28 Days - A Posse Ad Esse

"Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end"-

Jack Kerouac

It’s been a while since I’ve been here. And I mean that in every sense – of both word and world. It’s been a while since I’ve been back to my most basic – outside of an image I have been trying very hard to construct over the last few years. A watercolour visage of a person who fits – with people, with places with a priori performance. Career settled and casually self-effacing. This is decidedly not who I am. It never has been. I have never enjoyed company for too long, nor have I ever been able to be casual about myself, my work or my wants. I have always been inherently uncomfortable with the idea of comfort. Recently, I have felt myself lost in the camouflage because it has been oddly convincing. Enough, for me to buy into it myself... or to want to.

I presently find myself at a détente between dream and disillusionment. I miss much of my old self – before I had time for all this impromptu ‘adjusting’. I don’t read anymore. Sure, I read articles and philosophy books but I don’t delve or dive in the way I used to. I don't spend time beside my bedside before I sleep. Tragically, I now sleep mostly to the sound of the television. I haven’t touched the long novel in years. I don’t drown anymore. Since my divorce, I have been very careful not to. This detachment has led me to question my direction again... I desperately want to be one of those practical, calculating individuals who know what they want and scorch their path to success getting there. They are well adjusted and enjoy the company of friends and family. They balance work, pleasure and play and always aspire for more. This is how I see myself. This is also the polar opposite of who I am and that has finally begun to pose a problem. ‘The truth will out’ as they say, or as Cervantes puts it "The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water".

And so, I presently find myself in the process of readjusting my ‘Ikigai’ 生き甲斐 . I came to this term via a facebook meme and literally translated it means ‘a reason for being’. Put in practice in Okinawa cultures, it constitutes ‘a reason to get up in the morning’ i.e. a reason to enjoy life. It is the most fundamental of value monikers, used as a barometer for what one considers mental or spiritual stimulus that enriches their existence. Wikipedia tells me that ‘Behaviours that make one feel ikigai are not actions which individuals are forced to take – these are natural and spontaneous actions’. I suppose the ultimate goal then is for them to become subsumed as aspects of one’s personality to the point where the ‘iki’ (life) and ‘kai’ (the realisation of what one expects and hopes for) inherently complement one another. To cut to the chase – mine don’t. What I want is a centre that I have control over and can define and my actions of late have mostly involved uninterrupted hours, sometimes even days, of sleep. My time over the past year or so has been navigated between work, eat and sleep. Emphasis on the latter.

And this is what brings me back here I suppose. For the bulk of my life, when things get muddled in my mind I tend to seek clarity by meandering through the muddles in language – on paper and then pixel. It's why I need to write again I suppose, because as much as I thought turning 30 meant finally abandoning ‘childish things’ such as maudlin musings and wistful, wishful thinking about what I wanted out of myself - it appears one is never truly done with any of that. Nor should I be. Only, I hope that this time I can learn to write with a purpose. To

that end, I return ‘a posse ad esse’ (from being able to being) determined, this time around, to weave possibility into actuality.

I am opening with what can only be deemed one of pop-psychology's worst fix- its – 28 Days. Plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz devised that, generally speaking, it takes a person 21 days to coin or break a habit. Some say 18, some 32 and others 28... the idea being that a specific number allows our cognitive cowardice to locate a scapegoat and believe we can change. The routine, whatever it may be, serves as the placebo. The key is the drive that this very ‘achievable’ sounding trigger can offer and so many of us finally ‘try’. Trying is all that is really needed but having a strategy grounded in faulty logic and Anonymous inc focus groups helps one ‘trust the try’ this time around. I am ‘trusting my trying’ with the number 28, because given the variables of personality and performance - it doesn’t really matter anyway and mostly because I like how it sounds.

There are so many things to change and consequently there so many places to start. The starting itself has been a revelation. I have been particularly self- indulgent and begun re-reading Cervantes. This is my second time reading Don Quixote, the first time I read it I was 15 years old and I finished the entire novel in two days. I used to read like that back then, at a blurring pace born out of desperation in order to seek some sense of inner salvation. Often, I would read out loud to drown out the voices in my head and the toxic ones that surrounded me. I didn’t really read to drown myself or to feel but I still remember some sentences. I remember knowing that this was perhaps one of the most beautiful things I was ever likely to read, because it was naïve and kind and foolish and wise and ...Quixotic. Recently, a friend of mine faced a terrible tragedy that overturned his entire existence and in the aftermath we spent hours watching The Newsroom as some kind of pathetic temporal tranquilliser. The premise of the show rested on someone being handed a copy of Don Quixote to allow for idealism in the face of common sense.

I feel I need some of that right now and so this time, I am determined to drown. Cervantes’ passage on sleep has ironically proved to be an awakening “All I know is that while I’m asleep, I’m never afraid, and I have no hopes, no struggles, no glories — and bless the man who invented sleep, a cloak over all human thought, food that drives away hunger, water that banishes thirst, fire that heats up cold, chill that moderates passion, and, finally, universal currency with which all things can be bought, weight and balance that brings the shepherd and the king, the fool and the wise, to the same level. There’s only one bad thing about sleep, as far as I’ve ever heard, and that is that it resembles death, since there’s very little difference between a sleeping man and a corpse”.

Now that I finally find myself somewhat awake, I am resting on my second step to lead me into some kind of objective absolution. Stage two of my 28 Days involves detoxing and I was brought to this point a few months ago when I watched a video by Uruguayan ex-president Jose Mujica, whose people affectionately call him Pepe. There is so much in his words that cuts me and the worst is, I cannot identify why. I have never truly been able to ground myself in ideologies, I only ever skirt around them – occasionally dipping my feet or washing my face. I do not want to drown here - not even swim, truth be told. There are purer waters and safer shores for that. So I’m no socialist. I'm not brave enough for that. That said, I do long for a perspective out of the one I have cultivated for myself, wrought in trying to belong through my belongings. “I’m a reader – look at my overflowing bookshelves. I love music, look at my pretty playlists. I love art – can’t you see it splattered all around me?” To be clear, I don’t arrive at this point out of guilt. I enjoy the rush of purchase as much as the next person but I have discovered more and more that it is followed less and less by process. I buy something and forget to use it, far too focused on buying my next something. In that vein, I now rule for a reprieve. I am giving myself these 28 days to not buy anything new, to use everything I have and in that enterprise, hopefully re-discover how much that is. I have logged out of facebook and twitter so that I can finally find and fix time – for reading, writing, studying. I am presently applying myself to my applications and Cervantes. I've thrown in a lot of archiving – some days I take out all my shoes and clean them, remembering which ones I haven’t worn in ages; other days I do the same thing with earrings. Yesterday, I organised my make-up. It gives me the chance to re-discover and finally USE all these ‘things’ I once bought while buying into that oh-so familiar delusion that they would solidify me because they were just ‘so me’ that I had to have them. That without them it would be hard to define myself completely somehow.

Detoxing, has also meant dragging my body along in an attempt to awaken it from its long held stupor. I have gotten too comfortable with folds of fat serving as my security. Because that is what they really are. When eating one’s emotions, the goal is to ensure you don’t have to run the race. You don’t have to exist or appear for anyone else. The latter is generally a good thing. It wouldn't matter worth a damn if I was fine with the way I looked but I never have been. That only renders this cellulite crutch as the excuse I have to not bother trying. I haven’t even been able to do that properly, because I still have an audience. Only now it’s an audience into my anxiety. Anxiety I carry on my hips and my belly, layering my shoulders and weighing me down every breath each time I try to (literally) run away from it. Which is all to say, I’ve hired a trainer. Someone to push me into pushing myself.

It has been three days since I’ve been on this particular life-detox and after the initial vertigo, I now find myself finally enjoying the endless possibility. Living in the real world, as opposed to one where we are all caricatures of ourselves, has its rewards. I have bought plants and I spend my morning watering them, as opposed to staring at inspirational quotes on facebook inscribed on pictures of plants. I am taking on tasks with the express purpose of finishing them. This means that more and more post-its on my wall make it to the bin by the end of the day. Pepe says “And this is what I discovered: Either you’re happy with very little, free of all that extra luggage, because you have happiness inside, or you don’t get anywhere! I am not advocating poverty. I am advocating sobriety. But since we have invented a consumer society, the economy must constantly grow. If it fails to increase it’s a tragedy. We have invented a mountain of superfluous needs. Shopping for new, discarding the old...That’s a waste of our lives! When I buy something, when you buy something, we’re not paying money for it. You’re paying with the hours of life you had to spend earning that money. The difference is that life is one thing that money can’t buy. Life only gets shorter. And it is pitiful to waste one’s life and freedom that way.”

I am beginning to understand this better.

The idea of not locating myself in the illusion of myself. An illusion created and forever cyclically grounded in possession. We all need things but it is odd that we want to need them. I suppose this prevents us from both wanting and needing more for and from ourselves. I see myself finishing things now; reading the books I own; writing in my pretty journals; cooking rather than ordering; luxuriating in multiple cups of coffee and tea and mat'e – in slow, languid sips, like molasses. I am not planning new outfits but rummaging through my closet taking out old ones I no longer fit into and deciding to do so.

In the first book of de La Mancha, Cervantes opens with “I know who I am and who I may be, if I choose.” What’s really funny is that often the latter comes back full circle. You re-discover what you always wanted and shed the baggage of expectation like barnacles of the mind. You vanquish rose-tinted spectacles and trade them in for regular anti-glare ones.

And you realise that this is enough. It was always enough.

You just never allowed it be. 

Song

The girl with the beautiful face

is gathering olives. 

The wind, that gallant of towers, 

takes her by the waist. 

Four riders passed 

on Andalusian ponies, 

with suits of blue and green, 

with long dark cloaks. 

'Come to Cordoba, lass.'

The girl pays no heed. 

Three young bullfighters passed, 

slender of waist, 

with orange-coloured suits and 

swords of antique silver. 

'Come to Seville, lass.'

The girl pays no heed. 

When the evening became

purple, with diffused light,

a youth passed bringing 

roses and myrtle of moon. 

'Come to Granada, lass.'

And the girl pays no heed. 

The girl with the beautiful face

goes on gathering olives, 

with the grey arm of the wind 

encircling her waist.

                                    - Frederico Garcia Lorca 

(Translated from the Spanish by J.L. Gili and Stephen Spender) 

Verbage - Looking for the Librarian

“You," he said, "are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.”  Emilie Autumn

I’m a writer who cannot write.

This is a hard admission to make considering the fact that words are pretty much my only currency and comfort in this world. It is words that have saved me time and again from both myself and my feelings by opening up a sidelong segue into a blind alley of thought. And yet, it appears that words are the very things that fail me now. I find myself cornered by people who can manage and manipulate words far more efficiently and proactively than I, rendering my efficacy rather redundant.

And yet, I am rediscovering my relationship with words as I catch myself exploring newer kitsch schemes to motivate my students with their writing. I find myself writing under the influence quite often. Currently I am writing under the influence of oranges, post-run adrenaline, Sunday morning sidewalks and lingering guilt. Such alchemy forms a jittery, jarring sort of high that is rather difficult to navigate with any sort of clarity.

I am living on a university campus again, though not as a student this time around. This distinction is important, I find, because it is one I often need to remind myself exists. I feel I am finally at a stage in my life where I could let myself succeed at something. Ironically, as it happens, being surrounded by perpetually positive and self-assured people is proving to be a good thing. I have often been told that whereas most people suffer from high or low self-esteem I suffer, unequivocally from what can only be described as ‘no self esteem’. Often enough, I find it a gift. I used to think that it allowed me to take a microscope to things rather than a mere magnifying glass because I never feared the collapse of my own ego. Sadly, it also means that the things I am searching for seldom come to light. They live in a sad little laboratory, neatly labeled and bottled away from light, dust and…life.

The realization that I have been living most of my life on tomorrows and yesterdays is hankering. I suppose, in some way most people do this to some extent- live amid the flimsy glands of postponement and atonement. But I seem to have mastered it: my mind is riddled with masterful schemes and plans of my future…all doable ideas but all irrevocably marked with one lowest common denominator: tomorrow. I can almost never meet deadlines unless they are about work and this is why my writing suffers perpetually. I can never consider it work, even though a part of me recognizes like Cohen says ‘that I needed to go to work at it everyday’.

I am also living with and among people again and this is oddly exhilarating and debilitating in equal measure. I am judgmental. Did I tell you that? Or have you surmised as much by now? I judge and measure everything. I suppose the only saving grace is that I judge myself more than anyone else and certainly the harshest but my philosophical underpinnings reiterate that this is the wisest course. A course that allows me to cut through the layers of narcissism and pandering in given conversations to the core of people thereby deleting most of them out of my minds ‘to-know-list’ and yet this leads me to believe that having a refined bull-shit censor may not always be such a good thing. I have never been able to claim I am ‘fabulous’ at something or even moderately ‘talented’ or ‘smart’. Having maintained throughout my life that people who do so lack a very basic sense of scale and sensibility…after all, what does it matter how good ‘I say I am’ at anything. Doesn’t quality control and peer-review define the standard of all things? And yet, in a culture where self-aggrandizement dominates the curve and self-deprecation is no longer in fashion, I am perpetually struggling with my sense of both selves. I am a narcissist who is perpetually humble - it is the worst sort of contradiction to live with because one can’t luxuriate in the superiority of either.

Currently, I am enjoying the long-forgotten sensation of having a crush. It is rather refreshing because amid all my confusion and paranoia it has allowed me to construct a fantasy around someone else other than myself for a change. I enjoy crushes, mostly because I am acutely aware of their limitations. I never get involved and religiously avoid the subject of the crush because it destroys the illusion, which is the whole point of having a crush really. I am spending a disproportionate amount of my evenings at the LUMS Jammin Java café reading David Foster Wallace and subtly spying on someone else reading something else. It is comfortable. I always maintain that the easiest way to cure a crush is to speak with the subject. The same is often true of relationships as well.

I suppose my downward spiral began three days after I shifted to my new apartment. At the time, I was alone and neither of my flat mates had arrived. I was perfectly giddy about all my New Year changes and suddenly one silly, Saturday evening I found myself over-estimating my coping capabilities and decided to Google my ex. Suffice it to say, that Googling your ex is always, always, Always a bad idea. We all tend to operate on myths of closure and then we construct waiting periods, coping periods, healing periods and getting-back-out-there periods for relationships purely because we need all experiences to be time-bound. This allows us a construct to move in and on from. In truth, there is no real science to moving on and how one does it but I can unequivocally say that discovering how much better your former half is doing without you is not one of them. Even if the same is equally true for you.

I am working hard this month, this particular February, on being less afraid. Afraid of wanting things I feel I don’t deserve. Afraid of being more than I currently am and afraid of not being who I may regret not becoming at some point in the near future. Wading through ennui is disconcerting but necessary at a point in one’s life where the precipice isn’t so much about discovering who you are anymore but rather about being comfortable with who you are or revising the status quo. Sometimes I feel I was born afraid and then I recognize that this isn’t the case…I see pictures of myself as a child, cheeky and facile and I realize that I am no longer the person that child could have grown up to be. Instead I am this mass, mess of floundering feeling encased in frost and humor. It’s a sickening realization.

One of my friends recently told me that perhaps I needed to ‘start at the beginning’.

Burning bridges and looking back. I have never really ‘looked back’, it’s not how I’m…built. And yet, for the past few days the temptation has been alarmingly great. Perhaps it’s because there are no good films to watch and I can’t seem to read at the same pace I once could. So at present, I am merely letting my fingers clap at keys with my mind numb. According to Sean Connery in Finding Forrester, it sometimes serves the purpose of beginning an actual thought. Just ….typing. I am working - surprisingly hard - at creating a moment at present and I have never had to work at it before. The music selection is sublime for scaring up some sentiment: unhealthy dealings of Dylan, Cohen and the occasional Joni Mitchell.  There are also culinary conduits…cheese and wine, no going wrong there. I’ve even painted after years…I’ve scribbled thoughts and yet for a change I want to be nakedly honest and I am afraid that is too scary. I want to write out something that isn’t pretty, poised and poignant…or forever attempting to be. I want to write something visceral, brutal, hurtful…to lash out at all the fucking assholes who have stomped over me simply because I was stupidly considerate enough to not stop them doing so. It is no life-altering recognition acknowledging that one is a pushover after 30 years or having been one, however it is alarming to discover that one has lost the ability to side-step the default position carved out to stick into.

It’s a cruel fallacy folded in flawed familiarity.

Sometimes I wish it were still a noble aspiration to be a librarian. To be satisfied merely being a keeper of books without needing to be a great reader or writer. Do you ever feel that? Watching some garish, sappy romantic comedy where a single, happy, healthy female protagonist lives in some ridiculously romantic setting running a book store…isn’t it sublime…until she recognizes her life still isn’t complete because she’s single. Sadly, I can’t even aspire to being a book-store manager in Pakistan because my education dooms me to far more lofty aspirations but I wish I could move away and live in a rinky-dink town someday running a bookstore…not one of those Barnes & Nobles, Borders behemoths but a tiny nook-in-the-corner shop, with old musty smells and tight corners one could hide away into. Just enough customers to keep you going but not enough to keep you well.

I wish I had just enough ambition to allow me to write one book and no more. I have been told that it is only the first book that belongs to an author, everything that follows is tainted by expectation…someone else’s expectation. I now know that my book will be about the books I have read and the person they have made me. My only consistent companions in life and my only solace, the only geniuses who do not judge me and in whose company I feel secure and not stunted. Each chapter an o’mage to a novel shaping a person into another person and searching for all the ‘something missing-s’ to fill that layer of a character.

I have my first sentences:

This is a book about …other books. Better books. This is a book that will shamelessly borrow and covert the best turns of phrases, plagiarize the most sibilant philosophies and romanticize the un-romantic. This book is borrowed from all the books that have written it because She borrowed from all that she read.

They say write what you know. Well I am a reader…that is really all I know I know. I am hoping, once again, that it will be words that will bring me out of this mess if only I would have the courage, conviction and dedication to keep writing them. I am perversely inspired by DT Max’s eulogy for Wallace in The New Yorker, published a few years after his death in September 2012, he said “…What all these residua of his life have in common is that they are testaments to Wallace’s belief in the power of words. Even when things were at their worst, as, sadly, they often were for him, David was writing; if not poems, then fiction. If not fiction, then letters. He used words to wound, words to heal, words to persuade, words to enchant. But in the end, despite their potency—never more compelling than in his hands—these symbolic representations of thought and feeling couldn’t save David: not from his mental disease or from his ambition to be more than just another remarkable writer… So today, on the anniversary of his death, on September 12, 2008, it seems right to echo the narrator of his late, brilliant suicide story, “Good Old Neon,” on a copy of which he annotated, “Ghosts talking to us all the time—but we think their voices are our own thoughts,” and end, as he did, with: “Not another word.”

One would think that this would put me off from telling my own stories - perhaps equally sordid- but it doesn’t. If anything, wherever, I am. Words are always good company and I could use more of them. I could construct some kind of meaning in and about myself through them and I have always needed ‘meaning’ more than anything else in this world.

Wallace once said that “The purpose of fiction is to combat loneliness” and yet it has been ages since I have read a novel. It used to be the only thing I was once capable of doing. I would even dream in voice-over dialogues because the words were always prettier than people. Come to think of it that still hasn’t changed. And I am lonely. Comfortably lonely.

That is finally beginning to scare me.         






 

Così fan tutte : Remember, Remember the 5th of November

It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them.”   

-DH Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

I find myself flummoxed by life at present. It is an odd place to find oneself in, especially seeing as it’s November and this has traditionally been my month to wind down, consume inordinate amounts of coffee and listen to disproportionate dealings of Dylan. I reserve my annual existential crises for this particular season but my personal and professional clocks seem to have miscalculated my gestation period this year. There is just way too much to do and this means that my self-prescribed procrastination must be held at bay and I am making do with small snippets of existential angst as I drive to work each morning.

Mind you, I am not depressed. I have never thrown about that word as casually as most people do, whenever things fail to go their way. Having battled with genuine depression, I can generally distinguish between melodrama, the odd funk and full blown-out doldrums. I suppose this current state is best categorized as a rather portent blend of aggressive ennui. I am finding that ennui makes me pretentious. It has got me listening to Opera again. And, for those of you who haven’t tried it, it is a particularly nocuous negotiation listening to Puccini or Beethoven in Pakistan. The magnanimity of the score coupled with the surreal gritty road-side-miseries somehow render poverty poignant without meaning to. It is the most uncomfortable mingling of opposites that I can think of and that is perhaps why I find it all heartbreakingly beautiful.

My current playlist includes Massinet’s Meditations; the more robust Ode to Joy and when I am feeling particularly vindictive…Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Wagner, in particular, should come with a warning label and an R-rating. Beware: Contents are liable to cause overflow of latent phobias and passive-aggressive angst. I can trace all this back to four days ago, as I casually sifted through my mail to stumble upon my divorce papers. Ordinarily, I should be glad seeing as I have hardly given my misnomer-of-a-marriage much thought over the past few months, devoting most of my energies towards overcoming it with politically-incorrect pizzazz. Still, there is an odd power to a piece of paper, formally drafted in a language you cannot comprehend announcing your freedom from your biggest mistake. I spent the first two hours pretending I hadn’t seen the papers; another two hours rejoicing over them and the next few days trapped in a miasma of ‘what ifs’. Not about the decision to get divorced so much as the repercussions of having put my emotions on the line and realizing that I should have stuck with my original instincts and kept to my own company.

A friend recently visited my house and upon seeing my room whimsically remarked “Wow, your room seems really well-inhabited”. It was one of those odd, offhand, too-precisely observed comments that one cannot help but deflect with humor in the moment. My room has –for the most part- been my periphery planet. When I was ten, it was another room with ten years of being locked from the outside. The last ten years have meant a perverse sort of decadent independence but it didn’t change the fact that I still located my life within a room, this one locked from the inside.  I suppose, it all boils down to a Stockholm Syndrome conflation of being imprisoned and eventually learning to enjoy it. Both prisons lead to a locked door regardless of whether or not it is of ones own choosing. That is the odd place I find myself in right now, negotiating between being a person I wish I was –one that I now find I am rather good at affecting – and the person that I am. The former has friends and the latter resides in a cocoon of literature, music, films and sonnets composed to a conglomerate of fictions that require no justification. I have always been one of those people who lacks balance. I can ‘act’ balanced better than most people I know purely because I am all too aware of how vulnerable my innards are on this score.

That is perhaps, why, my new job may just end up saving me. For the first time, I am bound by contract to interact with other people… in droves. And while, people are still not my primary choice of company, they are no longer the last on the list either. Armed with self-deprecation, I think I can deflect any particularly pointed judgments thrown my way. My pathological fear of people is amplified a thousand-fold as a teacher, especially as I recall how my friends and I used to mock our own teachers. Setting them apart as a different species, flawed, formidable and frivolous - infuriatingly peppered with the presumptuousness that they were capable of ‘teaching’ us anything. So I hope that laughing my way through two hours and overt obsequiousness will make my students ‘not-hate’ me. And then there is also the charm of being on a campus again. University campuses provide an odd moratorium on both life and reality. Places where learning is contagious and there is no warranty on the watershed of ideas. I wish I could tell my students that this is the only time in life that they will get to do this, have big ideas and not have them belittled; think big thoughts and believe them to be big enough; make friends and keep them. I have recently taken to walking on campus after wrapping up my classes with my headphones plugged in and listening to the closing act of Swan Lake. Now THAT is November at its best, coupled with the occasional chili prawns from the cafeteria soaked in just the right consistency of unpalatable grease; grading that unicorn-ian brilliant essay plopped onto a cushion in my office, toes basking in my uggs with a steaming cup of coffee.

That is how I stumbled upon Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte, K588 day before yesterday. The Italian opera buffa literally means ‘Thus Do They all’ (or The School for Lovers) with the latter libretto penned by Lorenzo Da Ponte. Technically, the title means ‘Thus do all Women” and the music was scored to try and capture the duality of women, sung by men who could never comprehend them. I’ve been listening to it on loop and while my mind has trouble agreeing with the intonation of all the silly things women are meant to symbolize, my heart cannot help but melt at Mozart’s rendering. Especially given the fact that the man in question generally fell far below the standards of what anyone would consider a gentleman. It is almost as if a Lost Boy, perhaps even Pan himself, composed a song for a girl and lacked the courage to play it. I can relate, especially, because I am finally meeting and mingling with women and ironically, not loathing the experience. As someone, who has generally found it difficult to cultivate friendships with my own sex, it is a relief to scratch some very brittle surfaces only to discover kindred souls struggling with the same emotional see-saws.  I have been trying to incorporate these people in my life on a semi-regular basis and it has proven to be a fruitful but formidable task. This is perhaps the best of any worlds I have ever experienced. I hesitate to call it so, but it is almost a state of grace: Aloneness…with options.

While I am enjoying the company immensely, I know myself well enough to recognise that I will never enjoy it enough to submerse myself in it completely. I have and always will be one of those ‘periphery-friends’. You know, the ones people remember as an afterthought

‘Whatever happened to her?

Where is she these days?”

I will never be someone’s somebody because I can’t reciprocate that need. That isn’t to say I don’t ever feel such a need. It is an appealing thought, this theory of having ‘your person’ in the world: pro-choice, at your beck and call to complete your sentences, thoughts and blanks. My failing lies in a fatuous self-love cloaked (or cloaking / have never been able to really figure out which) as self-loathing. I somewhat relish the romantic table scraps of being that girl who is hard to forget but even harder to remember.

Bricoleur Du Dimanche : Of Sacred Spaces

“The Guide says there is an art to flying,” said Ford, “or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss"

                                                                       - Douglas Adams, ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’

I’ve never really considered my life in the context of time and space before. For the most part, I tend to view existence as a series of consequences and my reactions to them. These days, however, I find myself seriously contemplating the subtle dynamics of the time-space continuum…not so much in commonly contrived trekkie terminology involving cylindrical beams of light, rather as my own personal bubble of actions, reactions and timing. If I think about it hard enough, I can easily divide the past ten years of my life into alterative spikes and pitfalls on a sonogram. I’ve peaked in some years and plummeted in others.

I wouldn’t exactly call it a balance but it helps keep perspective. I am presently enjoying the idea of a personal reboot. Every time I find myself facing a large group of people sitting and listening to me speak (and not falling asleep), it is a colossal validation of …something I can’t quite capture anywhere else in my life. It feels rather powerful and I suppose that is somewhat perverse. I never really saw myself as a teacher before, mostly because I haven’t really considered anything I know worth teaching. Still, it is proving to be an odd form of release …almost as if one is able to forgo personal ambition without experiencing guilt. There is a colossal sense of relief in this, given that I was never much good at self-actualization.  Teaching offers up the chance to feel ambition on behalf of other people, wanting, even craving their success without having to worry too much about ones’ own anymore.

It is the least selfish I have ever felt.

It is also the most free I have ever felt.

I find myself suddenly absolved of the weight of ‘perfection in possibility’ leaving behind simply…possibility. I am finally contemplating writing my novel and just writing in general because I am no longer terrified of not being good enough to meet my own standards. I am finally willing to let others judge me and I am able to not collapse under their criticism. I suppose that is the greatest lesson I could have learned in the last year and it seems to finally be sinking in somewhat.

More recently I find myself contemplating sacred spaces. Crusty crevices marked in my day that I cannot quite capture but that might prove golden if only I could hold on to them long enough to let them be born. As it is, they are mere figments, conceived and aborted during my breakfast coffee or as I return to my office from class. I find all my good ideas, gentle hopes, idle quests melt away into one giant sieve of ‘wanting’. I’m not quite sure what it is I want anymore but I do feel that I am finally in that particular personal time-space continuum that relishes moving forward. I suppose it was a long time coming. Do you have that? That sweeping knowledge that you managed to think at least a dozen epic thoughts before lunch but that they’ve all dissolved by dinner? In Sanskrit they call it Bhrantapratavakavakya, the room into which we go on putting our hopes and dreams and desires. I can’t help thinking that at some point, it is beyond time we started looking for a key to the door, rather than an extended lease that allows us to add on more space to its piling proportions. Perhaps carpe diem is the order of the day

…or at least this day.

I have discovered that my car is a sacred space: all the in-between mandatory conversations I need to have with myself cloaked in the midst of music, traffic and idle stalkers on the road. I’ve always loved driving. The hellish traffic of Lahore; the familiar streets and the perfunctory juice waala’s at chowks are a constant source of pithy inspiration, idly composed tweets and wry smiles. Driving allows me sanctimonious security shrouded in the illusion of momentum. Even if I’m only moving forward in a circle that always leads back to the same place. I find that I do some of my best thinking while dodging motorcyclists and navigating traffic, listening to Rafi and stopping for nimboo-naaryal at Hussain Chowk. It is why I love this city - when the weather is right; the traffic optimally erratic and the playlist particularly profound, one is able to tap into a personal frequency that is never accessible amid the complacency of home. Of to-do lists, to-go places, to-meet people and to-eat foods. It’s a composite of colour and alive-ness that cannot really be captured in words properly, so I will stop trying. But it is there. And it is sacred.

Another sacred space, I am discovering, is the toilet seat. Funny how little credit we give our personal thrones as if it is somehow improper to acknowledge that our brains tend to function and philosophize at their best when our bowels are moving in the opposite direction. My own bathroom is its own odd little oasis. The rickety exhaust fan window opens sounds to a completely different world. From the servant quarters of my neighbours’ house below I can often hear the voice of Isa Khelvi and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan wafting through. Other times I can hear the tail ends of Bollywood film one-liners, the old ones, mixed in with snippets of crowded conversation that tells of a too large family crammed into a too small room. So far I’ve archived one-liners from Bobby, Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar, Chandni and on several occasions Namakhalal and Sholay. Sometimes I can smell parathas and other times I can hear potent Punjabi swearing. I know, for example, that ‘chote saab’ is a ‘chootya’ and ‘Shauki’ (one of the children) is a climber, given the number of times his mother says ‘Abe Haram Deya, fer taun deevar tappan laga e. Khasma noo Khaa, Shauki, thalle aa’. The intensity of developing mystery that is my neighbours’ household staff waxes and wanes depending on how boring my bathroom book is.

A new space I am discovering is the class room. I find myself trying to empathize and emphasize with and for my students in equal measure. To make them have fun but not too much fun. To make them ask questions but not too many questions. To teach them what I feel they ought to know and to resist teaching them what ‘I know’ instead. It’s self deprecation meets self actualization. But I know I am enjoying it more than I ever enjoyed anything else. I crave the adrenaline of entering a room full of people every day and not knowing for a split-second before I open the door if my voice will fail me. I love the sheer star burst of relief and ideas that follows when it doesn’t. There is a word in Japanese, Ikigai, that the people of the island Okinawa derived to mean ‘a reason to get up in the morning’. I understand it a little now. This is not to say that I feel ‘teaching’ is my calling or something. I’m so far, not sure I am any good at it and a part of me will always seek a self soaked in words. But it is, so far, my best use of words.

Perhaps I am one of those cobblers that the French call bricoleur du dimanche, an ingénue with an undiscovered calling who starts building always without clear plans, always adding bits on the fly.

A flight risk, with a purpose that can only be sustained when there is a pitfall in sight.

A glitch with a chip on her shoulder but a smile on her face.

A cobbler, whittling together the prefect pair of shoes, improvising madly each time the heel collapses and she finds herself stumble.