To the death of damage, destruction and repeat.
With the climb of social media taking over our lives sneakily and quietly since it’s inception, it’s not easy for one to be able to pull out of it and see the bigger picture, the world at large. We are like the organism that grows with it by feeding it and multiplying so it literally became a part of our lives especially to the ones who grew with it since it’s beginning- someone like me.
Throughout the years that my fashion brand was perceived by others as successful and inspiring on the outside, I felt that I lost a part of myself on the inside. And in that life that was full of abundance, I find myself lost, confused and empty on many many nights. No matter how good it was on the outside, I felt that there’s just something wrong about what I was doing because I could feel a sense of guilt and ignorance creeping in and I couldn’t understand why.
I began asking myself many questions about the environment that we live in and how my job and industry has a huge part to play affecting a small part of this environment. I came to realized that not only is the industry one of the highest pollutant contributors to the planet, it was also a very toxic part of my own living environment. Fashion basically took up my whole life, as if there’s nothing left of me, the real me. I realized what I was doing and understood why I felt that something was wrong. My brand succeeded itself in fame internationally but my doing was something else.
I stopped what I was doing completely and started watching what others are doing and the more I observed the more I felt alive because they seemed blind. It was then that I realized in this over-abundant world that we live in, as materialistic as it seems, people became of that quality too. I couldn’t get out of it because I was still in it. I had to listen to my heart no matter who tells me what. So I did and I left.
During the lowest time of my life, when I felt completely hopeless and helpless, it was my vivid dreams that kept me alive. It was in those dreams where I felt a sense of absolute peace and hope. For the longest time, those dreams came into my life and showed me something that was so bright and full of light. After repeated nights of revisiting those dreams, I knew it’s time I get there, get to a place of nothingness, far far away.
I took a long long train ride from Shanghai to Lhasa, just to sense how far I could get away. On the ride, I emptied my mind and only focused on what’s in front of me and watched how others live. I felt peace. During my hikes up in Tibet, immersed in that vast nature untouched, I was so enlightened I cried out of pure joy and bliss. It was also then that I thought further about the ‘what- ifs’. I’ve experienced such pure joy out in nature that I was afraid that it would be gone in no time. People are so focused on making things, businesses, ventures that they truly forgot how beautiful our raw environments are. It’s time we pause and breathe.
One can only feel peace without chaos and distractions. And yet, we are the ones that’s creating all this chaos and distractions. What can we do to stop? What can we do to make a change? I knew that I could do something as an individual no matter how big or small the change might be; at least I could take out my own germs out from the society and I felt peace at last.
This will not just be a change for a better life, it will be a change to connect back to our Mother Earth; the place where I felt safe, where I felt sane, where I felt I belonged.
From a modern living human being on a life transforming experience.
