Echoes

For all the times we have loved, we have also lost. Many of us have been around the world of love, feeling it, losing it, fighting for it, begging for it and many other things. If you haven’t, worry not, it will soon come.

For the loves that didn’t work out and even for the ones that eventually did, there are echoes of what could have been. You could have found the love of your life, but years later, things are not quite what you thought they would be. Then you hear coulda-woulda-shoulda echo down the corridors of your relationship.

There’s this beautiful Matchbox Twenty song called The Difference, it tells a story about love and somewhere in the song they sing:

Slow dancing
On the boulevard
In the quiet moments
While the city’s still dark

Sleepwalking through the summer rain
In the tired spaces
You could hear her name

When she was warm and tender and you
Pulled her arms around you
There was nothing but her
Love and affection she was
Crazy for you now she’s
Part of something that you lost

There are loves we have had that were so grand and now they are only part of things we once had, things we lost. Loves we thought we could never live without and now we thrive without. It makes me wonder then, is love real? The fact that one moment you can’t live without this person and the next  you can’t even remember their favorite color (shout out to all the talking stage peeps out there!)

Reality may not always live up to the expectations set by the dreams inspired by love. You have a real human to love and as we all know, human beings are as flawed as they come. Many a song has been inspired by this mismatch.

So sometimes, after a while a relationship can feel like an echo, reverberating through the halls of memory and reminding us of what we once hoped and dreamed. Like an echo, the remnants of our desires continue to linger, refusing to fade away completely, even though the source of the sound is long gone. It is as though you are standing in a room of shadows.

On demons and vanquishing them

I’m sure we have all watched an exorcism movie or two…yes? no? Hold that thought.

I have always believed that if you can name your demons, you can fight them. Whatever they may be, be it something as simple as procrastination or something as complex as anxiety or depression. Few things are as challenging as suffering from something unnamed be it physical or mental. It’s why we go to the doctor for a diagnosis. After the diagnosis comes the treatment.

Perhaps it’s the catholic in me that has always inherently known this. Back to the exorcism movies, it is believed that until the demon identifies itself by name, it will not leave the possessed. The priest needs to know “who” exactly it is so he can then summon the power of God to vanquish it. It has to be vanquished by name.

Same applies to our personal struggles I believe. If ever I feel restless or anxious or down or whatever feelings I feel that creep up on me like ghosts, unnamed, and unknown, i try to take a step back to figure out where they are coming from. Living with emotions whose origins are unknown feels to me like living in a haunted house.

There’s this beautiful quote I read once;

“One need not be chamber, to be haunted”

It stayed with me because this is what the human mind feels like to me. It is a house that can easily be haunted by unwanted thoughts and feelings and if we don’t sit with them and call them by their names, we may never be able to get rid of them.

The Netflix documentary Stutz, which is really like a therapy session touches on this. Leading Psychiatrist Phil Stutz talks about the three aspects of life that every human being needs to get comfortable with. That is “Pain, Uncertainty, Constant Work”. He says:

“You have to learn to love the process of dealing with those three things. And that is where the tools come in, when it appears, you identify it and then use the tools to nullify it”

From the Netflix documentary Stutz

What we need in life really is the tools to help us fight our demons.

Watch “Sunday Chats with Carol: Identity, isolation and intimacy” on YouTube

Of endings, beginnings and…hope?

Is it just me, or is this time of the year filled with contradicting emotions?

On one hand ‘tis the season to be jolly! And on the other ‘tis the season for looking back on the year and wondering what was that?! Did I accomplish anything or at least half the things I wanted to?

It is the flood of emotions that come with looking back to the year that was- while enjoying the merrymaking -while anxiously waiting for the new year -that brings with it the contradictions I speak of. Oh December! Every year you bring me the same old anxieties. Measuring current me up to a past self whilst wondering if the new year will truly bring a new me?

At the same time, I constantly remind myself to stay grounded and enjoy the present. The spirit of joy and relaxation brought about by the holidays begs me to stay right here in the present moment. It beckons and calls and many a time I gladly respond and allow myself to be swept up in it all. 

But right in the midst of it, like an unwelcome guest, the daunting idea of starting a whole other 365 days, going through the same motions, doing the same things, fighting the same battles….creeps up on me.

What is life but Sisyphus persisting?

And then there is hope..

Hope is the prayer that things will change, that our loved ones will be healthy, that this year will be better than the last, that we will finally be happy.
The only problem with hope, as I see it, is that it can be flimsy. For an anxious person, catastrophic thinking is more reliable (and at least comes with a pleasant surprise when we’re wrong). If you’re like me, you know that “wishing” and “wanting” are often immediately followed by a deeper layer of fear: what if what I wish for doesn’t come true? – Esther Perel

The trouble with hope is that, it is what kills you. The constant wanting and wishing for things that sometimes never comes to pass. The character Red from the Shawshank Redemption tells his fellow inmate Andy, “Hope is a dangerous thing, it can drive a man insane.” In this context Red has been in prison a long long time, he has long abandoned hopes of getting out and he would rather accept his fate than tell himself stories of freedom.

This is where I agree with him, the more you hope, the bigger the disappointment when the things you hope for never come to pass. Many times I think it is better to not be hopeful at all.

But then again Esther Perel adds “Closing ourselves off to the possibility that things will get better doesn’t protect us from getting hurt. Unfortunately, it only ensures that nothing will change.” You see if you cannot dream a new dream, imagine a different future, hope for something new then you will never have anything to work towards. All that will be is the dreary existence you have come to know so well.

So despite the angst, the despair, the anxieties, hope we must!

Like happiness, hope is not logical, but nothing about trust and faith is logical. It doesn’t make it any less important. There is a saying in Judaism, “na’aseh v’nishma” — “we will do and then we will understand.” – Esther Perel

Completely fine

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (by Gail Honeyman) is the title of a book I came across during one of my book shopping sprees. The title caught my eye because as soon as i read it, I thought “no she isn’t“.

This thought crossed my mind, not because I knew the storyline or contents of the book, but because, who is completely fine? I guess there people who are completely fine, I am not sure I have met them. I instantly decided to buy this book because I wanted to know who is Eleanor, and why does she think she’s fine, when she clearly isn’t? The story of so many of our lives.

Books read us back to ourselves

Jeanette Winterson

Eleanor’s story is about the stark darkness of loneliness. Of never having been seen, of never having been acknowledged. And how that makes you question your own existence. Do you exist if nobody sees you? If no one misses you, wants to spend time with you, let alone care about you? She spends almost a decade of birthdays and holiday seasons alone. She goes days and days without saying a single word to another person. She lives alone. Her face is marked by scars from childhood trauma, making her even less likely to blend in with others, alienating her even more. She tells herself she is completely fine…on her own.

I may not be Eleanor, but some of her story is my story, the story of so many of us. In many ways we move through life unseen, unheard, unacknowledged. Unknown, even to our own selves. Moving to the beat of other’s drums. Never knowing who we really are, feeling lost and out of tune. And never saying a word about it. Books read us back to ourselves.

It’s a story about the stark darkness of loneliness and how in the end it is Kindness that rescues us. The help of a stranger, the silent companionship of a pet, the tea date with a long lost friend, the familiar hug from a sibling. The quiet look or touch of understanding when we don’t even understand ourselves. Being seen. In the end, this, is what rescues us.

the authentic self

Who are you when all the layers are stripped down? The religion, the tribe, the job, the expectations, the conditioning, the roles you play, the choices you’ve made, the mistakes. When it’s all stripped away, what remains?

From the day we are born we are thrown into the river of life, and it carries us on its waves, relentlessly flowing forward, and after a time, we find ourselves on the river banks of who we have become. When we are young, we are unable to swim against the tide, but as we grow into adults we find that we can swim, but the river has already had its way.

When does one’s true self emerge from this relentlessly flowing river? A self defined by one’s own mind, free of a history that we at times had no control over. When do we pause to actually take an outsider view of who we have become and start to sort which parts are truly ours and which parts are from without?

“This is the greatest damn thing about the universe,” Henry Miller wrote in his magnificent meditation on the meaning of existence, “that we can know so much, recognize so much, dissect, do everything, and we can’t grasp it.” Paradoxically enough, the fragment of the universe we seem least equipped to grasp is the truth of who we ourselves are. Who are we, really, when we silence the ego’s shrill commands about who we should be, and simply listen to the song of life as it sings itself through us?

brainpickings.org

While reading Paul Kalanithi’s When breath becomes air (about a man who for a lot of his life contemplated meaning and death and who eventually came face to face with death when he was diagnosed with cancer in his 30s) I hoped that he had found the answers he was looking for and in so doing he would share them in his memoir.

What I found was not what i was looking for. I’ve always thought that death is one of those things that is sure to bring clarity. That maybe if i am reminded of my own mortality, if i am reminded that death is not as far fetched as i think then questions like who am i?  will come into sharp focus and the answers will follow.

But it seems even if i knew how much time i had left on earth, what would follow would be confusion. What to do with that time? What would I prioritize? Would it be enough time to discover who i truly am or would i be forced to only finish the things I had already started? What truth would I live? Would I swim against the tide?

Paul writes “…everywhere I turned, the shadow of death obscured the meaning of any action.” He too struggled to define who he would be now that death was staring him in the face. Was he still a neurosurgeon? What was he to do with the limited time he had left? What should come first? Who would he be now?

When we silence the world, take a break from the ever flowing river of life, are we able to really find who we are outside of it all?

 

the others

Why do we need to connect?

Brain Pickings by Maria Popova

We are creatures of relation. And because life has such a sense of humor, we are by design so individually unique that no two people are exactly the same, making the divide between one individual and another that much bigger. And so one has to cross this great divide in search of connection. And this journey sometimes if not many times is too long and perilous and also many times joyous and profound.

Many times I think, it is okay to have things that only you alone understand, enjoy, relate to but then you meet people with the same interests and all of a sudden the room is that much brighter. But even then as you connect with them you find the many other ways in which there are differences and so the connection cannot be complete. And so the search continues. I guess one would say this is why we have different friends, relationships with different people, each closing a different gap in the great divide.

It is ingrained in us to desire closeness and yet human relationships are designed in such a way that they come with different seasons. Seasons of closeness, seasons of separation. They need time, love and effort to be kept afloat, thriving and yet very easily slip away when left untended.

“The joy of meeting and the sorrow of separation … we should welcome these gifts … with our whole soul, and experience to the full, and with the same gratitude, all the sweetness or bitterness as the case may be. Meeting and separation are two forms of friendship that contain the same good, in the one case through pleasure and in the other through sorrow… Soon there will be distance between us. Let us love this distance which is wholly woven of friendship, for those who do not love each other are not separated.”  Simone Weil writing to a friend separated by distance.

And so we spend our lives,forever journeying towards others, forever hoping that our connections, our friendships will stand the test of time and forever needing to not walk alone.

Small

About 2 weeks ago I spent a Sunday afternoon with a relative, old enough to be a grand parent. He told us stories from his high school days, stories about Uganda, stories about what was, particularly regarding the political landscape of back in the day.

As I listened it dawned on me that part of what I found fascinating about these stories was that there was a time NRM didn’t exist, not the way we know it now anyway. That there was a time other political parties had a stronghold in the country, a time other men held  power and a time when this power changed hands frequently for one reason or other.Also fascinating to me was watching a man who had lived through all these times and listen to his perspective on things as they were, as they are and as they might be.

And the smallness of my existence dawned on me..

In the grand scheme of things, what do i mean and who am i? I will have no impact whatsoever on the history of my country, I will be but another one of the 40 million people who existed at this point in time (side note: he actually lived through a time when the population of Uganda was a paltry 6 million people,6 million!) And my story will pass unlauded, save for the people close to me, my story will be lost in the sea of millions. History, time, is bigger than all of us.

Source : Wait but why (the gray arrow is the big bang)

A character from one of my favorite shows Dark said something like ‘people think they still have time but you don’t have time, time has you’. And yes, the show itself is as mind boggling as that line. When all else in my mind settles, these thoughts keep stirring. And like a moth to a flame, similar thoughts find their way into my everyday reads. This is an excerpt from a beautifully written article that ponders our smallness. Enjoy.

“When one is considering the universe, unseen matter, our small backyard of the stuff, I think it is important, sensible even, to try and find some balance between laughter and uncontrollable weeping

Cry because we cannot even begin to understand how beautiful it is, cry because we are terribly flawed as a species, cry because it all seems so shockingly improbable that maybe our existence could be nothing but a dreamscape — celestial elephants in rooms without walls. But then? Surely, we can laugh.

Laugh because being riddled head-to-toe with human emotions while trying to come to terms with just how indisputably tiny we are in the grand scheme of things, makes absolutely everything and everyone seem quite ridiculous, entirely farcical. We have heads? Ridiculous! There are arguments about who is in charge here? Ridiculous! The universe is expanding? Ridiculous! We feel it necessary to keep secrets? Ridiculous.”

 

The Wild

“It’s not you. It’s your cage.”

I think about this article a lot… On the wildness of children

It’s sad to think that all of mankind’s efforts to grow, to thrive to expand have led to nothing more than elaborate cages designed to keep us from doing exactly that. I have always thought of life as we know it as some sort of tunnel. Our lives are dictated to us by the ones we love, even by the world, before they start. Our names, our faith, our roles… our being. To escape any of these things is to escape the tunnel. But where to? There’s nowhere to go when the wildness has not been given a chance to find its way.

All we come into this world with, whatever is innate or pre-wired in us is all we truly have that belongs to us. From the moment we are born our parents, with all the love and good intentions then begin to mold us.Knowingly or unknowingly our stories begin to be written by others. And because we know no better, we are doing the same for our children. We will hand them the very same template that was handed to us, go to school, graduate, get a job, get married, start a family…rinse and repeat.

This article delves into our disconnect from the world, from nature. Everything we know about the world we call home has been ironically taught from within the confines of man made structures as the world we seek to learn beckons us from the outside. Why can’t we go to it itself and learn from there? It wonders.

But the truth is we don’t know how to teach our children about nature because we ourselves were raised in the cinderblock world.  We are, in the parlance of wildlife rehabilitators, unreleasable. I used to do wildlife rescue and rehabilitation, and the one thing we all knew was that a young animal kept too long in a cage would not be able to survive in the wild.  Often, when you open the door to the cage, it will be afraid to go out; if it does go out, it won’t know what to do.  The world has become unfamiliar, an alien place. This is what we have done to our children.

This is what was done to us.

The author then posits that this disconnect is having a profound effect on us as a species. Separated from what for many years was our natural environment we are slowly becoming restless and anxious among other things. Our home, the wild is calling to us.

“In Wildness is the preservation of the World.”…..What does this mean? Turner has tracked down a reference in Thoreau’s “Fact-book” to the word “wild” as “the past participle of to will,  self-willed.”  The wild, then, is the self-willed, that which lives out of its own intrinsic nature rather than bowing to some extrinsic force.

So where do we go from here? Where does this leave us? Can we ever escape?

Labyrinth

Where do I begin. I wake up with my thoughts in one place and end the day with my thoughts in not quite the same place. They travel, meander, searching for where to perch. Could explain my absence from this space for so long. Where do I begin.

I’m a mom now so often when i wake up my thoughts are about getting him ready for the day and yet..it is still unfamiliar landscape for my mind. Remember those 30 years of your life where your morning thoughts weren’t so consistent or more so did not need to be so consistent? I think to myself. Yes i do. And then i wander out of the house to work and as the day goes by i begin to think about a whole lot of things, some are neither here nor there, many revolve around “what am i doing here, what are we doing here” and so on and so forth.

labyrinth

/ˈlab(ə)rɪnθ/

noun

1. a complicated irregular network of passages or paths in which it is difficult to find one’s way; a maze.

Words; these have always been a passion of mine, so today as my mind wandered it perched on this word: Labyrinth. This is it, this is what describes what’s going on in the landscape of my mind. Normally I would have let this thought just float away.

But then i remembered that writing was an anchor for me once. A place to perch. And it can be again.