Category: Life

I doubt if we can salvage anything of this year. And what a surreal year it has been. This is probably the closest humanity has ever come to a shared condition across all the continents. And, oddly, it is also something that shows how differently we experience the same thing.

The anxiety that I used to experience in a period of months is now experienced in a single day. I am surprised how resilient we are, to live with that every day and still plod on. But, I also fear that it is not an endless rope and some of us are just hanging on by a thread.

But, do we have any other choice?

The anxiety aside, I don’t have a lot to complain about. There are a few material things that I desire, but not as a burning desire. I will get some or most of them if I can continue like this for a while longer. But, I don’t feel the lack of those things as a big hole in my life.

On the non-material end, the story is the same. I can desire a few things, but they don’t represent a burning desire. Contrary to the material, I don’t feel I’ll get some or any of them; mostly because I can’t bring myself to invest time or effort into getting them. I have gone as far as I want to go on that front.

It is mostly a feeling of being done, having enough, done enough, and seen enough. If life were to end today, I would not have many complaints at all. I would go without much trouble.

That leaves things mostly transactional on the table. Which, for a person like me, has been a revelation as to how much I am okay with it. It boils down quantifiable steps, outcomes, and expectations. All of them are habits and you can fly on autopilot there once you measure them out.

Life has an infinite capacity to surprise. And I am surprised by how I have taken to this life. It is definitely not a place that I had expected to find myself in. If we have to go back to a world that has a lot of interaction with people, I am not sure how well I’ll take to it.

One of my earliest memories after having accomplished something in my adult life while living on my own, that I had cherished for a long time, was an absolute lack of triumph. That feeling, though totally unexpected, has stayed with me for the rest of my life.

At the end of nearly 43-years of life, and having seen and done all that I have, that feeling is the most persistent one. This partly drives the lack of the burning desire. I know what is waiting for me when I get someplace.

Guilt has been my constant life companion, mostly of not being good enough on so many different fronts. Somewhere in the last couple of years, I have let that go too. I still feel that as a huge void as it has been the driving force of a lot of my life.

Not having it around makes me feel a lot less alive, but it is a decent trade-off. I make mistakes as much as I used to do earlier, maybe even more than I used to. When the realisation strikes, I apologize genuinely, try to make amends and move on.

Where does that leave life? The feeling of being alive? I find that ocassionally while being alone. There is not a set framework for it. Sometimes, it is music, sitting at night by the warm light. The chores done for the day, the accomplishment of having made it another day and my people are all OK.

The gratefulness of having that is about when I have consistently felt alive. That there is some point to so much of this rubbish.

For now, it will have to be just that. As what used to make my heart sing, the mountains, are far far away right now. If I ever make it back to them again.

What is the right way to look at death?

Avoid thinking entirely about it, and it will take you by surprise one day; and in a really bad way.

Think about it all the time, and all of life starts to revolve around it. You stop living, in a manner of speaking.

The last 8-months have been almost entirely the latter for me. Everything is measured through its prism. It is not a good way to live.

Logically, I know how this works. All these thoughts does not prevent it when the time comes. No amount of preparation helps you cope with losing anyone that is close.

But, right now, it is not something that I am able to internalize.

The past couple of months have been a running battle. There is no point in denying it or trying to wrap it in flowery words. It has been a case of pushing relentlessly at a wall that almost never budges. And it kind of caught me unawares as the chaos that preceded it at least helped me be prepared for this.

I have not always carried responsibility with a great deal of comfort. Some people do that with a great deal of grace. I am clumsy-by-default and often struggle with being responsible for anyone else other than me. Yet, as I am given to doing often in life with things I am not good at, I have kind of brute-forced my way into being acceptably bat at it.

Even so, the changed life from the past 6-months just provided an entirely different take on it all. The greatest hit this impact it had on my life was the near-eradication of reasonable amounts of time that could be allocated to just taking some time off to reflect and talk to myself.

And those two things are my greatest centering mechanisms and without them it is just gets increasingly difficult to have clear view of where I am headed within myself. And it is still not there in place at all.

This is just a first crack at acknowledging it in words.

I spent a good five-minutes of my time wondering what could be the right title for this post, than wonder what to write about in the first place. Well, it has been that kind of a time.

There is normally the end-of-the-year or the beginning-of-the-year kind of posts that I end up writing. This time, there has been none. The passing of the year that ended was barely noticed.

Time is just another of the many recurring details. One that makes itself felt in a body that no longer can handle the heaps of abuse thrown at it all that well. And in the list of things to be done that never end.

In that, there is never enough time.

If you don’t pay enough attention to it, it becomes the norm to not pay enough attention to yourself. There are many wonderful ways to spend time on yourself, but not really spend any of that listening to yourself.

Sometimes, the helplessness is overwhelming. There seems to be little agency left in life; which, I know, is a tad melodramatic, considering I still live a very blessed life.

That being the case, I do wonder if things will ever go back to a time again when things did not seem like a churning. Of the waves, the tides and the shore that seems a bit more distant each day.

Over the years I have become far less enthusiastic about conversations with others that require me to speak about myself, while I am more than happy to have conversations about things other than myself. The odd exceptions do exist, but even there I find the urge weakening.

I used to be someone who used to be really fascinated with people and what makes them tick. Age has more or less eradicated that fascination. It is really difficult, even with someone you know closely, who they are and what makes them who they are. What we think we see in a person is what we want to see.

Often, my perception and the reality of a person can be on two different galaxies. It has kind of settled down into a hazy zone where the important criterion is if that person matters to me.

That said, life being in a phase where there is precious little time for all this analysis makes this all slightly irrelevant. I could make the time if I really wanted to, but I don’t want to speak about myself and I do hear a lot about others on a regular basis.

Life itself continues to fascinate me. Where I find myself has no connection with where I thought I would be, even as recently as 5-years-ago. This car kind of drives itself, my hand on the steering is mostly my own imagination. That used to be a scary thought. Now it is mostly ‘meh’.

Snaking through episodes of utterly blinding trust, different shades of a permanent loss and the overall uncertainty of the times, a rare pause becomes a deafening wall of silence the world passively enforces otherwise.

Loud sounds eventually become only a persistent ringing in silence.

Couple of days ago, I was listening to a talk, that about 200000 people die every day on this planet, while another 250000 are born within that same time period.

It would be easy to assume that of the first lot, most would not have wanted to die, yet they died. Of the others who lived, it would be safe to assume at least a part want to die because they feel miserable in life. Of the lot that are born, none would have done anything to decide they wanted to be born that way.

It is tremendously empowering to realize that we have so little control of our lives. We may take all the precautions we want to, eat safe, live safe, travel safe, but there is always yet another way to die that we would not have accounted for.

And it is just a simple luck of the draw that we did not die today. And that same logic holds for tomorrow and they many tomorrows to come after that. So much of planning, so much of worrying; and yet, all it takes is just a small change in the universe for it all to go wrong.

Couple of days ago, something really struck me, that most problems are mostly fine with me, as long as they are problems I can do something about. Of course, I would love to have no problems in life, but you will always have problems to solve if you live.

Problems that have possible solutions are far better than problems that don’t have solutions. You just have to bear them, see the ones close to you suffer with no possible way out of the suffering.

Compared to that, problems that have solutions are just equations that need to be solved. Those are better; any given day.