Finding Meaning Amidst Endless Whys
Every once in a while I feel 'why am I even doing this'. Over and over again I realise there's not one answer that could be as satisfying and certain as I seek. So I move on…
Contents
Swathi’s Life Sized Essays
Amidst The Endless Whys
Song and Art
Book Suggestion
Poem
Swathi’s Life Sized Essays
A year ago, I didn’t know who Swathi was. She was a girl whom I followed on Instagram. Had read some of her writings before.
A year later she’s one the best friends I’ve ever had. I look upto her. And the amount of changes learning to meditate and grasping the intended meaning of ancient knowledge has brought in her is unreal. That’s a story for another time, and you’d probably read or hear it from her in the time to come. For now, she’s been tidying a lot of stuff up – in life, in the mind, her creative writing. In that movement, she deleted all her previous Instagram posts and started afresh. She’s been writing small but life sized essays.
Read them on her Instagram writing profile.
Sharing one here:
Little Tara opened her sleep soaked, crusty eyes to the bright yellow lightbulb flickering over her head.
Tara hated the sight of that bulb. It lent a dull, gloomy hue to the entire room and made her feel even more unwell than she already was. Tara’s Aai called it the jaundice bulb. Aai switched it on only when their usual white tube light was broken.
Tara squinted at the Jaundice Bulb. It was right over her head, glowing bright this time around, as if mocking her swollen face. She winced, not knowing if it was the Mumps hurting her face or the Jaundice Bulb dulling her spirit. “Aaai, come here na” she yelled out to her mother.
Aai shuffled out of the kitchen, sweat soaked from rolling out chapatis in the sweltering Bombay heat. “Kay re Banku?” (What do you want Banku)
Tara smiled. She always smiled when her Aai referred to her by her odd childhood nickname. Aai thought that Banku is wincing. The mumps turned Tara’s beautiful smile into a grimace.
“Aai, please switch off this Jaundice Bulb na. I hate it.”
“Banku beta, the tubelight needs fixing. You close your eyes and rest. Pretend that it’s not here.”
Tara rolled over on the bed in anger, her tiny six year old frame looking even more fragile in the light of the Jaundice Bulb.
Hours passed by as Tara drifted in and out of sleep and dreams, unsure of where a dream ended and where reality began. She also dreamt of the Jaundice bulb laughing at her twice-as-chubby face. But she vehemently believed that it wasn’t a dream; who is to know anyway.
When Tara opened her eyes in the middle of the night, escaping a painkiller induced nightmare, she saw the prettiest sight by the Jaundice Bulb. A glass-wing butterfly was fluttering about the flickering light.
Aai must have forgotten to shut all the windows that evening, she thought to herself. Everyone was fast asleep. She could hear Baba snore.
She quietly lay awake there, watching the gorgeous butterfly settle by the side of the flickering yellow bulb. She vowed to get Baba to buy a few more of these bulbs, as soon as she felt better.
And just like that, it was not a Jaundice Bulb anymore.
Amdist The Endless Whys
There are moments which are restful. That's all that matters.
Binny, who’s been the biggest supporter of my efforts in life, is a friend and college batchmate. We silently walked back to our hostel rooms together after we got our first job. We were not excited. We were kind of relieved. We had gotten jobs we thought we didn’t deserve, because we were surprised we had gotten them. We haven’t talked much, but from what I could gather, we both have an itch of finding meaning in the things we do. It gets very difficult to get that out of the day job. We both make things by the side in our efforts to find that meaning.
Lately he sent me the latest Paul Graham essay. It’s a big one. I spent 2 hours reading it. Paul Graham is the founder of the largest seed money startup accelerator called Y Combinator. In his past life he hacked on and invented a way for regular people to make websites and set up e commerce stores, without knowing how to code, through his company Viaweb, which Yahoo finally bought in late 90s. Think today’s Wix, Tumblr, Wordpress and the like. It all started with his company’s vision.
In the essay Paul walks the reader through what he worked upon in life. From going to and abandoning the top Art schools in the world, painting for a living, to writing programming books for money on the side, to starting up a company so that he wouldn’t have the fear of going broke again, to inventing one of the first successful novel ways to let users make their own websites without coding. From his essay —
One morning as I was lying on this mattress I had an idea that made me sit up like a capital L. What if we ran the software on the server, and let users control it by clicking on links? Then we'd never have to write anything to run on users' computers. We could generate the sites on the same server we'd serve them from. Users wouldn't need anything more than a browser.
If you decide to read the essay, skim over the technical details if you don’t understand them. I want you to reach to the end of the essay, after you’ve read all of the rest of its contents. The last paragraph reads:
Now that I could write essays again, I wrote a bunch about topics I'd had stacked up. I kept writing essays through 2020, but I also started to think about other things I could work on. How should I choose what to do? Well, how had I chosen what to work on in the past? I wrote an essay for myself to answer that question, and I was surprised how long and messy the answer turned out to be. If this surprised me, who'd lived it, then I thought perhaps it would be interesting to other people, and encouraging to those with similarly messy lives. So I wrote a more detailed version for others to read, and this is the last sentence of it.
When I started reading the essay, I saw a gazillion rays of hope to my constant lack of satisfaction with whatever I did. I said to myself “There you go! I’m young, I’ve the privilege to try things out, I’ll get there eventually, like he did. Look at how random of things he chose in life and where they lead him to.”
Then I read the last line and I recounted the conversation I had with my flatmate just a day before. We had discussed about how every desire, no matter how beneficial it’s implementation / manifestation would be to the world, just keeps pulling us outwards. That hit like a storm in the head, when I read the last lines of Paul’s essay. He’s still looking out for what to do. It’s not a bad thing. But in his writing I sensed a bizarre fear of that continous never ending search to find what to do next – something meaningful.
Lately I’ve been going easy on myself. It has been freeing. Reading the essay’s last lines reinforced that. I work but don’t get worked up. I make efforts to make change, but also give room for something to not work, so that I recognise it early on and move onto other avenues.
Song And Art
What’s cool about this video is that they have a separate web page ( open in google chrome ) where you can use the whole graphic that you see in the YouTube video as a canvas and colour it! It’s exciting to me because it might have taken tough work to code this functionality up. Go play and have fun.
Book Suggestion
The Body Myth by Rhea Mukherjee
Poem
This is one of my favourite poems of all time. It doesn’t matter if one does not understand what it’s trying to say. If it feels good to read, it’s good enough. I read this poem in Poetry magazine’s April 2013 print issue. The issue was gifted by one of my most unlikeliest of friends. I could relate to the last two lines a lot. Have a read:
Once, I
— Jane Hirshfield
Once, I
was seven Spanish bullocks in a high meadow,
sleepy and nameless.
As-ifness strange to myself, but complete.
Light on the neck-nape
of time
as two wings of one starling,
or lovers so happy
neither needs think of the other.
That’s it!
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