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 day

It is a no pants day. An acute craving for freshly squeezed orange juice day. A wake up frighteningly early yet stay in bed day. An old Goan melody day.

A trying to find meaning in the checkerboard of light and shade stretched across my floor day. A speaking just a handful of words throughout the day.

A darkened room and the whirring of the fan and the whiff of the fragrant body lotion day. An Adrienne Rich poetry day. A graphic novel day. A book about books day.

A counting blessings day. A soupy noodles day. A red socks day. A staying in the present day. A call in sick and grateful for the headache day.

An internal day. A tree watching day. A piecing together the perspective puzzle day.

A quiet day.

(Note: This is a recycled post from a now deleted blog of mine)

Intuition

I never really relied on the (in)famous “intuitive” power women claim to be gifted with. Till recently I used to believe people unquestioningly, and was of the general opinion that all people have an inherent “goodness” in them, and since I don’t want to hurt anyone, why would anyone ever hurt me? Dumb reasoning, I know.

I was taken on many a ride by friends, acquaintances and strangers alike because my reputation of being the “ever-trusting” fool preceded me everywhere I went! I used to unquestioningly believe each and every word the people I loved and cared about said to me. Not a very wise decision as I ended up hurt quite often. Sense got drilled into my head much later. I finally have begun not to take everything at face value and trust my intuition after neglecting it for too long. I did follow my intuition when it came to all things except for when it came to judging people. If I had not done that, I’d have saved myself a couple of heartbreaks.

I am a firm believer of the fact that a lie would be caught sooner or later, in ways we least expect of. Every time I’ve lied about something, my family came to know about it sooner or later, even when I had made sure no one can ever detect it. So they came to know of each time I’d made excuses of bunking class, or had met my ex secretly, or made excuses about not completing a chore assigned to me…just about anything. They will come to know, sometimes as late as a decade! Sometimes I confess and sometimes they come to know because I goof up and forget what I’d lied about!! It’s easy to tell the truth…you don’t have to make an effort to remember something that hadn’t happened, but for a telling a lie you need to be on constant alert for the rest of your life and remember what story you’d made up. It can be very taxing. My mother takes one look at me and immediately knows if I’m making excuses or fibbing about something.

So, I’ve experienced it myself in a small scale, and my belief that lies get caught sooner or later only got stronger. My mother intuitively knew every time I fibbed. And so did I, every time someone cheated me or lied to me. It took time, sometimes years…but I eventually come to know. ALWAYS! I find it difficult to explain, because it’s hard for me to ever doubt the ones I love, but sometimes an intuition gets so strong and it inevitably turns true when I follow it. Every time.

If something doesn’t sit right with you, think and question why it is so. Don’t just ignore that voice. Don’t become suspicious of everything, but don’t take every word and emotion at face value either.

Joan Didion

“I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” (So true)

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.” 

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”

“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”  

“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.” 

“I closed the box and put it in a closet.
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.” 

“Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.” 

“To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since our self-image is untenable – their false notions of us… ” 

“I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and a proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.”

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Dear Jesus, Do Something

“Dear Jesus, do something.”

“Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.”  

“In spite of everything I loved you, and will go on loving you–on my knees, with my shoulders drawn back, showing my heels to the headsman and straining my goose neck–even then. And afterwards–perhaps most of all afterwards–I shall love you, and one day we shall have a real, all-embracing explanation, and then perhaps we shall somehow fit together, you and I, and turn ourselves in such a way that we form one pattern, and solve the puzzle: draw a line from point A to point B…without looking, or, without lifting the pencil…or in some other way…we shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn.”

“When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of some impeccably narrowing corridor.”  

“Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don’t stop to think, don’t interrupt the scream, exhale, release life’s rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life. ”

“Toska – noun /ˈtō-skə/ – Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness. No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”  

“Literature was not born the day when a boy crying “wolf, wolf” came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying “wolf, wolf” and there was no wolf behind him.”

~Vladimir Nabokov (My Personal God)

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Personalized Spring

I am aware that the first day of spring is seldom the first spring day; the sky is overcast with dull grey clouds, and if not for a lone cuckoo’s call one can almost call it early winter or the late monsoon. Yet when I woke up this morning I couldn’t help the anticipation of something serendipitous around the corner on this first day of spring. Not long ago I was told that I manufacture reality without any basis, and maybe today’s anticipation was a classic example of it. Maybe most of my hopes, dreams and yearnings would thrive only in the world of wishful thinking and never in the real world. This uncomfortable realization is not the serendipitous thing I wanted to happen today. So much for the joy of spring! 

But I have a weird problem. No matter how many skies fall I can’t sustain an appropriately gloomy mood for long. It was only the anticipation anxiety that troubled me in the past, but a depressed mood rarely lasted beyond a few hours. I always find something to occupy myself and create my own happiness; a task I had mastered since childhood.

So, when the day started going downhill with unexpected skirmishes and stubborn memories crowding my mind, I knew I had to salvage it myself. As night fell, the dull grey clouds finally started pouring out the first shower of spring, and I stuffed my sneakers into a bag and headed for the Pilates class after a month’s hiatus. After an hour of challenging previous limits of elasticity and flexibility, the mind was unable to focus on anything apart from a violent tachycardia, which was followed by laughter and the conversations that varied from mountain treks to (one-at-a-time, because it is so expensive) butt implants! The rush of endorphins returned the spring into my day.

The street outside was wet and gleaming, bouncing off the red and orange glows of the vehicles that plied on it. The night sky was a bewitching indigo and the dark silhouettes of trees swayed in the brisk wind. The rain continued. My favourite dishes were prepared for dinner (minuscule serendipity?). I have turned off the music tonight, I want to go on hearing the rain through the open window. I’m in bed now, snug under the covers, and a new book, The World According To Garp, lies next to my pillow. I can no longer recall the gloominess I felt earlier in the day, or be tormented by worthless thoughts.

Nothing out of the ordinary happened, no serendipities, and the day would end in a few minutes. I dug out my own spring on a day devoid of sunshine and cherry blossoms; instead it had a wild wind, ceaseless rain, occasional thunder, a new book, some camaraderie, good exercise and good (small portions of) food. I may “manufacture realities without basis” and look for happiness in the oddest and simplest of things, but it turns out quite well for me!

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David Foster Wallace

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”

“It’s weird to feel like you miss someone you’re not even sure you know.” 

“Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.”

“What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love? “

“We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we’ve never even met?” 

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.” 

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”  

“Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.” 

“The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.”

“Both destiny’s kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person’s basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.”  

“We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog’s yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum’s scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother’s retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what’s brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.”

“The truth is you already know what it’s like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes. But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you think…The truth is you’ve already heard this. That this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali–it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.

So cry all you want, I won’t tell anybody.” 

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As If

Lately, in the course of a normal day I get this weird feeling. As if never wanting to get out bed again. As if holding my breath indefinitely. As if lugging around a phantom conjoined twin. As if waiting to hit the bottom during an endless fall. As if a irreversible numbness has engulfed me. As if not caring any more about anything. As if being told that I would never have any new thoughts or new experiences. As if being wiped out of all memories. As if saying a single word will require paramount strength. It is a fleeting sense of physical and emotional lethargy, barely lasting a few minutes, but it is scary that it should even occur. 

Maybe it is a sign to spring-clean my life; weeding out the old, the stale and the stagnant, and planting something new and joyous.

But what?

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Moment to Moment

It hasn’t been a conscious decision but I have led a life of discrete moments that are grasped from here and there, like a magpie, and chunked together side by side in some semblance of a continuum. I live from moment to moment; each new and whole, each offering a blank slate. That is why I am unable to hold a grudge; it seems silly to remain angry or annoyed about incidents that happened so many moments ago. Often my leaky memory finds it difficult to retain the cause of an argument, and even if it does, the earlier flammability is lost.

Even uncalled for convolutions in the course of life that threatens to throw me off the edge are relegated to being mere mishaps in retrospect. They don’t fade from memory, but past hurt is automatically and effortlessly eradicated in the onrush of the new moments that seduces with so many possibilities. It is perfectly normal for me to argue in the morning, remain annoyed for an hour or two, and backslap the person by afternoon, wondering at their bemusement. Flitting from moment to moment creates incoordination with people who mothballs their past, but that is a price I am willing to pay, along with the slightly raised chances of repeating the same mistakes.

The only thing that seems to quietly permeate underneath all the unlinked moments of my life is love. Love is always there, unobtrusive and undemanding, from one moment to the next and then the next, and so on. It creates a sense of permanence no matter how disheveled life becomes. It is like a really tall lighthouse that always looms in the horizon, the sight of which I can take comfort in wherever I sail out to. We don’t choose the life we are born into, or the people we call family. I have been very lucky on that aspect.  Yet I long for that something of my own; the glue that invisibly holds my moments together, the lighthouse I can sail back to any time, the feeling of coming home.

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