On happiness

I came across this article in the Independent yesterday. It intrigued me. Partly because I was having a miserable evening, and in the middle of something like that, I'll pick up and try anything that presents itself, claiming an answer.

The title is a bit odd: 'How to be happy: Gretchen Rubin's guide to everyday contentment'.

Are they the same thing? Some of the happiest times in my life (like now) have been the least comfortable, and I certainly have not been 'content'. I've been walking, climbing, scratching at walls, clambering under thorny thickets (like now).

So I view her lists as guides to comfort rather than 'happiness' (the way I define the term), and when I see it like that, I can bring myself to try.

It made a difference. In the middle of an uncomfortable time, to follow her 'one hour' list:

1. Go for a short walk, or pace: Pacing makes me nervous. So I wrapped up and went for a walk in the sun to get some curry from the curryman at the Saturday market (sold out. Grrr.)

2. Reach out to friends: Check. I sent emails and skype messages and asked my mum to ring.

3. Rid yourself of a nagging task: I am the queen of nagging task drama. It's absurd. I am shortly to send off a scanned ticket to someone who's been expecting it for 2 months. I haven't sent it yet because although the ticket is lying on top of my scanner which is lying 1 foot away from my hands, there's a pile on papers on top of the scanner. Yep. That's all that stopped me.

4. Clear your desk - As soon as I finish this post. So that I can clear away the papers on top of the scanner...

5. Lay the groundwork for future fun: Done. I'm going to a garden some way outside town tomorrow - I checked opening hours and bus routes and planned my boots.

6. Act happy: I remember being told this by a favourite aunt when I was 10 and miserable. I still have not managed to take this advice. But yes - if you can't help the big thing that is eating you, and there's plenty else to grin about, fine, I'll grin.

:)

Bloody Hell.

I am.
We are.

Without the first, the second can never be.
With the first, the second can never become.

Whoever designed relationships, hearts, heartlessness and romantic love up in heaven (or further south - much further south) - could you please release Version 2.0 (with the same man, of course)?
Many thanks.

To be in love, rather than just outside of it, peering in.
Language is deadening and hopelessly clumsy, sure. But underneath clodhopper words that trample across white spaces, there is something sharp and crystalline.
To be in love is to recall the touch of a lovers skin, sitting here in the office, and to be transported in a lightsecond to yesterday (or tonight!), so that you are no longer in the office, the phone is not ringing, the last few weeks and months of thinking suddenly dissolve and that was not the security guard who just locked you in. Fuck.

To be better. To feel better. To know better.
To know how.
To know why it seems so important.

To see and to understand. To be able to read the world and love it.
And above all: To see if there is anything beyond that "grey rain curtain" and if there is, to fly towards it, arms outstretched, smiling, and with no regrets.

These are things that seem to give one wings when one thinks about them. And yet each step seems slow and excruciating. Each drop of understanding fragile and hardwon and always ready to be undone. And each time one pauses, one sees ones feet more tired, more bloody, than when one started out. One seems further than when one started out. And yet there is no choice but to go on.

Sometimes I wish I could just Topshop and go to the cinema and make out and buy shoes and find that enough. But I cannot. Those things make me smile, of course and give me some lightness. But they don't fill this huge yawning hole that seems to stretch wider every day, full of more questions and never any real answers.

The things that really keep me up at night

Who am I?
Who are we?
Why are we?
Why am I here?
If not me, is there someone else?

How long do we have to find out?

*run on a continual loop until dawn, when to the sound of seagulls awaking, I finally fall asleep.

The perfect excuse for bad blogging:
The more eloquently I can describe my life, the more distanced I am from the chaotic ambiguity that I love most about it.

But on a different note, here's the thing:
I've always thought that I love the ambiguity.
I'm discovering that I don't love it unconditionally, by any means.

Perhaps I'm not as immune to conditioning as I'd hoped. Isn't the whole point of the human enterprise to remove ambiguity? From the scale of the couple to the scale of the civilisation, 'success' means that we've locked things down and then systematically removed each and every question mark.
Put up a wall between the civilised and the Wild everything-else.
Definition. Understanding. Prediction. Control.
Engineered Perfection with low probability for disaster or despair.
Isn't that what we try to do, from the lone soul to the species?

And so it is that all of a sudden I find myself asking the Man: Seriously, what is going to become of us. Until I know for sure, I can't be Sure. And if I'm not sure, I can't be here.

To take what at first was the only limitless thing in my life, and then try to wrestle it to the ground with deadlines and contracts: Whose fault will it be when I can no longer fly? And will I mind when I wake up and realise what I've done?

Things are changing:

When a person leaves, I now say goodbye, without bitterness.
I used to take it very personally. Of course, this does not apply to all people. But the exceptions I can count on the fingers of one hand.
When I want to leave, I now say goodbye, without sadness. (And the number of people who'd try to stop me I can count on the fingers of one hand.)

Comes with practice - years and years of practice. But this is a good place to be.

There are only three certainties

With so many question marks, it is easy to miss the exclamation points.
They are, in no particular order -

The Man loves me. I love him.
My parents love me. I love them.
Home is beautiful. And I am here, in my other home, by choice and it was the right choice and I know it.

And there is someone smoking outside my window and I can smell it and I am back in a quitting phase and that ashy smoky fragrance is not helping matters.

Postcard

Back from three weeks in India.
Surreal trip. Have you ever had the sensation that looking at everything around you, you wanted to draw a giant question mark over it all?

How long does my father really have?
What Will Happen After?
Where I will live.
The fractured horizon over the river - on one side, glass-fronted skyscrappers and on the other, homes made of mud and plastic. A dead river in between. Airbrushed adverts of glossy couples sheltering mothers nursing their babies on the pavement. Everything becoming gloss and polish, surfaces and screens, where there used to be old trees and carved buildings. Shops where there used to be markets. Empty coffee shops where we used to stand amongst crowds pushing and shoving to eat a vada-pav.
Why? How? What can I do?
When Mumbai finally eats up the mangrove, where will those little fishing boats go?
How long does Pasha have?
How long does my Mother have? Will we meet again? (Yes, we will, won't we?)
If I don't buy this dresss or that blouse or those shoes, will that woman or those slum-dwellers have more, will a green field somewhere stay green?
What can I buy the woman who has helped raise me for 28 years and slept on an army camper bed in my sisters' room every night and washed our dishes and our clothes and made our breakfast and woken us up early to study for our exams and held us when we scrapped our knees and slapped us when we said something rude or thoughtless, harder than our own parents would ever think of doing?
Where will I live?
How long does my father have?
What will happen after?

All day, all night, these images, the question mark superimposed.

Kama: Impure love, with expectation. The opposite of Bhakti. But playful, immersed in the bliss and the horror of everything, feeling it all, desiring peace, not desiring it to end, dancing on the edge of the precipice, wanting flight, but also wanting the freefall.

That is the word for it.

Where's German when you need it.

I need to find a word for:
Looking at a sunny day laced with fractal clouds in the softest blue sky and hearing the wind blow and feeling ecstasy and despair, both at once. Feeling immense and infinite possibilities and feeling the ultimate futility of any possible path. Open and closed. Dancing on the edge of something incredibly deep, but staying hypnotised by surfaces.
What's the word for this?
I don't know.

But I do know a great little device for stopping it all feeling so fraught:
Cigarettes.

Sigh.

I am scared (oh, like hell) of getting cancer.
Cigarettes are carcinogenic.
I am scared of cigarettes.
You'd think.


Two Marlboro Lights were hurt during the writing of this post.
May my cravings rest in peace.

Summer, 2010.

I live a quiet life these days. You wouldn't guess it, looking at me running up the hill, laptop, coffee and several notebooks in hand. You wouldn't think it, seeing me screeching with laughter with a colleague at the bar after he's finished work and I've decided to break for a beer. We stand around in the sun sometimes and just roar. One beer down, and I can roar pretty damn loud. You would be forgiven, listening in on conversations with my mother, that Drama is my middle name: The Man did this today! He said that!! He bought me this! I hate this! I hate that! I love this! I want this! Ad infinitum.

But those are just the odd notes.
The spaces in between are intensely quiet, intensely peaceful, intensely alone.
I think. I write. I stare at the sun-dried grass outside the window, dotted with yellow and pink wildflowers. I listen to doves cooing on the window sill and crickets chiming away the long afternoon. I read.
The silence is golden.
The solitude is golden.
In between, there are intense flashes of memory: A piece of fieldwork. A fight I had when I was talking to the Man longdistance from a village somewhere and I had a mad idea to run away right there and then, lose myself in the middle of trackless dusty little villages. The touch of a strangers hand on my arm as he explained some vitally important point about irrigation. The point was vital enough that he touched me. The touch was vital enough that I forgot the point and still cannot remember it. The sound of neem trees and clinking glasses and Suttar drinking - no, slurping - his tea.
Inside all of these memories there is data that has to be written up, analysed and re-analysed, sharp recollections and soft ones that need to be remembered and re-remembered and a life, apparently, to be lived in the here and now. Bills, washing, laundry, insistent emails from my sister asking me if she should or should not order dinner, halfway across the world in Mumbai (No, she should save some money and cook herself.)

I've often wondered what people meant when they said that a piece of research can suck you in.
I'm not just sucked in, I'm several feet under, trying to grow a pair of gills so I can stay there longer.
But I am no mermaid, and sometimes I need to come up for air. And the beer at the bar or the Mans' mandolin, which he has taken to playing every evening, are just about as much sound and Outside as I can stand.

.

Here is a thought that I've been having again and again, almost intrusively, for the past few months:

Life. Is. Too. Short.

It's strange that the immediate catalyst for this (entirely mundane) realisation was the onset of spring. That's usually the time when I become so immersed in the annual renewal that I am positive down to the my bones.
Not this year.
This year, I've been catching glimpses of old people getting off busses, their knees creaking, their eyes dimmed, the grasp of their hands weak, their understanding of this new, fast, hard world sometimes incomplete. And it floods me with pain to think h0w quickly that happens. 70 years, 80 years, 85...
I've been thinking of all the things I want to do, want to see. All the things I want to be. All the things I don't even know I want yet. All the things to love, to hate, to know, to change, to touch, to learn. All the bigness, the vastness, the deepness of the world.
It seems impossibly crazy that we're given One life. And it's a short one. And we're given an instinctive hold on it. A desire to keep it going. How brutal.
It seems as though inside everything that is beautiful, wildly moving or worth learning there's the incessant ticking of a clock that never stops. A sadness. A knowledge that this lovely friend, our time here, is moving always further and further away, until one day she is gone.

I was on the phone to my mother today and I told her what I'd been mulling over in my head, again and again all through spring, and now summer.
She laughed, and reminded me that she'd turned 60 this year, and that I was too young to be thinking like this, I should go out and kiss the Man and enjoy the sun and forget everything else.
But I really can't. I feel a new sense of urgency, of mad attachment to this one, wild, precious life. And a breathless desire to make it stay, keep it around longer, hold on tight.

Hmm.

In all the great stories we're told, it's the calm ones who have the happiest endings. The ones who swallow their poison with a straight face. The ones who never want things for themselves and who, having been denied chances at happiness, smile sadly and shrug.

Having never been such a person, having never had the strength to do this, preferring instead to lock myself in a room for a time when things do not go my way and simply scream and cry and make no attempt at a straight face when my heart is twisting inside me, does this mean I will not have a happy ending?

Wow, I really can't shake off the maudlin-panna right now.

Note to Self

Dear Desire, dear Lust, dear Need. Dear Ambition, dear Curiosity, dear Angst, dearest Fury, dearest Rage:

Please, please come down. You're going to get me killed.

Much love,
Tara.

Number 62.

I use the busride to think. Mostly maudlin bullshit. Faux profound. But still.
This afternoon, on the 62, I thought again:

Attachment,
Non-attachment.
Desire is pain.
Desire is beautiful.
How to reconcile these?

How to be utterly non-attached, but still entwined in the beauty of his cheekbones? How to feel the throbbing pulsating Utter connection I feel when my mother holds me? How to feel, like I sometimes do, like flinging myself across the earth, arms outstretched, hugging the mud and the roots of trees?
I love it here.
I love the ones who're with me. And some that have passed. How to feel them across that divide except through my awful Missing?

How to be an environmentalist, to care, to feel pain, to scream, if I am non-attached?

And yet, how to be peaceful?
When every desire, every beauty, every thing is transient, fleeting.

I have to learn how to look that in the eye.
I can't, yet.

Eureka.

The reason I jump, too fast:
I believe:
If anyone should break my heart, it should be me. Not circumstance nor callous people.

I should stop doing this.
Other people - save one, and he is long gone, now - have been far more careful with my heart than I have ever been with it.
I throw it up into the air and forget to catch it.
I box it when it gets strong enough to soar.
I push it when it wants pulled. Open it when it wants closed.
Reopen healed wounds and leave them bleeding, disgusted.

Only I do this, no one else does it to me.
I really, really should stop.

This isn't really an ahha! moment though. I've known these things for years now.
And still, I do it.
Thornbird, etc.

Love, what else.

Now should have a million names,
one for each of the infinite directions.
And we should marry them all off:
paired, at last, they'd stop screaming and fighting
get bored
make love
sleep.
And I'd have some peace, at last.

But that's not what I really want, or I'd have it, by now.

Last night I wrote my wedding vows in my head. Silently, in the kitchen, while the Man was upstairs being sick with a stomach bug. They spilled out, in the space between the bean plants on the window sill and the kitchen counter. I had a light blue ceramic bowl in my hands, full of bright red soup.
I imagined saying them very softly, underneath the mango tree at home. I imagined the grass on the lawn. The softly cobalt sky. I looked straight into his eyes, and said, I love you. I love you. I love you. And I promise I will never stop.
I tried to change the never. Superstitious. Unholy word. Awful, if you break a never promise. The word is hurled back at you and it shatters into your face - You promised you would never...
But I couldn't change it.
A tear pricked the corner of my eye, and I said, out loud, Wow! Sentimental ass!
But the tear always wins, and it rolled down my cheek, fast, and into the soup.
He ate it, and I didn't tell him.
He has absolutely everything now.
Which terrifies me. I keep trying to change it. But I couldn't.

Weather, inside, weather outside.

... it is exactly 00:00 as I start to write this.
Is it today, tomorrow, or yesterday?

U2 is playing One Step Closer To Knowing. That song is my prayer, this week, this month, for the rest of my thesis. For the rest of my life?

Yesterday, I dreamt that something had happened - a volcano, a storm, a something big - and the sky was overcast and rusty red. Deep red and extremely heavy - like nothingness, as described by someone or the other.
Everyone was told to stay inside. My best friend was there, and the man, and my mother and father.
Suddenly, I had a mad impulse, and said, oh screw this! I'm going outside! And I stepped outside under the nothingness-sky, and looked up, and it started to rain gentle, star-bright, slow raindrops. I closed my eyes and smiled.
When I awoke, it was dawn, and the sky was overcast, and red, and I had nothing planned for the day. So I awoke the man, and we went outside, and stood in the park and closed our eyes as it rained gentle, star-bright, slow raindrops.

I opened my eyes, and didn't know whether I was dreaming the same dream again, awake, or still inside last night.

Back in the house now, and the sky is dark, and lightning is forking across the sky, and U2 is forking lightning through me as it throbs on my speakers.