As many of you may or may not know, I moved to China a few months ago. I really needed a change. I was due one. I needed a radical uprooting. I finished up my studies, tied up a few loose ends & did the necessary mending to broken fences with family & friends, healed up enough to utilise my new strengths & decided it was time. Time to move my business & to venture onward into the unchartered waters of Asia, I mean as far as a new “home” is concerned.

Change is great but nothing & no one can ever really prepare you for what’s to come on the other side of this great & brave decision. With that, I’d like to reiterate how important living through your own experiences instead of trusting the hear-sayings of those who’ve gone before you are.

The other day, I got off a video call with Ray, one of my closest & dearest friends. We go a long way, she & I. We’re close, we’ve even been mistaken for twin sisters on more than a few occasions LOL. Got through some heavy torrential downpours together too. She’s brilliant by the way, she has the creative mind of a genie & this uncanny knack to sew you just about any kind of garment you’d dare to conjure up from the deepest, most imaginative parts of your brain. We spoke for almost 2 hours about what could at surface level seem quite trivial but it was so far from being that menial. For months I had been battling with what the best way to truly reflect & represent my style & creative flare would be in my attempts at designing the interior of my apartment & I started developing a little obsession about this, unbeknownst to me of course. I knew speaking with Ray about this would be the perfect move to an interior design dilemma as I’ve always loved her fresh take on designing spaces. She’s moved around quite a bit herself & within short intervals I might add, but every time I visited her new space, it would seem as though she’d been living there for eons. How she did it, I needed to know! I sought her advice & drastically so, or I would be decapitating yet another throw pillow on my sofa. What had already been in the space needed some feng shui-ing or some upscaling of sorts, but I found myself at wits end every so often & then eventually I’d just concede. YOU WIN, APARTMENT!

I have always wanted to move abroad again but this time ON MY OWN & live in a space that was MINE, ALL MINE. And here I was, getting just that, but now I had felt anxious about what I had been asking for all this time, feeling completely clueless about what to buy, where to put it, what fabric to match with what material. What was supposed to be a fun-inducing activity had now turned into a chore. I started feeling more & more frustrated. Ray listened attentively as she always does, another thing I love about her – her willing, patient ear.

Anyway, allow me to paint the backdrop of my new environment so as to build an all-encompassing contextual picture for you, as best I can. China is very different from South Africa, in fact China is very different from western culture altogether. Here, your cash money doesn’t really mean much. Everything, all transactions are mainly made via your phone, they do not use the internet browsers that we’re mostly used to, many common apps are banned here & suburbanisation is few & far between, given their very many apartment buildings in their cities & skyscraper office structures. In order to stay on the grid, most places including food spots, are donned with power-bank rental stations. These are so convenient. You rent one, use an app to pay for it & return it to any other power-bank spot of the same brand, once you’ve charged your device & no longer need the power bank. Your phone, very rapidly becomes an appendage. Something you cannot do without. Everything is monitored & censored through your phone. This, a safety feature I dearly appreciate though. It is also a given rule that during the day we sleep for an average of 2-3hours. Many businesses here, operate until the wee hours of the morning or even stay operational 24/7 with employees relieving each other come their shift. Most businesses include sleeping spaces equipped with beds for their staff ensuring ample rest resulting in prime productivity. Life here, is fast-paced & meticulously funnelled through fierce, simmering competition. Much of which is subtle but obvious, hidden beneath the kind gestures from the locals & the helpful assistance from strangers. It became very apparent to me that the air was constantly charged with electricity circuited for optimal efficiency. Everything is designed to be compact, portable & dispensable, even your living space. Here, you would see a new food spot opening, & an overly elaborate opening launch would follow soon after. Bells & whistles & free gifts, the works come in their droves. Owners spend a sizeable fortune on the store opening promotion & I promise you a week or so later you’d hardly remember that exact new store even being there in the first place. OKAY can someone explain what the point of that is, please? I’M STUMPED! Comfortability, passivity, & ease are strangers here & if this is anything to go by, I can tell you that in this short time of living here, I’ve already moved into 2 different apartments. The apartments by the way, come stock-standard semi-furnished with essentials. This, another factor indicative of the ever-changing, fast-paced life here. Because there is no real time allotted to becoming too cozy, the apartments come with what you need to survive, like a somewhat-more-comfy motel for passers-through. I once viewed an apartment & before signing the lease I realised that it had no kitchen. YES, you read right!, NO KITCHEN. I barely even noticed. That’s how quickly & how easily the convenience factor of having everything at the click of a button eroded my ingrained knowledge of what should be vitally essential in a home. Notice I said home not house or apartment.

You’d very rarely move into an apartment not fitted with a bed, sofa, TV, washing machine, microwave oven, & basic furnishings like a dinner table & chairs, coffee table, & WIFI. Those are almost always guaranteed upon moving in. It is also absolutely normal for families to live separated from one another. Fathers work in different cities, moms move to cities primed to suit their offspring’s educational needs where the top schools & kindergartens are located, & upon national holidays these families commute back to their hometowns to celebrate festivals symbolic of the unification of the nuclear family.

Now, I knew all this when making my decision to relocate to China, but again there is something noteworthy about hearing of how good or bad something tastes versus taking a bite for yourself. Your personal experience now becomes your subjective truth & wisdom & no one can take that away from you.

Back to my disconnected apartment. I noticed that neither of my apartments had an oven nor a stove, except for a portable hot plate on which to cook a dinner. In my current apartment, my washing machine is housed inside a nook in my shower. Unconventional much! Engendered a trigger, but why? I was very obviously still acclimating & not just at a geographical, climatic level or a linguistic level or an economic level, but now at a deeper psychological level as well. See what they don’t tell you about packing up & stuffing your entire life into a 23kg suitcase & moving halfway across the globe is that these imperative changes necessitate a mentally strong mind. The canard that a move like this is easy should be taken for just that, an unfounded rumour or story. The challenges are pretty hard to define & even harder to coherently explain & so I appreciate the way that by no means of any explicit instruction at all our beautiful brains undergo a neuroplasticity so complex, yet so gracious. We feel dis-ease but not to the point of panic. We are still able to function & to reason, yet while undergoing something so incredibly harrowing. I marvel at how brilliant we were designed as humans. Anyway, I know I needed this & I also know beyond knowing that this experience is meaningful in ways that I could never fully express. Along with some of the more recent decisions in my life that were hard to make, I chose the same route with this one as opposed to the previous easy-way-out ones I had made, & this one had to be cushioned with patience & not recklessly grabbed with expedience. I realised how climacteric all these constructs purposed to be in the light of the much-needed directional pivoting of my life.

See, back home we are quite conservative especially in our thinking & if you’re anything like me who grew up in a colored person’s body & social environment, you’d know exactly how cautious & careful you still find yourself around certain areas of free, progressive thinking. No matter how far you’ve advanced in your thinking, skulking in the shadows of your psyche is a tiny undetectable degree of what is called a ‘poverty-mindset’ forcing you to action caution, which somehow skirts the edges of your free will. So, it should come as no surprise that our first internal prompting when presented with something secure, is to anchor down roots the very minute it lands in our possession. We stick our flags in the ground & stake our claim as soon as we can & we hold on for dear life to what we’ve worked so hard to clench. Here’s the kicker – It dawned on me – I was trying to integrate the 2 worlds standing before me 1. THE CONSERVATIVE – the one I was growing out of & 2. THE LIBERAL – the one I was morphing into & like a crab; I was shedding my exoskeleton so I could grow larger & rid myself of the parasites that could later poison or paralyse me entirely. But could there be a way for these 2 worlds to co-exist? Could that even be possible? Does everything have to be that black & white? Would it be necessary for this polarity to exist? I was about to find out. The former world had me hell-bent on gathering, securing & guarding what I worked for & the latter had me detaching from possessions & the value that I had subconsciously laid on them, only to find out later the subjugation I inflicted upon myself by virtue of this act. This proved a daunting reality & I was taking it out on my apartment. Things weren’t fitting. I either spent the money, bought the window dressings, lugged them with me when I moved to a different city (constant re-homing is tenuously concomitant with a life in China), or I just left them behind so as to live in the nomadic, fast-paced, unattached fashion that the vast majority of the Asian civilians do, OR remain an alien to their societal norms. These nascent norms here were slowly starting to grow on me either way, whether I liked it or not. But how do I balance this long term? I want the comfort & security of a home, the sanctuary of peace, an aesthetically pleasing space, representing who I am reflected in every piece of wall art & cutlery but I was living in a nation where none those things really took precedence.

There was only one solution, & bear in mind this solution is not a one-size-fits-all strategy; it’s what will work for me, it may do nothing for you. Nonetheless, I am positioning my brain to live as an unattached homebody (quite a juxtaposition) acquiring modular pieces of furniture, investing in meaningful smaller items liked framed photos, small art pieces, but still making my space feel as comfy & cozy with as many of my creature comforts as I can garner, whenever I needed them. The word of God says in John 10:10, “I came that they might have life, & that they might have it more abundantly”.  And that to me means living with open hands, an open heart & an open mind, ready to give & to receive, to cull & to store up, to shed & to regrow, always making space for what is to come & leaving behind whatever is meant for the next person to lay hold of as their newly discovered, exhumed treasure. Paying it forward & moving on from what was once mine on that time stamp of my life’s timeline. It wasn’t ever supposed to be about clutching, grasping & desperately clinging to what I had, I’d have no room enough within myself or outside of myself to hold the new stuff or the new experiences! Make sense? IT EVENTUALLY & CLEARLY DID TO ME! A whole lot of sense! I always knew this principle, but now it took on a whole new meaning, practically symbolic of the life I wished to lead & what I had been praying & asking for, for as long as I can remember. I remember my younger self ruminated endlessly on embodying a full life. Little did I know that that meant FULL BALANCE of giving & taking, seizing & relinquishing. Life is happening now, & nothing that we have now can ever be taken with us into the afterlife, Ray so aptly helped me see this. What she was basically saying was to live presently in the season. To stand within it, senses heightened to the touch, seizing the day but to also detach from the things within that current season when the next one came rolling around, being freed up of clutter & ready to assume my next posture.

It’s so immensely strange that my psyche was tied to everything & my apartment to nothing, yet they collided in ways I couldn’t explain. So to wrap things up, I’d boldly like to encourage you to buy the rug, buy the drapes, buy the shelves, & live by the quote so proudly stated by my beloved friend of 30 years whom I carry in my heart so carefully, Denzil M Thorne; “Why save the good stuff for later?!”. But also remember to detach from their value & leave them behind, sell them & only take what you can carry into your next season.

MY APARTMENT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH EVERYTHING THAT MY PSYCHE HAD TO DO WITH.