Hunger

I've been a hungry person since infancy as my parents used to tell people my first spoken word was 再 (more in Chinese) after feeding. Now I am eating low carb I am constantly hungry but I've been conditioned to eat at "meal times". So it's easy to ignore the feeling of hunger purely out of habit. It feels like the "right thing" to do. Only now it literally gets me down emotionally. A bite livens up my spirits every few hours.

This echoes the title of this blog where small birds continuously feed more often than huge beasts. Besides the mundane hunger for food, I thought I should stop yearning for knowledge and new vantage points just because I was no longer young. It seemed that like "meal times", learning time is commonly consigned to the young. Many of my peers say they can't learn anything new as they were getting dumber.

Yet these same self-degrading adults may be the first to tell young people they don't know any better, despite implying only the young can learn. Many are telling Hong Kong protesters exactly this.

I don't know the outcome of the protests as I do not know about my own life. But one thing my sickness, depression and subsequent improvement has convinced me is that I am put here to learn about life. 

I hunger for deeper relationship. Not just friendliness though it is better than rudeness. But some rudeness is just honesty among friends who accept each other although it is not a good way to start a friendship. There are so many ways to deal with friendship. It ranges from unchanging friendliness, to overt frankness, to hiding true feelings, to rejecting all deeper relationships... and so many mixtures of them all.

I hunger to embrace cultures, soulful engagement, laughing about life, crying together, finding ways out of self imposed limits... to find freedom from the regret that litters our messy lives.

This hunger is what keeps me going and I am eager to learn what the next moment will reveal.