Bits and bobs

You know those times when you realise that you were wrong about fundamental things? It's a strange sensation. I think the mind takes time to adjust to it. Instead of acclimatizing and evolving ways by which it can deal with the situation, the brain goes in to overdrive. I don't know if it's always the case, but mine starts sprouting bits and bob of popular culture and oft-heard adages. 

"The best laid plans of mice and men..."..."I tried my best, but I guess my best wasn't good enough.."... "What doesn't kill you makes you stoooongerrr...", etc. 

It's like a constant cacophony inside your head, with things you always knew coming back to haunt you and tell you that you've gone and put your foot in it this time. The corny song verses are the worst, yurgh. They even come with the accompanying bars of music. After a point, you realise you need to tune out, or slowly go mad. 

Here’s to them

Of the long talks and the longer walks,

The gut-busting laughs and nasty on-dits,

The jokes that only they understood.

Here’s to love, the sort that surely must

Have engendered envy; the sort that

Sometimes is surprising is even allowed.

Here’s to happiness, sorrow, anger, lust;

Extremes, always, hardly tempered,

Hardly neutral.

Here’s to what was – here’s to what seemed

Eternal.

Here’s to the good times, the bad times, even the worst of times,

But always times,

Always tangible, like live wires, like electricity;

Never dull, never placid

Or painstakingly normal.

Things that make you question.

You can be in the middle of the most mundane, routine, regular day when an existential crisis hits you. Often, it's the strange, small things that make you question the validity of the life you live, or the work you do, the routine you have chosen to control you. This is all despite having made a conscious decision to adhere to that routine and disregard all the rhetoric on how you should give up your city job and chase your dreams all the way to Tuscany, on the back of a handsome, leather-jacket-clad stranger's bike :)

Small things, indeed, like a routine survey that questions if you feel content in the workplace and if it aligns with your long-term plans for life. Or like an in-the-middle-of-the-rush moment when you find yourself staring out of the windows of the city's tallest buildings, looking down at Colombo's twinkling lights and wondering how you ended up becoming something you had one day vowed you would never become.

Maybe "crisis" is too strong a word -- I think I'll stick to "wonderings," although, of course, that is not a word, per se :)

Thoughts over tea

Have been meeting some different types recently, due to some new developments in life. Quite a few of them work in NGOs and research organizations -- the horrors that well-heeled corporates shudder at. Low pay! Humanitarian aid! Run! :)

One of these is a tiny young woman who's currently involved in community rehabilitation in Jaffna. She sat across us at the table in that ragged canteen as we, a motley group of 20-somethings from weird and wonderful walks of life, discussed life, love and, well, boys, over hot tea and helapa. I freaking love helapa. She told us about her work in the North and about how words can barely express how beautiful the land is, and how interesting and open the people are. She's wiry and energetic and as she spoke with her hands flying and her eyes glittering (seriously), you could see how excited she was about it, how enthralled by the sheer awesomeness of the life she's living.

While a part of me was truly envious that you could be so in love with what you do, a part of me was fascinated -- what is it like to be so passionate about something? 

Fresh-faced

Still hope there
Still dreams allowed,
Seems a while since
That was a thing
To be.

I am cuckoo alone.

These few days...I have been feeling mildly psychotic. Psychotic not in terms of actual psychosis but in the sense that I feel my being is being slowly pulled in two dozen different directions at the same time, each requiring a specific, measured, and urgent amount of energy and success to be achieved. This feels like some noxious by-product of growing up and turning adult, and doing all the things "you're supposed to do."

Through it all, however, I have come to the happy conclusion that not only can you please everybody, including, very much, yourself, you also cannot count on everyone being as understanding about your not meeting expectations as YOU would be, were they in the same circumstances. All that 'be kind because everyone is fighting a harder plan' biz seems to be a bunkum in real life. I suppose it's more difficult to acclimatize to the fact when you generally make an effort to be "the understanding friend."

Also, success has suddenly become an internally-measured factor. Yes, let's just all open up about it -- for the greater part of our lives, success is as how the world sees you --parents, teachers, peers. If they are successful enough in inculcating their well-meaning ideas of how successful you should be, soon you absorb it in to your world view..and voila! Le stress!

Sometimes I wonder how some people balance. Especially those super mom types with irritating husbands and crying children and nagging in-laws and let's-meet-up-for-high-tea-at-Galle-Face-Hotel lady friends. I suppose they have learned the lesson of how to achieve enough inner peace and calm to manage life and all its madness. To think I used to laugh at folk who used that cliched phrase, "24 hours in not enough." Now I don't know if I wish there were more than 24 hours or if I'm glad because the requisite hours of rest allow everyone to shut their traps, including my inner psycho goddess. Who I'm sure is gorgeous and well-educated, but can turn in to a raving lunatic in constant PMS mood sometimes.

"My friend, thou art good and cautious and wise; nay, thou art perfect, and I, too, speak with with thee wisely and cautiously. And yet I am mad. But I mask my madness. I would be mad alone."

The Madman, Khalil Gibran.

Ispot on, old chap.

A long post by an indecisive individual

Decisions -- they make us. They take us to where we are going. And often if we have a real problem with the way Life has turned out, or the hand Life has dealt us, or the way People possibly view us, it's good to just look at decisions, because there you'll find your answers and an admonishment for blaming Life and Other People. I admire people who are decisive. They seem to be the type of individuals who go through life with so much grit, always knowing which way they are going (though not always sure if that is the right way). They make choices fully aware that these may screw them up -- but they don't, because they make them with real conviction. Never half-baked ideas or "OK let's try it like this this time." They waver, but momentarily; purpose follows them like a puppy with an affection complex "pant, pant, here I am, I'm cute, pick me up." :P

How do these people do it? I find myself floundering over the slightest thing, and worst of all, making decisions and then thinking "well, I'm sure that was for the best anyway," when the choice seems like the easy way out, the path already trodden by a million different others, the boring choice, the safe choice that's completely normal and expected. You see, there's nothing wrong with the choice, but it's just so not-happening. In The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, a book that got under my skin in several ways and made me think about my life (not in the most pleasant way), the protagonist Tony Webster talks about how he had lived a perfectly acceptable and "peaceable" life-time...but how little he had made happen in his life. The whole narrative seemed to me like a eulogy for settling, ordinary decisions, and mediocrity more than anything else.

How decisions mould us, though. Makes you think about the series of events that has led to this point of life and time, and what could have been (to be avoided at all costs), who is in your life and who has had to leave it, who you have cut out for various reasons. But that's change, and another story all together. But I do, I do admire people who can make spot decisions, who do not think that OK is all right, and that maybe that could be done next week...because the thing we do not realise is that this particular moment in time is never, ever coming back again. This chance is critical in that the ripples this stone's-throw cause can be caused by no other stone thrown at any other angle. I wish I was like that. Instead, life for me seems to be a series of "maybe-next-times", something that can get tiresome when you're not tired enough to think of nothing.

“What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels? One whose self-rebukes never really inflicted pain?"

All these thoughts, however, come on the back of a really good day, so the vagaries of life is another thing to think about. Brings to mind what my mother had recently said to a friend who had hinted at the futility of life; that, in the words of Lord Buddha, nothing is permanent -- not the good times, nor the bad.