I have made it to a quarter of a century! There are many birthdays that pass without any real sense of change or difference, but this doesn’t feel like one of those even though I neglected to plan anything for the day (as usual). While I will make sure to hold something celebrating with my family and friends, more than anything I felt that today I should spend celebrating myself. There are many a birthday that I have spent alone or celebrated by myself (not in a tragically lonely way, relax, I’m just an introvert and often forget to plan stuff), but it struck me as this birthday approached that I have never really taken a full day to pause and celebrate Aingkhu in the 3rd person. Not celebrating my accomplishments and place in life from my own standard perspective, which is bogged down in criticisms and qualifiers, but from the perspective of the me beside me. The spiritual twin that has accompanied me throughout my earthly experience and appreciates my life for the robust story it is. The facts are as follows.
I have never felt more me.
I have always been a dreamer and shall remain so till my very last breath. My mind has always been more occupied with worlds my body can’t reach, whether in my own head or from others. This has made it so I’ve had to find certain anchoring points between the way the world works and the way that I FEEL that it should work.
I am a writer because I am obsessed with communication, and I am obsessed with communication because that is how humans connect. And for most of my life, I felt that it was difficult for me to CONNECT. Hard to understand the intersection between value and money when it comes to art. Hard for me to tell people who I was and feel like I was understood when I did. Hard for me to understand other people's motivations and perspectives. Part of the reason that I have always felt more comfortable by myself is that it can be hard for me to reconcile the knowledge that every person who looks at me has their own configuration of who they think me to be, and that I cannot and shouldn’t try to control that.
You enter into the world fresh, and as you grow you attempt to learn the world around you. You study it and acclimate and develop as you witness it being done around you. It can be so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that many of the systems and cycles that you are witnessing were born before time itself, alongside Nana Bukulu.
This is true of the world outside as well as the world within you. From the minute you enter the world your spirit is vulnerable to being wounded in your development, and if you don’t hazard to pay attention, you can begin to assimilate those wounds into your understanding of who you are.
I have found that binaries can be useful starting points, but are mostly unhelpful when applied to life and often stand as a substitute for critical thought. Humans can often forget that we are extensions of nature. That everything seeks to adapt. To outsmart the system and evolve. There is always an exception to the rule, even if it hasn’t been found yet.
I have come to value imagination immeasurably, and I intend to make it my business.
When I am asked what I intend to do with my future, I often freeze. I don’t know what I want to do, yes, but it is more than that. It is that in place of a destination, I have a series of questions and philosophies that gradually push me toward a destination beyond the horizon. What does that mean? Well, can you imagine world peace? No wait, don’t roll your eyes. It’s the vague goal and tagline to many movements, each progressed towards in the way the see as most effective, but can many people actually imagine how a peaceful world would work? This is obviously not a world without strife, because that would be no world at all. For me, this a world in which humanity does not seek to cannibalize itself for profit, and I can actually see such a world. Well, I can imagine it at least, and I find that many can’t. Or more can, but have isolated themselves so far from the body of humanity that they would rather continue to glut and be glutted upon. Before anything becomes truly real, it must begin as an idea, and the more people that idea sticks, the closer that idea comes to actualizing. My work is to promote the actualization of beautiful ideas.
“I do believe that what we pay attention to grows, so I wanted to stop growing the crisis”
Adrienne Marie Brown; Emergent Strategy. Pg.46
My name is Aingkhu Aakhu Ngala Sheps Anpu Ashemu, and it means “he who walks in the light of the ancestors and brings forth the word of God.”
My parents were very intentional in naming my siblings and I, and coming from the spiritual tree that I come from, I of course take the naming of things seriously. I don’t take this as some message of me being some sort of prophet or anything. I believe that the very function of the universe is God, and so the actions we perform and the messages we spread are an extension of this. I see my name as a reminder to myself to be aware of the messages I communicate to the world. To take the ego out of my art. To not get caught in the weeds of an “original idea” or groundbreaking epiphany. To let it exist because it is beautiful and places a little more beauty in the world, and not because it is paying the rent above its head.
As I step into 25, the age at which my brain is supposed to fully mature, I have to say that it is filled with more questions than answers. Unlike most of my life though, I am more at peace with that. I feel like I have some of the right questions, and only life and time can answer them for me.
Since the age of about 17, I have frequently asked myself the question: if 5-year-old me met current-day me, how would he feel about him? The answer to that question has fluctuated over the years between yes and no but falls firmly in the former today. Not only that, it is the first time that I wish I could actually meet younger me and tell him all the shit I’ve learned since I was that age…well, not everything. Some lessons are best left to time.
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