BELONGING & LONGING — free as the sky

“There is some strange sense in which distance and closeness are sisters, the two sides of the one experience. Distance awakens longing; closeness is belonging. Yet they are always in a dynamic interflow with each other.”
John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong

Longing and belonging are two of the most primal human desires. They define what it means to be human unceasingly searching and yearning for intimacy and community. The problems humanity, especially in this day and age, faces stem from the unparalleled lack of longing and belonging. Social media has become one of the major culprits in ushering loneliness at an epidemic proportion, ironically. Problems only worsen as we look for remedies in the wrong places. One can only reside proximately in one location which creates closeness in one sense and distance in the other. Having “moved” from Pasadena to Kuala Lumpur almost a week ago, distance and closeness traded places. As such, I feel the pang of definitive loss of belonging which in turn intensifies longing. The more intimate the belonging, the more intensifying the longing. The more intense the longing, the more intimate the belonging.

We could not have moved to Malaysia if we did not have a community here. A missionary family of five for over twenty years whom we have known intimately for a similar duration welcomed us. As we have longed for each other’s company, we finally get to experience belonging. Before we even landed here, they had made all the appointments necessary for us to hit the ground running the morning after we arrived. We walked more than 10,000 steps just to see close to 10 apartment units in a neighborhood called Mont Kiara. Mont Kiara, right adjacent to Kuala Lumpur city center, is an enclave for expats surrounding three international schools. I’ve heard that more than 50 nationalities live in this small section of the city. Coming from Los Angeles, this feels like home. Having wanted to function here without a car, location became paramount where we can walk everywhere. Among the “everywhere” had to include grocery stores, decent cafés, and eateries of all kinds. More on this later. . .

The circle of belonging here in this region of the world (Southeast Asia) will enlarge over time as we look to deepen both existing relationships as well as create new ones. We have friends in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand we want to walk a “freedom journey.” When we are not on the road, we envision creating a hospitable and free space and begin hosting people.

As a quintessential Southern California homeboy, I love the fact that I get to wear flip-flops every day with shorts and short sleeves. At a superficial and mundane level, the uber-casual wear makes me feel like I “belong” here. During torrential downpours, which is often the case, it is pointless to wear any other shoes. Right??? My mind transports to Korea in my early teens during the summer monsoon season. I remember walking to school one morning during one particular monsoon with an umbrella, trying helplessly to keep myself dry. After quickly realizing it was a futile attempt, I let the umbrella go and got promptly drenched, feeling strangely free and exhilarated. This vivid memory solidified as one of those early lessons of life—when I let go, freedom flows.

What divides longing and belonging is not only distance but also time. There is time to long for someone or something, and also time to belong. Time in this sense is both fleeting and grounding. As we as human beings are trapped in time, time coupled with locale dictates our experiences of longings and belongings. What can betray my “time-ly” sense is that my mind has the innate capacity to wander back to the past, thinking about what could have been resulting in second-guesses or regrets, or projects toward the future, worrying about what is not yet. Time is a wonderful gift if we can harness the present. Present demands time to be present and grounds us in any one physical location. Anything outside of being present is our mind’s play especially if resulting in regrets of the past and worries of the future. Not all mind play is harmful though; there is a benefit. There is beauty in remembering and learning from our past. There is hope in envisioning and shaping the future to be better. To be sure, belonging and longing are gifts of a confident experience-based recollection arising out of our hearts.