Spice the Love No.14

Dear you,

Spice the Love has been quiet in your inbox these past few weeks, hasn’t it? I didn’t forget you — I’ve just been busy… living through a few very big changes. Now that things have settled enough, I can finally sit down and tell you, unhurried, about all these new things.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer“.

_From Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

I’ve been living with questions just like that lately. The biggest one these days: can a person still change, at an age when everything about who they are is supposed to have already taken shape?

To find out, I decided to… move. Not to a new address in the same city, but to an entirely different city altogether — Huế, to be exact.

The list of reasons my husband and I love Huế is probably a mile long — I already shared some of it on the fanpage. But here, I want to tell you about two reasons that go a little deeper.

One: I believe the relationship between a person and a place runs both ways. When I love a place, that place needs to love me back too — to give me enough room to feel free, at ease, cared for and able to grow, through very concrete things like living space, environment, work opportunities… Only then can the relationship really last.

Two: everyone has their own rhythm — fast or slow, depending on the person and the moment. So the place we live in needs to move at the same rhythm we do. Years ago, I felt like I was moving too fast, and Huế felt too slow — out of sync, probably. Lately, my husband and I have slowed down, and Huế’s rhythm has started picking up, so we finally met at that crossing point.

Which makes me wonder: can someone live with a one-sided love, or follow their own rhythm regardless of the world around them? Maybe — if there’s a purpose specific enough, and a determination strong enough to chase it. Then everything else I just mentioned simply follows along. But a person and a place becoming one is still, I think, the ideal. Isn’t that why we keep searching for — or trying to find our way back to — somewhere to call “home”?

That said — meeting those two conditions doesn’t mean harmony happens overnight. A two-way relationship still needs time to adjust. Right now I’m adjusting to central Vietnam’s dry-season sun, with the rainy season still ahead (the season central Vietnam is famously harsh for). But adjusting takes love. No one keeps holding on to something they don’t love, right?

To ease the adjustment, I’ve let myself pick up a few new things too: a painting class, an advanced writing class, a classical Chinese class, a calligraphy class. If anything interesting comes out of them, I’ll tell you later. For now, the minor (but still important) reason I joined these classes is simply having something to do through the coming storm season — a way of preparing myself, mentally, for the parts of this move I’m not used to yet. The bigger reason is that moving to a new city will inevitably change some of our work, so I’m learning new things to redesign that work for what’s ahead. I say “redesign,” not “find a new job” or “find new opportunities” — my husband and I have both freelanced for years, and most of our work is something we build ourselves, shaped around what we’re good at.

So in a way, this move is also our own attempt to answer the question I mentioned above: can we still change who we are in midlife? And to make that more likely — what do we need? Hard skills? Soft skills? The ability to adapt? A willingness to learn? To not be afraid of being wrong? To not be afraid of starting from zero?

If this letter reaches someone who needs a change in their life right now — I hope, in some small way, these words help.

Thank you for your patience with me, even through the weeks Spice the Love went quiet. See you in the next letter.

With love,

Lê Ngọc (Nhà Có Hai Người)