Build My Kingdom

During my dinner of customized fancy instant noodle, I suddenly remembered I have a Kingdom to build.

It’s a moment when everything still feels the same, like in a movie where a character had his soul traveling elsewhere and suddenly went back inside his body. Everything has been going on as usual, and from the outside nothing has changed. Everything has been and is still real, but a new reality just emerged.

I knew it all along that I have a kingdom to build. I understood that unconsciously, maybe. It’s a huge, lifelong work that I am dedicated to, but for some reason, for months or maybe even years, I have forgot about it. I’ve been searching for meaning and purpose and my passion and worth, and blind to the answer to all those things: to build my kingdom.

My life was becoming fragmented and unmotivated because there were too many things I am interested in and too little I am becoming better at. I can’t decide on a core path. I can’t name my profession. I feel like a pool of potential decaying into waste. Tried to save myself but myself keeps slipping away. But I still try to save myself by connecting to the world and creating actions here and there. Things seem fruitless, though. What I do are usually not well-connected and feels like fragments. I can’t even manage to write in one style for one project, switching between styles too spontaneously. From these fragments I lose sight of one, unified goal for my life.

When it downed on me that goal is to create my kingdom, it all seemed to make sense.

A kingdom consists of so many parts. You can’t create one in a day or a year. It can be planned but cannot be entirely controlled. You have to keep creating the building blocks, which largely compose of mundane, unexciting labor that spurs little excitement or progress. You will have tons of vision. Imagination and ambition is yours to spare. You also have tons of voices and lives to take care of. You’ll try to make things work, either stubbornly your way, or reluctantly for the reality.

There’s no definitive project scope and end date. It doesn’t end. There would be endless construction dates, review dates and celebration dates. Some old constructions fade away, maybe into memories, maybe into a layer of history and culture for your kingdom-to-come.

And I am the ruler, the creator, the queen! I am building a kingdom that reflects my colors, my dreams, my loves and my craziness. My choice of materials, structures, communication, collaboration and exhibition tools.

It makes sense now, seeing that I am the queen of a kingdom to come. It makes sense that I am a nobody now. It makes sense I am collecting stones and bricks and running around the streets, feeling hidden and small. It makes sense I am leaving traces of myself in various ways, without identifiable signatures. It makes sense I feel tired and see no visible progress. It makes sense that I get lost deliberately, pushing myself to the depths of darkness, at the same time unconsciously asking for threatening wake-up calls. It makes sense I search for destruction and fluctuate between despair and hope. It makes sense that I am still building, making and making it further into the journey, closer to myself and my visions.

“Your path might be a subtle, winding one,” said a teacher to me.

“I am a slow learner. I know that,” said a fellow seeker.

My drawings of this and that, writings of here and there, lines and colors, melodies and spirits; stories not articulated, love not shown, imaginations not realized…… these are the building blocks of my kingdom. I am the queen to be, and everyday I work.

To build my Kingdom.