Eveything Else Is A Bonus

“I know what the fear is.
The fear is not for what is lost.
What is lost is already in the wall.
What is lost is already behind the locked doors.
The fear is for what is still to be lost.”

In Blue Nights, Joan Didion writes about the long and blue twilights, during summer, just before it gets engulfed by the inky blackness of the night as an analogy for how ‘ordinary and expected blessings‘ like good health, finding love, marriage, bringing up a child, travels, new beginnings can be wiped away by sudden and unexpected catastrophes, uprooting the very foundation of a life that one had carefully built over the years. She has a career as a successful novelist and memoirist; a wonderful family; travels around the world; fame and money; and then came the irreparable and sudden loss of her husband and only daughter within a span of less than two years. The anxiety, sense of foreboding, grief and the subdued nihilism in her words made me realize how flippant most of us are towards the “ordinary blessings“.

I have everything I need; a late-blooming yet deep and strong bond with my parents, a sibling who knows me inside out and loves me despite it, seven ‘soul sisters‘ who creates unmeasured joy and camaraderie, a job that enables me to pay my bills comfortably and brings in a sense of making a direct and real difference in the lives of others (in whatever small way), a cosy home resounding with love and laughter; good health of my near ones, and here I use the term loosely to denote just the absence of any major illnesses; a sense of wanderlust, wonder and stubborn hope that (now) fails to get marred even by the dreariest of circumstances; stacks and stacks of books overspilling from every shelf in my room; and the love of a kind man.

Yet, not so long ago, I was drowning in the dark and turbulent waters of mourning about what I want and didn’t (yet) get. And no one wants to be ordinary. The hopelessness that stems from the knowledge that one has not yet achieved the universally accepted cornerstones of ‘success‘ in their specific profession, negates every little achievement and joy that were present at the beginning of the career. Tangled in self-doubt and an unfulfilled and misplaced sense of entitlement, the thought of settling for less pained me to the very core. My parents are quite supportive and happy with the very fact that I am the first and only doctor in the entire extended family including the past generations. But it meant nothing to me, because I had failed my own expectations owing to reasons that varied from circumstantial to self-sabotage or being just lazy. Anxiety didn’t help as much as ruined my confidence every passing moment. My whole worth as a person began to be centred around my academic performance. Nothing else mattered.

I remember my little cousin once asked me the reason behind the suicide of a movie star and I replied that it was allegedly due to depression, which many speculated was over a stagnant career. My cousin failed to understand why an actor who had surpassed thousands of people struggling to get not just a role in a movie and had attained world-wide fame and recognition had killed himself. How was he a ‘failure‘? I struggled to explain to my cousin that success is a subjective term, rooted deeply in comparison to others, and that happiness and well-being is centred around it to varying degrees.

Today I have reached a point in my life where I am thankful for every blessing I had been given unasked for; but I know the helplessness that many people might have due to failed expectations and the vicious thoughts it spurs about the absence of any way out, the complete oblivion of hope, the negligible sense of self-worth and the highly exaggerated delusion of what others will say. I had been trapped in that web of negativity and depression a few years ago for long enough to toy with the idea of embracing death in a bid to escape living. It was the result of a cumulative despair, feeding on certain untoward incidents in my life, that tipped me over the edge when I was challenged with a a period of stagnancy in my career.

While I was battling such negativity, a childhood friend passed away due to post-operative complications following a minor surgery. The day after she died the sun shone brightly in a brilliant blue sky, the bougainvillea was a riot of colour, my mother prepared my favourite dish, my father broke through my wall of gloom with his booming laughter; my sister kicked me in the butt and grinned impishly when I wanted to borrow something from her wardrobe; the television blared upcoming movie trailers, a few friends sent me a postcard from a holiday in Ladakh (because they knew how much I loved the mountains); I read an Alice Munro story; and I had an overwhelming realization that my friend will never experience these ordinary and mundane blessings again.

The world will go on, will bring in the new and hold on to the nostalgia of the past, and she won’t be there to know any of it.

Happiness is being alive. That’s it. Everything else is a bonus. And I had, a decade ago, let the fleeting thoughts of ending it all creep in to my mind; I don’t regret those thoughts, nor am I ashamed. I am immensely relieved to pry myself away from the clutches of such hopelessness and despair. Even now, my life is devoid of the ‘certain things that I want‘, but I am ready to work for them, strive towards them, wait for them. I realize that I will never have all the things I want; but I have everything I need, a wider focus of what this world has to offer and yes, I am alive to enjoy it all.

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The Price of Resilience

When I was a child, I used to accompany my parents to visit a family whom they had known for more than a decade. The couple had lost their elder daughter, then aged four, in a road traffic accident a couple of months before their second child was born. Both their present children, a boy and a girl, had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy. Even as a child, I could comprehend the graveness of the adversities faced by them. But no one in their family sulked about the apparent unfair and cruel blows life had dealt them. The whole house was a riot of laughter and activity. Sketchbooks, crayons, plastic trucks, glass marbles, frisbees, half-eaten packets of potato chips and a football were always strewn around the living room. Since the children were the biggest fans of Michael Jackson, they often used to rev up the music volume and give impromptu performances. They continued to quietly celebrate the birthday of their departed daughter, just the four of them, huddled around a chocolate cake baked at home, and the kids were oddly solemn in the remembrance of the elder sister they had never known.

There was none of the expected shadow of gloom hovering over their home; in fact often we could hear their laughter from the street as we turned into their home. But I was not convinced that not even a shred of anger, disappointment or sadness lingered in the lives of their parents; and was always on the lookout for hidden signs. But they were no more exasperated about their children than my parents were about my sister and I. I was suddenly disappointed about the hue and cry my parents raised about the glass of milk we refused to drink at bedtime or procrastinating on homework. I couldn’t contain my curiosity and bewilderment at their amazing coping mechanism and asked aunty how she managed to accept whatever life had brought her so uncomplainingly. Didn’t she ever get angry that this wasn’t exactly the life that she might have envisioned when she was young? Wasn’t she scared of what the future held?

They weren’t sticklers for religion, but they believed in the presence of a higher being who would look out for them, as they continued to make the best of whatever life brought them. She told me that the slightly detached overseer of our lives brought such obstacles into the lives of only those who had the strength to tackle them. She grew angry a thousand times every day but over the same causes that every parent frets about; untidiness, temper tantrums, excessive TV hours etc. And yes, she had found everything that she had always wanted in life; a loving husband, two happy children, a wonderful job, good health and lots of laughter. It is all about perspective. The journey was tough, and peppered with losses and obstacles; but the destination more than made up for that. She was content with what she had made of the sufferings life brought her. She was proud of it. As for the future, who can say what it held; it is useless worrying about the things we haven’t come to yet and giving up the pleasures of the present. She preferred to spend her days equipping her children with life skills, good education, ensuring they were healthy and happy rather than worrying about how they would cope in the world later.

These words had stayed with me and I still find them oddly consoling. Even now when I want to scream my lungs out, every time a cascade of new obstacles flow into my life and wonder if there will ever be any respite; I think of her words. I remind myself that I am resilient enough to handle this. Last night I had another health scare as the word cancer sprung up again, barely one and half months after I had lost my elder sister to it. I had lost three family members in quick succession in the past five years to cancer. And frankly, I am tired of it. I am tired of people dropping dead, when they are young and full of dreams, leaving the rest of us to battle the loss. All I crave for is a life where all my near and dear ones are healthy and happy; and I can get to worry only about things like what to wear for an evening out, long hours at work, the bad food at cafeteria, and get adequate time to lament about and pine for a lost love.

Sometimes I feel envious of those people whose lives had run such smooth courses, but then I remind myself that I haven’t been singled out, every one has their own private sorrows; and into each life some rain must fall, some more than the others. It has taught me to treasure the apparently mundane, everydayish things where nothing much happens; and revel in the infrequent but real joys that come my way.

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Wendy Cope mirrors my heart, gives ‘Two Cures for Love’

Today I discovered Wendy Cope’s poems-pithy, lighthearted, unpretentious and achingly familiar. Read them out loud and slow. Do the words mean anything to you?

Worry
I worry about you-

So long since we spoke.
Love, are you downhearted,
Dispirited, broke?
I worry about you.
I can’t sleep at night.
Are you sad? Are you lonely?
Or are you all right?
They say that men suffer,
As badly, as long.
I worry, I worry,
In case they are wrong.

Some More Light Verse
You have to try. You see the shrink.
You learn a lot. You read. You think.
You struggle to improve your looks.
You meet some men. You write some books.
You eat good food. You give up junk.
You do not smoke. You don’t get drunk.
You take up yoga, walk and swim.
And nothing works. The outlook’s grim.
You don’t know what to do. You cry.
You’re running out of things to try.

You blow your nose. You see the shrink.
You walk. You give up food and drink.
You fall in love. You make a plan.
You struggle to improve your man.
And nothing works. The outlooks grim.
You go to yoga, cry and swim.
You eat and drink. You give up looks.
You struggle to improve your books.
You cannot see the point. You sigh.
You do not smoke. You have to try.

Valentine

 My heart has made its mind up
And I’m afraid it’s you.
Whatever you’ve got lined up,
My heart has made its mind up
And if you can’t be signed up
This year, next year will do.
My heart has made its mind up
And I’m afraid it’s you.

 
A Vow
 I cannot promise never to be angry;
I cannot promise always to be kind.
You know what you are taking on, my darling –
It’s only at the start that love is blind.
And yet I’m still the one you want to be with
And you’re the one for me – of that I’m sure.
You are my closest friend, my favorite person,
The lover and the home I’ve waited for.
I cannot promise that I will deserve you
From this day on. I hope to pass that test.
I love you and I want to make you happy.
I promise I will do my very best. 

Two Cures for Love

1 Don’t see him. Don’t phone or write a letter.
2 The easy way: get to know him better.
 

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Why (do I) Travel?

Have you ever seen the flight of a Hornbill framed in orange skies lit up by the dying rays of the sun?

Or woke up on a winter morning to the sight of powdery snowflakes chasing each other down the window pane?

Have you walked deep into a forest and looked up into an eerie green light filtering through a leafy canopy made of trees that resemble the lithe limbs of a ballerina?

Did you feel the goosebumps on every inch of your skin when you held your breath and plunged into the depths of the icy, blue water just as the sun was rising?

Have you gladly let the waves carry you into the sea after a long walk on the hot beach that almost burnt your naked feet?

Have you seen a young monk moonwalk on the cobbled steps of a monastery before being overcome with giggles?

Did you ever sit by the pond at a remote village and threw pebbles at one of the two large and luminous moons?

Have you ever let your hand be bathed in the light filtered through a lattice screen built centuries ago with red sandstone?

Have you stood atop an old embankment as a wild river licked your feet?

Did you ever witness hordes of marijuana-puffing, saffron-robed, malnourished sadhus with long, matted hair dancing around a phallic symbol?

Did you ever go gallivanting in an unfamiliar hill town and stumble upon a tree with blossoms as pink as the cheeks of toothless toddlers that played underneath it, and by a gurgling brook no less?

Did you ever chase the sun on a lonely highway and watch its melting orange hue suffuse the sky?

Have you ever gulped in lungfuls of air after getting down from the car at an impulse and racing your cousins down the entire stretch of the road leading to your ancestral home in the village?

Did you ever share a first kiss on the terrace of an old guesthouse overlooking the sea, as the evening air caressed your warm faces?

Have you ever hung motionless in the air letting yourself be softly blown around by the wind and a strap around your back?

Do you know the vertigo of looking down the long, winding roads you had drove so far?

Have you ever sat cross-legged and drank tea in a tree-house?

Have you ever hidden inside a stack of warm, golden and somewhat itchy hay?

Did you ever light a fire from scratch?

Have you ever turned a corner and found an old bookstore and decided to dump planned itinerary to browse out-of-print titles for the rest of the day?

Have you ever pushed a stew of unidentifiable objects down your gullet just because the host was a smiling old lady in her nineties, and because you were just so hungry?

Did you ever buy a dozen amulets because the old man who sold them had such pious, believable eyes?

Have you ever dusted off frost from your hair as you watched huge sheets of icy rain engulf a valley?

Did you ever secretly believed that there was really a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and walked around a bent in the hill road to check?

Have you ever been on a boat, as curved as a bow, in a lake filled with lilies?

Did you ever eat fruit right from the tree?

Have you ever laid down in a large green ground, with tiny white and yellow flowers, and identified faces in clouds?

Did you chat with a co-passenger on a long, train journey and he/she’s now one of your closest friends?

Do you have a restless soul and impatient feet?

Do you need any more reasons?

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