When You're Happy and You Know It

"It won't do
to stir a deep desire,
to fan a hidden fire
that can never burn true.

I know your name,
I know your skin,
I know the way
these things begin;

But I don't know
how I would live with myself,
what I'd forgive of myself
if you don't go."

It's nearly midnight and I am clearing emails that have racked up while I was away in China. Am killing time before I can treat myself to a midnight cab ride home. Meanwhile, Suzanne Vega's Caramel is doing a honeyed, languid drift from my iTunes.

I liked Caramel the first time I heard it because Suzanne Vega's smoky voice makes it sound amazing. It's a bittersweet ode, a melancholy tribute to the cunning tangle that poor romantic choices weave around the human heart.

It would make an apt companion to Ha Jin's novel Waiting. Intrigued by how fast R and RBF had thumbed through the book in Xinjiang, I nabbed the well-thumbed copy and finished it during the hours spent in Beijing traffic.

Waiting is about frustrated romance - it's about the 18 years of waiting endured by officer Lin Kong's vibrant girlfriend Manna before he gets the divorce he has been craving for from his homely wife Shuyu. It's not a pretty tale and though nobody dies physically, they die emotionally. The realisation Lin Kong reaches about himself and his women is truly tragic. With restraint and reserve, Ha Jin paints a stark picture of how so many lives and budding romances come to be lived in quiet desperation.

In my 20s, I had throughly convinced myself I was in Love. I was too green to understand it was not Love but simply Desire. Desire can grip your heart so tightly that "having a crush" is no misnomer. Desire can crush your noblest thoughts and senses into nothingness if you let it. Desire can make such an incredible fool of you - you rejoice with crumbs; you weep in paranoia and fear; you loll around the dark mud of your insecurities; you shut your ears to truth and wrap yourself in a cocoon of martyrdom and lies.

With 30 round the corner, I think I have learned for myself how to tell Love from Desire. Love is about choice and commitment: an adult decision to give and receive both bittersweet truth and the merciful rain of kindness. Desire is simply not interested in all that. Love is Grace - a bit of heaven on earth that any of us can dispense if we humble ourselves enough.

I think I can say I have found firm ground. Somehow in the middle of a Good Friday solitary prayer in Kashgar - the kind of prayer which my 20something self would have happily let spiral into maudlin self-indulgence - I realised I have come to some strange restful place. I was pleasantly surprised to look for the usual tears and self-flagellation - and yet discover they simply were not there anymore.

It's a place between knowing - finally - exactly what I want in a man and yet trusting that it will be far better for God to keep me single than to settle for anything less. And being able to look beyond that to Love the world beyond.

It's the kind of thing you keep telling yourself in your 20s but are secretly unsure if you are not just deceiving yourself.

It's a completely different and liberating feeling to finally realise it's the truth. And that i understand and find pleasure and peace in it.

In Kashgar, I saw rows and rows of amazingly green grass crowned by apricot trees. It was still early Spring and the sharp bite of Winter was still in the air. Some of the branches were still dry and dead but oh - the promise! - the promise of Spring and Summer was pushing out in the sweetest hues of cream and pink. Those apricot trees set on grass so amazingly, vividly green have become the most beautiful thing in my mind's eye. It is a picture of Spring, and Hope and Promises Fulfilled.

The apostle Paul declared passionately "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!" (2 Corinthians 5:17)

Indeed, my dear dear God, my sweet Saviour Christ, the old has gone. And I believe, with a fresh heart, that the new has and will come for me.

I think I am happy.

And when you are happy and you know it, and you really want to show it -

- You clap your hands.