The limit does not exist
I’ve landed in Copenhagen, the city I grew up in, and where I am pretty sure I thought I was going to stay forever. Until I didn’t.
[As an 18-year-old I was so reluctant to leave, that I changed my area of studies to avoid having to move to Aarhus, an arguably equally cosmopolitan (or not) city a mere 4 hours away. Nothing like spending time outside of Europe to give you perspective on distances.]
As I walk from one meeting to another, I have flashbacks of other times I walked the same streets, or more likely biked, with other dreams and other aspirations. It feels a little bit like heartbreak every time I have a pang of recognition: there it is, the familiar, the beloved, and yet it is gone.
In yoga, there is a commonly used mantra – so-hum, or hum-sa – which, liberally translated, means something like I am all that I have been, the accumulation of all of my experiences, it has all come to this. I have written about this before: the ways in which this is so hard to hold, yet so essential to self-understanding. The ways in which this is comforting and disconcerting all at once.
Today, it felt almost overwhelmingly big, the way this city is such a big part of who I am and yet not present at all. Familiar and foreign. Inviting and excluding. I know that the eternal puzzle of who I am, the one we all struggle with consciously or subconsciously, is not solvable. And yet I engage with it every day at this stage, it feels like, because it is key to solving that other puzzle of why am I here.
In “Mean Girls,” one of my favorite movies of all times (you can judge if you must), the protagonist is participating in a math competition and gets asked a question to which there is no answer. Or rather, to which the answer is an infinite void. It’s like a flash of recognition as she lands on it: “The limit does not exist.”
That is the feeling I get whenever I have gone another round of so-hum, ham-sa. I am all that I ever was, all my experiences, and I am not done yet. I am recognizable and foreign, I am familiar and unknown. The limit does not exist.
