Reflections within and without....

Relationships come in many different flavors and there is no denying that but even in the closest of my friendships, one difference I have always noted is the extent of 'privacy or space' we have afforded each other. I have some relationships that are based on this tacit, implicit acceptance of each other - where words are often insufficient and superfluous. We know how much we care and we let it be. We don't question, proclaim, pick and choose words - we just are. 

And then there are other relationships where there is an abundance of words, where arguments are dissected, hashed out, said aloud, as are reconciliations. Where saying everything, somehow holds the key to being close and staying together. Words are a big part of these relationships and my ineptitude with them often works to my disadvantage. 

I have learnt and grown with both these kind of friendships. While the former was my refuge on days when I did not want to talk and there are many like that. The latter, were the ones that pulled me out of my cocoon and helped me externalize my angst and frustrations - and I have had plenty of those too. 

In my reflections on these two kinds of relationships, I have found a state of ambivalence to both modes of operation and yet I exhibit a preference to holding onto my thoughts, my own state of mind, my own feelings about things - up till the point where there is no ambiguity about what the events are actually going to be. And yet, over the years, my friends have cajoled me into emptying my mind to an extent that, now, I find venting out to them a relief. But this is always a game of thresholds for me because to me - on an ideological level, talking seems futile, while reflections and musings seem to hold the key to most problems. 

Incomprehensible as it may seem to most - this worked the best for me... 

This dilemma about my preferred mode of operation has lingered with me long enough so that I recognized shades of it in the article from New Yorker when I came across it today. My idea of self, the foundations of my relationships, my need for words and my complete ineptitude with them at times, all resonate deeply with this conflict between our private, inner self and our need to connect. 

At that point, I just had to share it here... 

After all, most reading is a process of uncovering someone else's work in finding better words to describe your thoughts... 

Here are some excerpts from the article that seemed most pertinent to me but the whole of it is beautifully written. 

Woolf often conceives of life this way: as a gift that you’ve been given, which you must hold onto and treasure but never open. Opening it would dispel the atmosphere, ruin the radiance—and the radiance of life is what makes it worth living. It’s hard to say just what holding onto life without looking at it might mean; that’s one of the puzzles of her books. But it has something to do with preserving life’s mystery; with leaving certain things undescribed, unspecified, and unknown; with savoring certain emotions, such as curiosity, surprise, desire, and anticipation. It depends on an intensified sense of life’s preciousness and fragility, and on a Heisenberg-like notion that, when it comes to our most abstract and spiritual intuitions, looking too closely changes what we feel. It has to do, in other words, with a kind of inner privacy, by means of which you shield yourself not just from others’ prying eyes, but from your own. Call it an artist’s sense of privacy.

“The compensation of growing old,” he thinks, is that “the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained—at last!—the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence,—the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it around, slowly, in the light.” By learning to leave your inner life alone, you learn to cultivate and appreciate it.

And you gain another, strangely spiritual power: the power to regard yourself abstractly. Instead of getting lost in the details of your life, you hold onto the feelings, the patterns, the tones. You learn to treasure those aspects of life without communicating them, and without ruining them, for yourself, by analyzing them too much.

And you gain another, strangely spiritual power: the power to regard yourself abstractly. Instead of getting lost in the details of your life, you hold onto the feelings, the patterns, the tones. You learn to treasure those aspects of life without communicating them, and without ruining them, for yourself, by analyzing them too much. Woolf suggests that those treasured feelings might be the source of charisma: when Peter, seeing Clarissa at her party, asks himself, “What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? … What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?,” the answer might be that it’s Clarissa’s radiance, never seen directly, but burning through. Clarissa, meanwhile, lets her spiritual intuitions lift her a little above the moment. Wandering through her lamp-lit garden, she sees her party guests: “She didn’t know their names, but friends she knew they were, friends without names, songs without words, always the best.” That’s the power of artist’s privacy. It preserves the melodies otherwise drowned out by words, stories, information.

“Sharing” is, in fact, the opposite of what we do: like one of Woolf’s hostesses, we rehearse a limited openness so that we can feel the solidity of our own private selves.

Every now and then, too, you come across some artwork that expresses Woolf’s sensibility in an altogether different idiom, refreshing it. Since I first stumbled across it a few years ago, I’ve watched Lucinda Williams’s 1989 performance of “Side of the Road” hundreds of times. The song is built around a simple metaphor: Williams is driving down the road with a loved one, and happy to be driving. Still, she wants to pull over to the side of the road and stand there by herself. “I want to know you’re there, but I want to be alone,” she sings.

If only for a minute or two, I want to see what it feels like to be without you. 

I want to know the touch of my own skin
Against the sun, against the wind.
I walked out in a field, the grass was high, it brushed against my legs.
I just stood and looked out at the open space, and a farmhouse out a ways.
And I wondered about the people who lived in it,
And I wondered if they were happy and content.
Were there children, and a man and a wife?
Did she love him and take her hair down at night?

If I stray away too far from you, don’t go and try to find me.
It doesn’t mean I don’t love you, it doesn’t mean I
won’t come back and stay beside you.
It only means I need a little time
To follow that unbroken line,
To a place where the wild things grow,
To a place where I used to always go.

From an entirely different angle, Williams has captured the same idea that we find in Woolf’s novels: that there is no final, satisfying way to balance our need to be known with our need to be alone. The balance is always uncertain and provisional; it’s always a matter of dissatisfaction, give-and-take, and sacrifice. Because an artist’s privacy is a state of mind, rather than a matter of law, there are no rules to help us master it. It’s up to each of us to balance the risks and rewards—to trade, in right proportion, loneliness for freedom, explicability for mystery, and the knowable for the unknown within ourselves.

VIRGINIA WOOLF’S IDEA OF PRIVACY
POSTED BY JOSHUA ROTHMAN

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/joshuarothman/2014/07/virginia-woolf-idea-of-privacy.html?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=facebook&mbid=social_facebook 

Roll of the dice...

There are hundreds of billions stars in our galaxy and then there are billions of galaxies in the known visible universe. The unknown that envelopes us stretches the very limits of our imagination.

Life, as it is today, evolved millions of years ago, from an oceanic soup, on one blue planet among an infinity of planets. The blue planet happened to be located at just the right distance and with just the right conditions for those early molecules to arise and interact. Life, that began with a roll of the dice, from the collisions and fusion of molecules over billions of years, has finally found its way to me - in a way that no one could have predicted or imagined.

And as a testament to those very unseemly probabilities, I stand here today, pondering on the nature of probabilities and life itself. Life evolved in a world that is driven by probabilities, in a universe that is being ripped apart by the forces of entropy.

I am nothing but another roll of that mysterious dice - a random product when one of the many millions of sperms found its way to this one particular egg, to set forth on a journey that culminated in me. I could not have been here today but for those sheer twists of fate and those random acts of probability that allowed two very different people separated by hundreds of miles to come together and build a life.

I could have been one of those twenty percent of pregnancies that result in a miscarriage. I could have also been among the three percent of children who are born with abnormal chromosomes - destined for a life different from the rest of us. I could have been one of the thousands of accident victims on the streets of Delhi. I could have been one among the millions of people who cannot read an alphabet. I could have been one of the thousands of girls who are forced to drop out of school. I could have been one of the seventy-four percent of people who give up education after a graduation; but instead, I am one of the one percent who complete a graduate program. I could have been a part of any of these statistics. I could have been one of the millions of women trafficked, burnt, assaulted - but instead, I am here, alive, aware and independent.

As part of my work, I try and answer the questions of why, how, when and what, but after a while, my very existence makes me believe in that elusive hope that is buried in probability. My very existence is mired in improbability and hope.

I am a statistic - just another number but its a good roll of dice that brought me here.

I have cribbed and complained, ranted and raged about every misfortune that I have encountered on the way - and it has not been easy, but once in a while, when I pause to look at what could have been - I feel like I was dealt a good hand.

But how much of our life is shaped by these random occurrences and how much is shaped by us - as people? Am I just a ripple in the fabric of time, just being carried forward passively by this billion-years old explosion or am I more than that - an agent of change?

People are a product of their times - from Hitler to Columbus to Einstein - we are all shaped by the times we live in and yet, we contribute to shaping it. It is a two-way street, it seems, but then why do I feel so powerless sometimes?

Why is it that my choice at home or in the grocery store or at work doesn't seem to have as much impact as it should?

Can my choices influence the world I am living in or am I just another number in the 7 billion?

Just another statistic, a blimp in that fabric of space and time... Are we mere puppets in the bigger scheme of things or can individuals really make a difference? And if we can't - should we just give up and wait passively?

What are the choices that I, as an individual am faced with and can any of them be responsible and right? Is buying electronics laced with conflict minerals responsible? Most would say, No. But does my giving up on technology have an impact? Does my not buying diamonds stop the trade in blood diamonds? Does my giving up on meat or avocados at the grocery store lead to better lives half-way across the planet or country? Does my buying quinoa starve the andean farmers or does my not buying quinoa starve them? 

Where does my responsibility to me, begin and end?

Where does my responsibility to the world, begin and end?

Should we as people not show moral outrage at Marius the giraffe or at the children in Syria because we can't do anything about it? Or should we just limit our actions to the occasional outrage in the media and nothing more?

Are our actions determined by morals or by the markets? Some think that the markets sanitize all these deals? Do you, because i don't?

But how much should we worry about these choices? About electricity. About water. About recycling. About food wastage. Is an individual equally powerless in all these arenas?

If yes, then are we merely prolonging our inevitable collapse and should we just give up sooner than later? Can we ever make the right choices considering we know so little of the global forces and the local problems? Does our burgeoning knowledge and awareness of these multi-faceted problems make our lives and decisions - simpler or more complex?

Can my choices influence the world I am living in or am I just yet another powerless, ever-shrinking number in the exploding 7 billion?

Am I just another statistic, a blimp in the fabric of space and time - another roll of the dice...?

Seeking misery...

We do the strangest of things to get through bad days but hunting for more misery is the most twisted of them all.

I can understand trying to forget it, running away from it, drowning it - in pills or alcohol - but, no. This involves actively looking for misery. Who in their sane mind would do that?

I do it every now and then, in one of these carefully nuanced moments, when life seems to be getting to that point when every step forward is two steps backward. When every force seems to be a drag to overcome. Suddenly the rules of forward momentum, friction and inertia don't make so much sense, because no matter how much effort you put, there is no net movement. It feels like trying to pull a wagon-load of misery on an oil-spill. The harder you try, the harder you fall. The less you try, the less things change.

That is when I go trolling through other people's memoirs - books, movies, blogs, stories. Anything and everything. Anything that opens the lives of these perfect strangers' to me - in their own voice. And I look for these oil-spill moments in their life. Their miseries and struggles seem to numb my own pain. It helps me wallow in the depths of someone else's misery for a while only to come back and find my own pool a little less shallow.

It doesn't hurt a whole lot less but there is comfort in knowing there are others out there. It also makes me see the flicker of light at the end of the long, dark tunnel - through my cloudy, foggy eyes. If they managed to get out their oil-spill, maybe I will too. If I held on just a little longer. If I just tried something a little different. If the dice rolls a little differently this time.

Perhaps, all is not lost. And perhaps even if it is, there is a new beginning to be made.


Thank God, we can’t see the future because if we could “we’d never get out of bed.”

August: Osage County 

Random thoughts....

The past few days have been stranger than usual. I have been teetering at the edge of loss, exhaustion and hopelessness but something has carried me through it all - a little bruised and wounded but still together. 

My days have been filled with random thoughts - mostly while walking or running - trying to get some air in and some anxiety out. 

I walk by the park and see a tiny two year old walking on the park's fence while clutching onto her dad. It reminds me of learning to ride a bike. Of constantly looking back to check if someone was behind me or not. To make sure that someone stayed with me even as I tried to break free - to speed away. With that tingling sense of panic, excitement and the fear of not making it. And yet, before panic grips me as the shadow behind me recedes into the distance - I feel the wind in my hair and I know I am on my way. I have fallen soon after, lost control, and gotten bruised, just when I thought I had found my wings. But for those few moments, I knew I had made it. I had done it once and I could do it again. And again. 

I was a bird ready to fly away from my nest, eager to fly, but I was still missing the nest. I still looked for that shadow. For that someone to be there, no matter what. To just be there and be mine. 

I walk by the rolling hills of the lush-green golf course on my way to the beach. With slippers on my feet and earphones in my ear, I walk. Uncaring and unsure. I see the luxurious green carpet of the golf course, dotted with specks of white spheres. My eyes try and find a pattern to make sense of it. But, there is no pattern - nothing to explain it all. Nothing but randomness. The white specks were the balls at the end of their journey. A journey directed by the sun and the wind, by the power of the stroke, by the strength and choice of the clubs, by the roll of the land, and by a whole lot else. There was no simple way to predict or to explain the chain of events that brought them there. They were at the end of journeys that were almost entirely beyond their control. I just had to walk on. 

I normally walk into an empty room with quiet solitude but walk into a crowd feeling lonely. But today was different. I was happy even on the streets because I acknowledged the crowd of strangers and realized that I owe nothing to them. Not the politeness of a smile or the courtesy of a pleasantry or the pleasure of a conversation. I was alone in a crowd of strangers and for once it was liberating to know that I did not care for them and that my existence did not matter to them. That at some level, I could be just who I am - unaffected by who I should be - because none of them were of any consequence to me, and neither I to them. To know that one's actions and decisions cannot break someone's heart or spirit and cannot hurt someone who is loved is liberating. It is liberating to know how little one means to some people because then there is no responsibility to be shouldered. There are no problems to be solved, no sentences to be structured and no decisions to be made. It is just you in a sea of loneliness. On some days, it is liberating to be surrounded by a sea of strangers.