Chrysalis

On dissolving into the primordial goo.

After a relentlessly rainy start to cherry blossom season, Tokyo has been blessing us with sun-drenched days and delightfully warm weather. I’ve just finished teaching one class and am segueing right into preparations for another, amid the pitter-patter of my daily routines, academic, creative, and otherwise.

In the Japanese and Chinese languages, the ideogram for spring is associated with sexual awakening and the erotic imagination. Puberty is known as shishunki 思春期 in the former (literally the “period of springtime thoughts”), while chūnsè 春色 (“spring scenery”) in the latter can be a euphemism for bodily desire.

I guess similar notions exist in the anglophone world. We attribute the acute onset of more frantic dating patterns to spring fever. Spring is in the air, we sigh about the hapless romantic foibles of ourselves and others. Then there’s that whole shebang about the birds and the bees, and so on.

It makes sense that humans have come to identify adolescence with the climatological season of flowering and fertility, especially as a discrete phase that overtakes the cold dormancy and ignorance of early life. For me, this imposition of biological time onto the natural world recalls an illustration that once hung in my elementary school hallway around the year-end holidays: the outgoing year depicted as a tottering old person, already one foot in the grave, while a plump and shiny baby cheerfully symbolized the year to come.

If we map a human life onto the calendar year, bookended by the figurative winters of our infancy (physical, intellectual) and our eventual enfeeblement, then I suppose our productive decades—in terms of professional and procreative possibility, inasmuch as social activity and mental mobility—might fall squarely in the middle of the year.

In which case, I’d like to think of middle age as the summer of life. Most people I know loathe summer in Asia, but I feel most alive during those sweltering months with no reprieve. I think it’s because the heat forces a confrontation with our physicality. That delirium of sweat and exhaustion, the creature comforts of a cold beverage or sweet treat: to me, they are all mundane reminders of our embodiment. Summer allows us to acknowledge the limitations of being human, and even find joy in surrendering to the elements.

I’m in my late thirties, which means I may not quite be in my summer yet—but I’m creeping towards it. Somehow this is already my third year in Japan. I’m simultaneously on the homestretch of my PhD, swimming in part-time and freelance assignments, churning along with a novel, and pitching another book translation. I’m dreaming far and wide. Yet amidst this whir of activity, my existential questions about the meaning of work, the value of education, and my creative or spiritual goals have only deepened.

Neither here nor there, but somehow still relevant, is the fact that I’ve been on a break from alcohol. Today is my twentieth day sober. It’s definitely my longest period of abstinence to date. Anyone who knows me offline knows that I enjoy drinking and socializing. I have an indulgent streak. And I can hold my liquor—until I can’t. As a young adult, truly in the springtime of my life, I had my fair share of troubles connected to booze. I’d like to think that I’ve matured and grown past that, but I also needed to acknowledge the red flags thrown up by a relatively recent string of messy experiences. It feels less cute and forgivable at age thirty-seven. (Though I do believe self-forgiveness is a virtue.) Ultimately, I wanted to take a moment to give my body a break and examine my tendencies in a state of placid and well-caffeinated sobriety.

Anyway, all of this is to say that I find myself once more in a weird liminal headspace. The condition or predicament of being stuck in-between seems to be a recurring theme in my life; I also have discovered that most everyone relates to this in-betweenness, to some extent. Perhaps it’s only human to feel anxious and adrift sometimes, to dwell in a world of no absolutes. I’m reconsidering my past, contemplating my possible futures, all while my present self is enveloped in a chrysalis.

My mundane routines are a protective casing. In this stasis, it sometimes seems like nothing is happening at all. But, like a caterpillar, I am quietly digesting myself. My flesh is dissolving into the primordial goo. A new creature is taking shape, tissues and neurons reconstituting by cosmic logic, biotic soup becoming parts of a new body.

I’m probably more moth than butterfly. Just feeling antsy for these wings to take shape already so I can flitter away into the summer breeze.