Perfectly irrational

Be warned, this post is a several years-overdue rant about a book I hated the first time I read it. There, now it's out.

I'm an indiscriminate lover of words, and I will read anything, almost. Even as I crib about a horribly written novel, I will finish reading it- its an instinct something like being unable to take your eyes away from a train wreck or a massacre. Given this, it takes quite a bit to make me stop reading an award-winning book that comes highly recommended by several people with impeccable taste.

It's got a fantastic story. A boy and a little zoo adrift in the Pacific in a  tiny lifeboat. You know the one, don't you?

A completely unbelievable story, of a boy and a tiger and their strange names and even stranger relationship. That I found completely plausible. But I've never heard a government official or a hotel concierge in India use the word 'bamboozle'. In fact, I've only ever heard it used in the most amused contexts, always with implied humor. Never met a Muslim man or woman with the name Kumar. Never, ever met a child of less than ten who "loved religion". Loved God? Possibly. Loved temples, or churches, or rituals? Certainly. But "I loved religion", coming from an eight or twelve year old? No.

Add to that a semi-traditional mother and a liberal/ atheist father in South India. Expect that these parents will be accepting of their ten year old running off to namaz or confession or pray endlessly to the deities of three religions. Once again, no and no. Add to this the thirty chapters of introducing animal behavior, which are essentially a schoolboy's essay version of Gerald Durrell's theories on zoos.

And even if I were to believe it all, pretending it part of some magical adventure, there is no narrative spell strong enough to pull these incongruous threads into that little boat. Even with my meager editorial skills, I could have cut every reference of religion out of the book, and it would still be an amazing story.

That is to me the part that hurts the most. If the unneccessary words hadn't gotten in the way, this would be an even greater story than it is. The book, as a whole, feels like an attempt to make a perfect line through a perfect circle in an even hundred chapters just went terribly wrong, adrift on choppy detail that nearly drowns a story that really will make you believe in God.

Just this once, watch the movie instead.

(In case it wasn't clear from the annoyed introduction, I did actually, finally finish reading the book this week, on the third try.)

Tourist

Screaming at someone who doesn't understand what I say is rather like being the annoying tourist who thinks if he/she just speaks loud enough, the locals will understand.

Raising my voice doesn't automagically improve the way my words reach you. A different communication must stem from training my words to find a path through the landscape of your experience and understanding. Screaming is hacking a path through the woods with fire and wood choppers, communicating might be hands gently pressing the undergrowth apart to make contact with the understanding earth beneath.

But so heavily and intensely, this relies on the faith that you, the local, are in this with me, trying to figure out this path together with the least destruction to whatever's blocking us. I have to trust that you aren't smirking at my dumbness in your world, understanding my words but pretending not to because it suits you, not because if you pretend to not understand then I'll stop trying, stop forcing paths that you don't particularly like.

Death

Don't worry, this isn't the start of a sixteen year old's poem with a Big Noun title. It's a simpler question.

Suddenly death seems to loom larger in my life- people around me are growing older, and bad things tend to happen to grown-ups rather often, it seems. There are accidents and cancer and scary diseases that go undetected, and in the last two years, five people I shared different parts of my life with are gone. Relatives, teachers, friends, acquaintances. And there are those that count their lives in the ticking clock of chemotherapy.

And I'm curious, how do you deal with it? Do you hold the ones near you closer, do you feel icy fingers slipping over your own time on the planet? Do you race faster to the end, since you don't know quite when it will be? Do you belittle your own problems in the light of these bigger ones? How do you honor their memory and make them count without losing a little of yourself in this slip-sliding count-up or down or whatever it is you call the march of time?

At a conference this week, I learned it is best to use quotes from sources sparingly when one writes. Use your own voice, said this best-selling writer of sixteen books. In the particular anecdote I'd like to put down today, I am not sure whose voice echoes the strongest.

At sixteen and a half, I doubt it was mine. There were so many- friends who had got into colleges with fancy names, friends who knew precisely what their career path was going to be. Parents who distressed over what I was doing with my life. Teachers who did a double take when I said I was going to study English. I was confused, and angry, and had heard enough of other opinions and words. She called me out from where I lingered at the back of the group, and asked what I was going to do in college. She was the first person who said to me, "But of course you should be a writer."

She told me I was "confident and poised and warm"  - though which sixteen year old ever is? We reconnected fifteen years later. She was no longer teaching at my high school. She had moved, from Bombay to Delhi, and in response to my message said, "Of course I remember you, and I'm so glad you are a writer now." She was, even after all these years, the teacher who could bring out the best in her students with just a few words. Her daughter, a few years older than I, was married with a toddler.

My teacher herself was battling metastatic breast cancer. 21 infected lymph nodes. I know the odds. But still, I wasn't expecting her to be gone in these few short months. Just like that, no responses, and a message from another teacher saying she is no more.

The memory of those exchanges now weighs a little heavier on my days. Without her to share them, I must remember, all on my own, that of course I must be a writer, and I can be confident and poised and warm. And so I try to raise my voice and lift my words to match her graceful spirit.

Losing sleep.

Some tell me I push too hard, too much, too often. Remember to relax and re-charge, they tell me. Mother, husband, friend, acquaintance. There are many voices in my life that remind me to do this. To stop pushing and striving and demanding and doing, and learn to wait. To give things time, and let them take their own time.

And still there is a whisper beneath them more insistent that will not be stopped. It comes to me at night when jagged bits of un-reasoned life poke me awake, remind me that there is less time than I think, and more   I must do, and perhaps, if only I do the more, the pieces will fit. And the whisper reminds me always of those who didn't have, who couldn't, who weren't as fortunate, who fell, who died. Like this name I removed from an e-mail list today.

I had only heard it in passing, and looked him up to update his address. Freelance science writer for Scientific American and others. Author of one book. Dead by his own hand at 31 last year.

The easiest thing to take and the hardest to give: Time.

Like green

Like sun-filled trees, like the lights on a long drive home, like the parrots that shriek against the sky by the bay as you walk to the train. Like hearing what you've waited years for. Like being able to ignore opinions that wait to lunge down your throat. Like knowing that you are, that you can. Like being able, just for a day, to be anything you want to be, and anything is everything that you wanted and you can, in fact, have it all.

Like knowing that the earth you toiled and worried and broke your heart over and hoped, hoped beyond hoping that it existed is now. Like having all the answers, and all the answers are yes.

Some days can be like this. And I hold their glistening hearts against my own as a reminder that green gives way to fruition, all warmth and effort congealed in some glorious unknown yet-to-be that I must trust will come. It must, with all this green.

Friend

In a room full of people, my attention is drawn instantly, inexplicably to the one with the stories. I see it in her eyes, in the way she holds my gaze when she asks what city I come from. We are very different, she and I, but I lean into her story as she does into mine.

I ignore the girl who comes to my dance class, slightly too content with her life that is so similar to mine. I ignore the girl who sits back with a polite smile that tells me she hasn't thought of a different life. At dinner this weekend, I realized how the people I am closest to aren't those who have learned to be content with their lives and pick out the prettiest dinnerware, but those who still struggle some deep unknown internal fight to BE.

Be someone bigger/better/stronger/fuller/greater/quieter/louder. Be more than just what they are. And it is only in this particular being that they somehow are completely present, a little off balance with the awareness of this edge of something more, something waiting.

In thinking back and forth, these are the people I am drawn to. The ones with stories, who have flown through personal storms small or large, only some of which they choose to share with me. But I can tell, when limbs and smiles are curved with the strength of a survivor, when a question draws me in on a secret flight through a high desert wind and it tastes like thirst and pain and growth and just a little bit of knowing, knowing that you and I might have traveled different roads but still, we have traveled. And we remember the journey and how it changed us.

Mountainspeak

Not all mountains speak with the sun-warmed nurturing voice of the earth. Some rise up to trickle glacial fingers down your spine as you walk in their midst, reminding you that you never were truly one with them. Some speak alien mother-tongues and demand your attention. Some thread fear through every step as forest undergrowth towers over your head, scrapes your skin and leaves you with a vague, irritated itch.

We walked several miles through these mountains, a group of people who have grown together and apart and still together again. I am still figuring out how we mesh. We hold each other close in heart and geography, speaking constantly of times we were warmed by our togetherness. And some of these words turn my heart to ice as I determinedly forget the lies. And some of these words remind me of our differences. And some of them thread fear through our collective walks, as my mind turns all of our past exchanges into a forest of words that scrape just under my skin.

But still, the mountains are filled with light and color. Not all mountains speak in warm, earth tinged tones. Some speak with the voice of light filtering through wind-rippled leaves, lifting heated exchanges with a fresh take on a tired subject. Some words lie refreshing as ice against a warm palm, as I remember why I grew close to these friends. And some follow our separate ways home like echoes on the wind, in phone calls and photographs and plans for another trip.

Mountains, like people, speak like earth and ice, water and tree. None is any less a part of the mountain because I choose to perceive it more than the other, and each is only one part of the long walks we take together.

I've been meaning not to write.

Littered through my drafts folder are 7 posts between the last one and this. I've been meaning not to write about certain things, subjects I deemed too personal or too repetitive to bring up here, where I come to learn and introspect and scream, and sometimes brood over the ways events may be remembered or forgotten.

And yet, perhaps I should write about these for that same reason. Little significances, like learning the value of a good night's sleep. And a multi-vitamin, and calcium. (Really- whatever else you do or do not do, get your calcium.) Taking five minutes a day to breathe. Taking the time to be kind, rather than being impulsively truthful. (Just because someone asks for the truth doesn't mean they can handle it, particularly when your 'truth' is different from theirs.)
Facing my fears. Having difficult conversations.
Taking big leaps of faith. It will all work out in the end.

Feeling nearer resolution, of what sort I am still unclear. But it makes me stronger, and surer of my actions, and kinder with myself and others. When summer rolled around this year, it still carried the memory of an ice storm in Niagara Falls, and my uncle visiting. And the smell of cherries still takes me back to a dark highway crash in Washington, as does a certain make of car I spot far too frequently on my morning commute. And these small darknesses flicker too strongly through those seven unpublished drafts.

Though it is years since I thought of seasons or events in black or white, this summer has been unusually filled with these shadows, perhaps of change that flits between the bright and dark. Perhaps they only lurk as they wait for a different season, a season where shadows belong and can step into clear light. And when they will, perhaps they will bring explanatory, resolutionary, interesting words with them to share.

I've been meaning not to write, as I wait with open mind and blank space for these.

Haiku day

An unexpected not-quite holiday.
Short sharp bursts of experience-
On a bright day in a city by the bay
Farmers market, right on the pier-
Sun shine on street stalls of trinkets
Tin buckets of spring flowers
Red-white awnings against rippling ocean
Tasting cheeses, a few hours fresh
Smells of food-
asparagus tempura (last of the season!)
ramen, roasting meats
Blue bottle coffee.
A train to take-
but no particular time to be anywhere.
Each moment a little poem in itself.

Go West. Or East.

Considering how advanced technology is and how connected we are and all that, this question really should not be that hard to figure out. I drive a car with not one, not two, but THREE GPS units in it. There's the fancy built-in unit that came with the car. So hoity-toity that she will not respond if the car is in motion. No frantic scrolling through stored addresses as I slow to a stop at a red light. The GPS lady (as we call the female voice its set to) demands full attention- pull over and focus on every non-QWERTY letter on the remarkably insensitive screen if you want polite direction and re-direction.

Then there's the recently acquired smartphone, which deserves a whole other post (I cannot be the only person in the world who misses being able to run my fingers over the keypad to dial without looking, can I?). My smart-aleck phone rarely pays any attention to where we actually are, which makes figuring out how to get to where I'd like to go quite a task. And last of all, there's the trusty old GPS we were gifted when we first moved across the country, my personal favorite. Though she hangs out in the glove compartment mostly unused, guess which one I grab when I must find directions as I drive, or simply want an estimate of a route to jog my memory.

Yet all these devices rarely help me answer with conviction questions like which North-bound or South-bound highway to take, or whether _Expressway East or West will get me from A to B. Though I am growing quickly used to carrying a crisscrossed mental map of typical destinations and highways in my head, it does little to help me find my way home on some evenings.

Driving back from a relatively familiar geography, I pause between on-ramps, unsure which to take. Until I remember that the Sun sets behind me when I take this route on Sunday evenings, and so I go East, and homeward.

Naya lagta hai

My little sister is off to college in a city far from the one she's grown up in. She's started a blog. She's been visiting family, and she wrote recently of watching another cousin, just turning two, and wondering about herself at that age. Obviously, she doesn't remember much.

I can't say that I do either, since we lived in different cities then, as we have most of our lives. But she visited us when she was that age, and I was twelve or thirteen. Across the street from our house in Delhi were three eucalyptus trees planted against a red brick wall that marked the government-run market. Tall, dusky green and white against the red, I painted and sketched them many times over, the view of them from the littlest bedroom in the front of the house.

In strong winds the trees would bend and swoosh in patterns unlike any of the other trees, unlike the neem and kikar and gulmohur that lined the rest of the street. My then two year old cousin had seen nothing like this in her little life, and she ran wordlessly from the window to the back of the house, as far from the trees as she could get. When I followed her in to ask why, the only thing she would tell me was: "Naya lagta hai" (It feels new). Her mother finally coaxed out of her that she was terrified these strange tall trees would fall on the house. Her words have stayed with me all these years, that strange mixture of childish terror and the unintended depth of her words. These trees were not something to be afraid of, just something new.

I've debated with my mother several times over the last weeks why I'd rather she wasn't going so far from home. I can't articulate these fears I have for her, of her finding strange room mates or semi-psychotic classmates, the ache of long-distance heartbreak and the complications of figuring out what love and friendship and other big, strange things mean. I think she's had enough to deal with, and foolish as it is, I'd rather have her somewhere her roommate is someone sensible, like her mother. (Yes, I realize how terribly old these lines make me sound to someone like her, and how terribly young they must seem to mature mothers.) At the end of these discussions, I realize I don't really want her to not experience these things. But for me too, it feels new, to think of my kid sister grown up.

Given the distances, there is little more I can do than wish her well. And so I wish that she holds this memory of her as I do, the little child who wasn't too afraid to say something felt new. I wish her those words with new depth, to hold close to her heart if/when things seem to be too much to handle on her own. I wish her the strength to retreat into herself when needs to, but still look out the window with child-like wonder. And I wish her the faith that there are always people near when she retreats from the scary new things in the world, even if they are only in spirit.

One of these nights

"Someone to be kind to, in between the dark and light"
 
One of the more classic displays of growing older is cribbing about how things ain't how they used to be. But seriously, why does no one write lyrics like this anymore? Some of the best ways to define love and growing up in just a few phrases. Here's the rest of this one:

Catching up

"I once saw a two year old at a fair, wailing and rolling on the floor, throwing a tantrum of her life. Her mom guessed she was hungry. So, she started, “Honey, would you like a banana?” “Nooooooooooooooo”, shrieked the toddler. “Would you like apple sauce?...Would you like to have some cheese...maybe some yogurt.... how about some grapes... would you like to have some milk? Some pasta? Some french-fries? Mac and Cheese? A smoothie? A pretzel? That ice-cream over there?A nice sandwich? Some gummy bears”....
And all the while, the toddler wailed and screamed and kicked and consistently shrieked, “NOOOOOO!”

It seemed simplest to start this post as it began in my mind, with these reflections from my friend. Her words,
in the context of a different conversation with another friend, helped lay at ease several uncertain echoes in my mind. I've written of some of these here, this sudden lack of time and constant sense of being stressed out in my efforts at relaxation. These friends and others have been reminding me, in the sweetest ways possible, to stop trying to do it all. Garden, paint, write, keep a good home, work out, dress well, socialize, work, dance.. my growing list of activities that enrich and rejuvenate the soul have left me only wanting to curl up and whine for a trip home.


Home, as in India. Which I make sound idyllic when it is anything but, which more importantly, feels idyllic. I return from these trips with my soul rested and eyes refreshed, though I could never explain why. Perhaps it is as simple as my friend's observations with the two year old. India does not often give me choices. When I am hungry, there is food. When I must go out, there are a few options for clothes to wear. Rarely is a sari inappropriate, just as jeans are equally accepted (at least in the places I visit). In the absence of a million options to define myself, it is easier to find who I am.  When I can do it all and have it all, it is so much harder to find a comfortable space.

And so, I am learning to find it instead in taking the time to do less. One pot of tomatoes, one of basil. No more. Put away the weighing scale, and picked up my phone instead. Walking as I talk to a friend, counting the good memories and ignoring the calories spent. Ignoring the instructions, skipping a day of dance practice to just lie back. Saying no to contributing to a friend's blog. Eating the rice and vegetables my husband cooked for lunch. Just as satisfying and flavorful as my organic salad was yesterday.Remembering that instead of always seeking silence and time to myself, sometimes all I need is the words of friends like these.

What no-one else has

A series of minor incidents culminated in the substance of an e-mail I received last night. “You’re exceptional”, it began, then continued with a string of cumulative compliments to a group of us before ending with, “it was a tough decision, and I regret..”. As the implications of the e-mail sift through the layers of plans I’d laid out, at each level they cast a familiar echo.

I am exceptional. I am bright and talented, with international experience and a flair for language etc. I could go on for a bit like that, just as the e-mail did. But in the end, the list of adjectives ends with what is not. It fails to mention the one thing I didn’t have that someone else did.

“It’s not personal” (Yes, I know), “They don’t know what you’re capable of” (maybe they do), and “Hey, they're just saying you’re so good you didn’t need that acceptance” (No, they're saying I wasn’t accepted) are the most common rejoinders I have heard when I share this. My family is up in arms, ready to reassure my wounded ego and remind me of something I am not sure I understand- what it is I have that no-one else does.

What makes me unique must be something beyond this conglomeration of facts and compliments. I don’t know if I have an answer to what this is, or if I ever will. If there even is one such uniqueness. For now, I pick up my metaphorical pen to compose a reply. “Thank you for your kind words. And while I have your attention, could you tell me how to achieve _, and point me to resources for _?” For today, what makes me unique is only this, this capacity to reach for answers everywhere and say, “It doesn’t hurt to ask, right?” (even though it does, a little).

Exchange

When I don't speak, it does not always mean my listening is available for you.

When I listen to you, I assume you will take only as much of my attention as I give. You ask for more.

When I give you object X, I assume you will not also demand objects Y and Z.

Perhaps we should have made these rules of exchange clearer. Perhaps I should have named a higher price. Not because I think my attention is particularly priceless or in great demand. Only because I now struggle to regain what I gave thoughtlessly, assuming there was more where it came from.

Sshh

This silence of politeness and distant affection terrifies me, the way it smothers insight and voice in the mind-numbing nothingness of small talk. I feel stripped of familiarity when I hear nothing but echoes of inanity bounce around my head. This is what torture must feel like, I imagine. (cue dramatic laugh)

Forgetting the self, forgetting who I am and what I like in this listening to another's litany. All I want is to scream, to drown these voices out so I can hear my own again. Or simply hear nothing. I don't always need to listen to my own voice either. But sometimes, just sometimes, I want only to be quiet, to hear what there is to hear. And instead there is the TV, and screeching laughter, and endless chatter about what someone cooked today and why a particular kind of paper towel is better than the other.

And so I try this silent shriek. Even if I cannot hear silence perhaps I can drown out the noise. But all I am left with is a toneless arrhythmic clatter that is neither peaceful nor resolving. Even after the chatter has died and the TV is turned off, this echo of my own drowning-out screech remains. Really, all I want is a moment of quiet. To stop hearing myself scream. Perhaps this will take a moment of opening the door to let the echoes out. But I am afraid of what else might come in to take this space I guard so closely.

A little more on identity

I've wondered annoyingly long and hard at what point one stops becoming something and simply starts being it.

Some people define this in terms of education. "I have a B.E, I am an engineer."
Others define it by what they enjoy doing. "I am a singer."
And still others by relationships or circumstance. "I am a wife and mother."

For myself, the dilemma is one of both career and identity. I trained as a scientist for nearly a decade, right until I finished my Ph.D. I have written as long as I can remember. And yet, I feel like an impostor when I call myself a writer. I figured getting published would fix the insecurity. It hasn't. At what point do I stop "becoming a writer" and simply start being one?

Thinking in a quiet place

More than being troubled by the many uncertainties that come with doing grown-up things, I have been troubled by my sudden incapacity to handle them. Where is that confident child, I ask myself, searching constantly for the memory of a self-assured younger self.

Slowly, slowly, I find the answers. That self only emerges when I am quiet, truly quiet. Not just alone, but when I can watch the stillness within and without. When I can spot the symmetry of pine trees silhouetted against a sunset sky as I stand in rush hour traffic. When I remember the reflection of that symmetry in the workings of my body. Like symmetrical sand ripples marked by random waves and wind and pulls of the moon, life has a way of falling into place.

When I remember these things, I find a certain stillness, standing in a place where I know I can make things work the way I used to. Where a single quiet thought cast out, strong and sure and repeatedly, can pull the waves just as surely as the moon, despite summer storms and capricious winds.

A place of unfamiliar words

Finding writers I disagree with on how the English language *should* be used.

Discovering that in a sleep-deprived haze, I can churn out nonsense like "ask questions with questioning wonder".

And type "molecular" when I mean "molecule".

Struggling to find narrative arcs that once curved effortless as.. and what is an effortless curve? A rainbow, a moonbeam, the flight of a bird, the throw of a ball? How do I quantify what makes for great effort?

Stopping mid-sentence because I have forgotten what I wanted to say.

How did I get here, to this place of unfamiliar words? A space where bad writers tell me I am 'finally writing well', a place where I gravitate towards words that I can use to cover up a lack of substance. Where it is better that ten words are used to describe one and we like to line our sentences up in pretty matched bullet pointed columns.

"I don't write for you to read. My writing isn't meant to be a communication from me to you. It isn't meant to idealize anything or stand for anything or maybe even mean very much. It is but a fragment of a moment that changed me."

I wrote those words over fifteen years ago, and I am trying hard to fall back to them. To a place where words led me to greater insight, clarity and conviction. When I did not write by the rule of three. Or even if I did, did not cringe at the words in neat triplets. I like to think I can find my way back- to a point where I did not care who read, or who liked, or who did much of anything else with my words, without Twitter followers or blog-readers or the pressure of creating an online persona that people might like. It is a little disturbing to think that my insecure fifteen year old self had more confidence and conviction and a sense of how to use words well than the so-called adult writer who finds words unfamiliar and sometimes unpleasant.

Perhaps this is only a literary growing up, where I find not all words play well in the sandbox and learn to cross the street if I meet the nasty ones on a dark street.
And once more I leave this dangling unfinished story, an unfamiliar string of incompleteness.

Purpose

The events of the past only fall into perfect patterns when I look at them through the lens of what I want in the future. This perception is a choice. I could equally easily consider the past a random walk unconnected to the present or future.

I could consider it random and conclude there is little purpose to dreams for the future, which is going to be just as probabilistic as the past.

I could consider it random and try and identify parameters to control for the future. From personal experience, I doubt this could ever work perfectly.

And so I prefer seeing these patterns that support where I would like to go. The road ahead is long enough and hard enough without my concocting monsters or simply ignoring what has already happened. Given the odds, I might as well squeeze strength and optimism from wherever I can get it.

Rubberband

A month of not-quite:

Routine
Work
Decisions
Peace
Health
Time
Space
Dance
Food

Too much of some and not enough of others. Too much of the right kind and too little of the wrong. A month of not-quite finding balance, not-quite figuring this one out. I wish I could sit out the next month. Instead, I sneak breaks at work to take deep breaths. I take long walks at home to take deep breaths. And when I drive I watch for sky-miracles of sun ray and cloud, wait for the semi-sign of a song that plays randomly on my shuffling play list.

As if some unique conglomeration of light and shadow, some synchrony of electromagnetic impulses in my brain and my iPod could be signs that someone is, in fact, keeping the balance of the not-quites in some way I cannot fathom.