Day 57: An Art Date
Today I took myself on what I like to call an art date.
It isn’t always about museums or galleries, though I love those too. An art date is about stepping outside of routine, finding something that shakes you awake to the world again.
Sometimes it’s 20 mins on a bike, sometimes a walk with your phone camera in hand. The point is to notice. To let yourself be touched by light, sound, texture. To gift yourself time. & Take what you saw & be playful with it when you get back home, if not on route.
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This morning it took me to Buddhapadipa Temple, tucked away in South Wimbledon. I hadn’t been out that way for over a decade, and I’d forgotten just how posh Wimbledon is. but there, down a side road, suddenly a different world opened up…
The temple itself was wrapped in scaffolding, mid-restoration. At first I was disappointed, ofc I’ve arrived when it’s not looking it’s most temple-y!
but then it struck me: what a privilege to witness repair? To see something sacred not in its pristine glory, but in its vulnerability: acknowledging time, weather, and decay, and meeting them with care.
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The temple wasn’t diminished by the work, but somehow more alive in it. A reminder that restoration, too, is a kind of beauty.
Around it, rivers bent quietly through the land, trees arched overhead like giants, and for a moment I could have been in California or Japan.
The sun warmed everything into a holiday haze. I wandered to the little monk café, ordered an iced Thai tea (rare to find a good one here), and sat alone: just me, the monks with London accents, the hum of construction, the sway of branches filtering gold light. No body else.
It was there, in the lull of an almost-sacred solitude, that I started thinking about last night’s conversation with D. He’d asked about my medical timeline, and I’d reeled it off mechanically. something I’ve done dozens of times now. But without meaning to, I admitted that I’d been delaying some of the next tests, which will then trigger my next referral.
He picked up on this straight away & said, “don’t be delaying anything” but because it had been so subconsciously said I first interpreted this as something like YOLO: book the holiday, do the thing! Seeing I hadn’t quite grasped the severity of what I was saying, He looked me straight on and said quite sternly, “no, I’m being serious. Do not be putting this off. It is important.”
Ofc my mom has also noticed what I’ve been doing. And keeps questioning why I haven’t done one of them which is a 24 hr urine sample.
Only later on today did this convo land:
by putting off the tests, I wasn’t just procrastinating. I was holding myself in a threshold space, in limbo. If I do the tests, then it becomes official: this treatment plan has failed. I have failed. and then I’m onto the next (unknown) chapter.
In Buddhism, they call it dukkha: suffering not just from pain itself, but from the resistance to change, from clinging to what is already slipping away.
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Fran always tells me: write down what you’re afraid of. See it on the page, outside of your head. Notice what you can and cannot control. And I thought of Leanne too, who reminded me that limbo can feel like control, but it’s also avoidance, a refusal to step through the doorway. But in doing what I am doing - I get to
Decide when.
Sitting there in Wimbledon, but feeling like I was far away, I realized: I am afraid not necessarily of what comes next, but of surrendering to it. Fear is the edge of transformation.
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The Buddha taught that nothing stays. Not temples, not bodies, not even the fear itself. To cling is to suffer; to let go is to be free.
And maybe that’s what I glimpsed there, in the stillness under the trees: that repair, transition, change: even when painful, It can be its own kind of magnificence.
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Later I raced back into central London for a long heart-to-heart with Hanouf at the British museum & got some extra work. who reminded me - without knowing it- of everything Fran and D had said to me previously. About no coincidences. About carrying faith & Hope into uncertainty.
She told me her story of fleeing war, of caring, of survival. It felt like being given another thread to weave into my own.
By the end of the day, I had a bag from Muji, a bookshop wander, and the quiet afterglow of conversations that felt fated.
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