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...?

Mercurial stillness...

The universe is a vast space filled with silence. We all carry that silence in us, not as a dark, vacuous, empty space but as a stillness, that connects us to what lies beyond. A stillness, that reminds us of the eternities before and after us.

A stillness that urges us to look beyond the concerns of everyday, and into life itself.
Life, they say is a marathon, not a sprint; but for the past few months, life has felt like a marathon-long sprint as I have been trying to race with and against time. Trying to keep running, to avoid falling from this giant, ceaseless ferris wheel.

Like the mice being tested on the rotor wheels for their motor performance; I too felt, like I was being tested - by some one. Or may be something. For weeks, I had good musculoskeletal strength, good persistence and stamina but even as my body carried on, my mind felt rudderless, fatigued, exhausted, scared and helpless. After those initial weeks though, my muscles too felt like the tightly strung chords of a violin and they groaned loudly when plucked.

But despite the weeks and months, I did not give up and the wheel wouldn't relent. 

After months of this ceaseless battle and at the end of miles and miles of running, my feet and my mind just wouldn't and couldn't stop. They were gripped by this mad frenzy - a visceral need, to keep moving, to not stay still, lest something go wrong.

But how long can fear propel you? At some point, the body is left fighting the fright without the adrenaline.
That's when fatigue sets in, a fatigue that tires the mind, more than the body. A fatigue that leaves you feeling drained, of more than just energy as it saps away hope, happiness and love.
Life becomes a computer program, a force of habit - with strictly regulated hours of sleep and wakefulness, that followed rhythms of habit and not of will.

Sleep becomes death at the end of a long day, everyday; deprived of dreams, the sense of rest, calm or peace.
Meals become the mandatory pitt-stops that you must make to keep the engine running.
And all this while, a tiny voice in my head kept asking me to slow down. But tiny voices are easily drowned in the roar of deadlines, to-do lists. In the angry voices and in the relentless echoes of the mind.

But then one day, a storm broke through all defenses and laid claim to that primal silence of my heart. In that silence, I could finally hear the little voice urging me to stop. Reassuring me, that nothing would go wrong. And I finally succumbed to the fatigue.

That day, I ignored all deadlines and lists, and I walked to 'my' cliff. The cliff overlooked the pacific, but in my mind, it teetered on the brink of eternity, this vast unknown. At that edge, I sat. And I wait.
I wait for that stillness from beyond to find its way back to me.
I wait for that inner silence that has been shattered into bits with this flurry of activity.
I wait for the tiny drops of that shattered silence to roll into the center of my being. To come to a standstill and to become a meaningful whole.
I wait for my mind to reach that stillness before it disappears again.

On that wonderful sunday morning, I sat there, on my usual bench, acutely aware of the gentle breeze, the sunlight streaming in and the distant sound of the ocean. I will myself to forget all but that sense of stillness. That quiet and that peace. And that sense of awe that liberates you by trivializing your existence in the grand scheme of events.

It takes me a while to drag those fragmented pieces from the different corners of my mind but finally, I have a glistening mercurial pearl in the core of my being.
I close my eyes and I can see its brilliance.
I urge it to stay with me. I plead to everyone and no one in particular.

With that stillness, I become aware of the vastness of time and space before and after me. I feel like a spectator to my own life, as I stop by the edge and watched life itself flow. I was a happy bystander to my own life and at the edge of that eternity, no problem seemed big enough, no sorrow seemed deep enough and no pain seemed vast enough.

I had finally found myself in that stillness and I wasn't to let go.

Samsara - a personal journey around the world...

I have always acknowledged the power of visual imagery.
And despite my preparedness for it, I am overwhelmed and pretty much reduced to melancholy as I watch these hauntingly beautiful snapshots - shot over a period of 4 years - from 25 countries around the world.

That is Samsara for you!
Art through visual snapshots that transports you to some of the most spectacular places on earth within a span of ninety minutes. And yet, it is not a travelogue or documentary or even a story. It makes you find the words for the story even as it compels you to make the story. 

Samsara is only what you make out of it - left to your own means. Some could just appreciate the cinematography and camera angles while some others could be struck down by a sense of despair, gloom and hopelessness - as one stands witness to humanity gnawing through its very own foundations. As much as I hate to use the word, Samsara to me, IS a spiritual journey. It is a personal journey even though it traces the past, present and perhaps the future of the rest of humanity. 

As I sat in a darkened room, watching these images streaming by, accompanied by nothing but hauntingly appropriate music in the background, my only thought was - "Imagine if some aliens from another galaxy or if our future generations, after an apocalypse like event, were to watch this to try and understand the world as it exists today:
What would they think? That we drove ourself to extinction and that we were a weird and extremely social herd of men and women who couldn't/wouldn't/didn't think!!!"

That is what Samsara is. A brutally honest and yet spell-bindingly beautiful portrait of us, as a people, a race and a community. It is us, as we exist, today, in at least 25 countries around the world. 

Samsara is art - not because of the stunning images shot on 75 mm film - that makes it rather special too; but Samsara is art because it doesn't tell you what to think. It floods you with these diverse images and leaves you to make sense of it. I left disappointed and disillusioned by everything I saw. Maybe you will not.  Maybe you will manage to see the human ability to survive and thrive despite the odds. Or maybe you will be consumed by a sense of despair stronger than mine. Nonetheless, it is a journey I will strongly recommend.

There are images that you see and then there are stories that you build 

Stories of: (Spoiler alert!!!)

Regimented battalions of hundreds of thousands of men, working like machines repeating the same task over and over, and over - until the world's end - only to get their two square meals. 

Imagine an army of perfectly sculpted, identical looking, pretty but unthinking women - trying to fit the stereotypes of the world. 

Imagine ghost cities and towns - abandoned, destroyed by natural disasters with names of their own. Disasters that left behind nothing but a haunting presence of all that was and could have been. 

A world where tiny, multi-storyed, one room shanties are built with corrugated tin pieces glued together and tied by ropes - threatening to collapse at a moments notice - all in the shadow of giant, multi-storey, apartment complexes that are furnished with swimming pools, gardens and other amenities. 

A world where animals are bred only to be consumed by the select few who can afford. Where life is dismembered, packaged and sold faster than it can be grown. Where life is sometimes just food. 

Where history from hundreds of years stands witness to the atrocities of the present. Where nature unleashes its fury every now and then but human will always strives to overcome it. 

When men are united by the name of an unseen god and by a book of prayers than by the plight of a fellow human. Where men and women, live in fear - trained and ready to fight/kill at a moments' notice.  A world where borders are made in stone and sand and yet they are strong enough to separate people of the same kind.

A world where body art continues to make statements - of power, culture, and individuality - in the oldest of tribes to the youngest of civilizations. 

Where creation with meticulous labour and exquisite attention to detail is only the first step towards destruction - a symbolic, cyclical ritual that we, as a race, seem to initiate everywhere. 

A world whose lungs are fast being choked with the overwhelming amounts of garbage generated everyday. A world which looks gloriously beautiful and hideously ugly - both at the same time - through the eyes of the unspeaking, unflinching camera. 

A world where the cities buzz through the day and are glittering by the night; in hues of red, orange and gold - looking quite vulgar and expensive.

Words of wisdom...

After a while(You learn)

After a while you learn the subtle difference
between holding a hand and chaining a soul
And you learn that love doesn't mean leaning
and company doesn't mean security.
And you begin to learn that kisses aren't contracts
and presents aren't promises
And you begin to accept your defeats
with your head up and your eyes ahead
with the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child
And you learn to build all your roads on today
because tomorrow's ground is too uncertain for plans
and futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight.

After a while you learn that even sunshine burns
if you get too much.

So you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul
instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

And you learn that you really can endure
that you really are strong
and that you really do have worth
And you learn and you learn
with every goodbye you learn...

- Veronica A. Shoffstall

If you want to walk fast, walk alone. If you want to walk far, walk together. - African proverb Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won't come in.

- Alan Alda 

 There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. 
- Leonard Cohen 

Hope...

I have often favored the harsher reality of life over the vague uncertainty of hope. Somehow knowing the truth and being prepared for it seemed better than the optimistic hope that keeps you unhinged from reality.

But today, when hope is actually dashed, and reality has made itself clear - somehow, I prefer that sense of hope - however tempestuous and elusive it may have seemed. It was enough to let me get through to the next day. It was enough to let me sleep and wake up.

It held a possibility, however small. Undaunted by probabilities or statistics, It held a possibility. It was enough to keep me calm in the face of the storm.

Hope is the thing with feathers 
Emily Dickinson 

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -

And on the strangest Sea -

Yet - never - in Extremity,

It asked a crumb - of me.

I hope I learn to value that little bird and its song without words. Because sometimes, you are just not ready for that storm. Sometimes, even that glimmer of hope, however remote, however uncertain, is sufficient to keep you together. 

Remember that - will you? The next time you want to curse hope for leaving you vulnerable, uncertain and confused.