One decision. Just one. And the relationships within my family began to change.
At that very moment, my mother’s loss of independence called for an important decision. And at that very moment, too, I was offered the chance to go and live abroad.
On one side, old age tightening its hold. On the other, a decision that opens up a new horizon.
In both cases, the same anxiety settling in.
Will my mother find her place in her new surroundings? What is she feeling?
And me: how do I say yes to a life 14,000 kilometres away from her without feeling that I’m leaving her behind?
It isn’t the distance that makes me hesitate. It’s what it might shift in the bonds between us.
Our bonds are the mortar that holds us together.
We would like to believe that love defies time and distance. That nothing really changes.
But that is an illusion. Being alive doesn’t spare us the fear of losing the other person. Or, perhaps more deeply still, the fear that the relationship will never be the same again.
It was with that thought, and with feelings of sadness and joy all mixed together, that I arrived in Singapore. I began going to the Singapore Botanic Gardens to sit quietly with myself.
From my very first visits, one tree catches my attention.
It isn’t its size, or its roots. It’s the crack running through its trunk.
I catch myself wanting to plunge right into it. And, in the same breath, preferring to stay on the surface. As if that crack held something I wasn’t yet ready to look at.
A few days later, I read Charlotte Casiraghi’s La Fêlure (“The Crack”).
One sentence stops me.
“The crack must not be suffered as a curse; it must be integrated and transformed, or it risks remaining a frozen suffering. We must not deny the break, but invest it anew, so as to empty it of its destructive charge.”
I read that sentence over several times.
Because in that crack, I find everything I feel. The contradictions between leaving and staying. The loyalties I might fail to honour by moving so far away, just as my parents are growing older and may need support.
That dull, nagging thought that a decision which opens up a future can also make such a clean break with the life I have now.
The crack keeps me in tension. I can’t manage to close it.
And yet this tree has kept on growing, without trying to get back the shape it had before.
The crack has been part of its growth.
And that makes me wonder. Perhaps a crack isn’t only a place of fragility.
It can also become a passageway, a new way of inhabiting what happens to us.
Charlotte Casiraghi also writes:
“One can live cracked, live shot through, and that is worth more than the unscathed surface of an unlived life, or the motionless coldness of things left intact.”
That sentence stays with me, because it opens up a new way forward.
We often try to preserve our bonds as if their strength depended on their ability to stay the same.
What if that isn’t where their true strength lies? What if the most alive bonds are precisely the ones that let transformation run through them?
This tree keeps unfolding in all its splendour, from a crack.
Its lesson runs deep.
It is possible to build yourself by passing through your own fault lines.
It is possible to carry on along your path without giving up the people you love.
It is possible to leave without ceasing to be present for the people you love.
And then another question appears.
What if changing your life were simply a matter of finding new ways to “re-tie” our bonds, without fearing that we will lose each other?
I haven’t found the answer yet.
But since arriving in Singapore, I think this is the question I am learning, day by day, to inhabit.
By Sophie Trentesaux, psychologist | Entre Ici & Ailleurs (Between Here & Elsewhere)
Through life abroad, career changes, life’s passages and the lessons of nature, Sophie explores what helps us stay true to ourselves when everything around us seems to be changing.
Each piece in Entre Ici & Ailleurs explores one facet of the invisible transformations in our lives.
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