The Weight of Being a Guest

On the quiet awkwardness of waking up first in an unfamiliar house.

 

It is awkward to be suspended in the unfamiliar grammar of a strange bed, trying to read the rhythm of a house that is not my own.

Arun Kumar

It is morning, and I am suspended in the unfamiliar terrain of a strange bed, trying to read the rhythm of a house that is not my own.

Above me, a ceiling fan lazily traces circles in the shadows. Through the slatted blinds, the first silver hints of dawn begin to filter in. I am wide awake.

Next to me, J. remains lost in some distant dreamworld; a late sleeper, she will not return to the surface for at least another hour. She is rarely visited by the quiet conundrum that finds me now—this peculiar paralysis that arrives on the very first dawn of a stay in a friend's home.

In these suspended minutes, lying still beneath the sheets, I feel less like a guest and more like an intruder. I am gripped by a sudden, irrational certainty that if I rise and move, I will desecrate a sacred silence. It feels as though the objects around me—the heavy armchairs, the framed photos, the quiet floorboards—are accustomed to sleeping late, and my presence might startle them awake.

Before we retired last night, our host traced the geography of the kitchen for us, pointing out the tea, the coffee, the milk. When they asked of my morning habits and learned I am an early riser, they offered an easy benediction: “Make yourself entirely at home. Sit anywhere, do whatever you like. You won’t bother a soul.”

And I, wrapped in the easy confidence of the evening, promised I would.

But here, in the cold clarity of dawn, my evening proclamations lose their weight. Perhaps they were never anchored to begin with. Perhaps they were merely the perfunctory architecture of social grace—a courteous tête-à-tête spoken without the scaffolding of real conviction.

To step out into the hallway now feels like trespassing on the very soul of the house. I am heavy with the awareness that I do not yet belong to this space. I can almost feel the inanimate things watching me with quiet, collective curiosity, wondering who this interloper is, disturbing their peace before the day has properly begun.

A strange inversion happens when the roles are reversed.

When we are the hosts, and I am the one who wakes before our guests, my morning is spent on a gentle vigil. I find myself listening for the small stirrings of their waking, eager to ease their transition into a brand-new day. I know too well the awkwardness of navigating a new terrain, and I want to shield them from it.

On those mornings, I will make intentional, domestic noises. A soft cough, the deliberate click of a door being opened, the distinct, metallic rattle of a kettle being placed on the burner. These are not disturbances; they are acoustic flares. They are acoustic beacons sent out into the quiet hallway to let them know that someone is already awake, that the coast is clear, and that they do not have to map this strange territory entirely alone. I want to meet them at the threshold with a hot cup of coffee or tea, offering a familiar ritual to anchor a day waiting to be lived.

I know how this story ends. After a few more visits, or perhaps just a few more nights under this roof, the tension will dissolve. I will grow accustomed to the landscape, the geometry of the hallways, and the unique vocabulary of this house’s morning rituals.

But until that familiarity arrives, I choose to stay exactly where I am. I lie patiently in the dim light, listening to the house breathe, waiting for the first authentic sign that my hosts are awake—and that it is finally safe to step into the day.

Ciao, and thanks for reading.

 

When Engagement Must Be Its Own Reward

A meditation on retirement and the quiet challenge of giving oneself fully to what serves no long-term purpose.

In retirement, making peace with the thought that engagement may be its own reward is no simple task; it is a quiet discipline, and perhaps even a form of grace

Arun Kumar

Not long ago, I opened a book on brain maps with the quiet expectation of delight. Its subject seemed full of promise: the body traced within the brain, smell and sight, touch and motion each taking up their residence in the folded landscape of the brain. It seemed reasonable to imagine that whatever mattered most for survival would be granted the broadest territory there. The book held out the hope of one of those rare journeys in which knowledge does not merely inform but gently enlarges the world.

And yet what began as an interesting journey soon acquired a certain weight. Weeks would pass before I reached for the book again, and when I did, I often found myself skimming rather than reading, gliding over the pages as though some inward eagerness had quietly loosened its grip.

Part of the reason was plain enough. Once I had understood the central idea — that different bodily functions belong to different regions of the brain, and that the share of neural territory given to an activity reflects, in some deep evolutionary sense, its importance — I felt little need to linger over the finer grain of detail.

By the time I was halfway through, I had begun to suspect that a briefer telling — thirty lucid pages, perhaps — might have yielded all that I had truly come seeking.

Lately I have noticed the same rhythm with other books as well: an opening spark, then the slow dimming of the will to continue. A book I that eagerly reached for initially, begins, almost imperceptibly, to feel less like a companion than a duty I am carrying.

Because this pattern has returned with other books, I have begun to wonder whether the difficulty lies less in the books themselves than in some alteration in the conditions of my reading. More and more, I suspect the change may have something to do with time itself — or rather, with the altered concept of time in retirement.

Retirement offers a paradox of time: the long-imagined freedom of unclaimed hours, joined to a sharpened awareness of life’s finitude. I am freer than before to choose what to do, and yet that very freedom is shadowed by the question of what, in the end, such choosing comes to mean.

How does one surrender oneself wholly to play, to the simple act of being, when nothing beyond the moment is asked or promised? How does one enter deeply into an effort that raises no monument? And how are we to make peace with the spending of our energies when they do not gather into achievement, legacy, or future necessity, but seem to vanish almost as soon as they are lived?

In earlier seasons of life, much of our effort was fastened to visible outcomes — work completed, children raised, obligations met, reputations earned. Retirement loosens those bindings. What remains is a different economy, where motivation can no longer be borrowed so easily from usefulness alone. One must learn, perhaps for the first time, how to stay with an activity that does not improve one’s standing, solve an urgent problem, or offer an immediate reward. That lesson is harder than it sounds, because it asks us to trust that attention itself is meaningful.

To engage in something for its own sake sounds like beautiful advice. We are often told that engagement is its own reward. Perhaps that is true. And perhaps it becomes true only after a long apprenticeship in attention, in the patient art of learning to be fully present. For many of us, the phrase arrives worn by overuse. To internalize, and then to live by it, is another matter entirely.

We understand rewards when they arrive as praise, income, or progress. But the quieter reward of absorption — the kind that leaves behind no certificate, no promotion, no measurable gain — can feel difficult to trust, especially when the mind has been trained for decades to ask what every effort is for.

For now, I find within myself a less modest ambition: to understand the terms on which attention is still possible. Perhaps the task of retirement is not to recover the motives of youth that once propelled action, but to cultivate a different, more unhurried form of devotion — to choose a few things and remain with them, even when there is no promise that some larger purpose will declare itself.

In retirement, making peace with the thought that engagement may be its own reward is no simple task; it is a quiet discipline, and perhaps even a form of grace.

Ciao, and thanks for reading.

 

Do I Feel 68?

At 68, life feels both long and fleeting. A reflection on memory, time, age, and the mystery of what growing older means.

The numbers that mark our passage through life are precise on paper, yet inwardly they seldom settle into anything exact.

Arun Kumar

A couple of weeks ago, I turned 68. Sometime during that day, J. asked, “Do I feel 68?”

Perhaps what J. meant was not whether I felt 68 in any literal sense. The numbers that mark our passage through life are precise on paper, yet inwardly they seldom settle into anything exact. They accumulate quietly, like rings in a tree, recording time without telling us what it should feel like to stand within it. Or perhaps it was only a rhetorical question, one of those small remarks that drift into the day and leave behind an unexpectedly large echo.

The question made me look back over the 68-year arc of my life — where it began, and where it has brought me now. In one sense, it feels like a very long journey, stretching from my boyhood, through my years at Indian Institute of Technology, then onward to America and all that followed after. In another sense, it feels as though the days, months, and years have slipped past with astonishing haste, as if time, after lingering in childhood, eventually learned how to run.

Living through time can feel like walking through a hall of mirrors. Events recede, enlarge, bend out of proportion, or return unexpectedly from strange angles. What once seemed immense may now appear small and insignificant; what felt ordinary at the time may glow in memory with a significance it never announced when it first occurred. The relationship between memory and time is rarely faithful. It is impressionistic, almost dreamlike, preserving sentiment more readily than sequence.

There is still a remembrance of moving through that timeline, but the specifics have faded. The individual days of my thirteenth year on earth, no longer possess enough sharpness to be distinguished from one another. They survive not as dates, but blurred visions.

With time, memory itself becomes a blurred spectrum. What remains are recollections without timestamps: the school I attended, the evenings spent playing in the park across from our house where children my age gathered, the shy ache of a crush on someone I never quite found the courage to speak to, the bicycle rides to the vegetable market. If I reach inward, I can still draw these scenes from their slumber, though they guard their secret well and refuse to tell me the exact year or day to which they belonged.

My mind still carries these small fragments without attaching them to any particular moment in time. Perhaps that is because they were woven into the ordinary fabric of life, part of a rhythm that extended across those years between twelve and seventeen years of age. Routine, while we are living inside it, often feels unremarkable; only later do we understand that it was quietly building the emotional landscape of a life.

And yet there are certain days that remain sharply individualized in memory. September 11 is one of them. I remember the beauty of the day — the clear blue sky, the slight chill in the air hinting that winter was not too far away — the drive back in the green pickup to collect our son from school, and then the hours at home in front of the television, watching the events unfold and trying, like everyone else, to make sense of what could not yet be understood.

In general, though, stretches of time do not possess the same firmness as distances in space. A road can be measured; a year back in the past is not held with the same certainty.

By some strange distortion of time, my earlier life now feels immeasurably distant, as though it belongs not merely to another era, but almost to another self.

So now I am 68. A lifetime has already passed behind me, and I am retired now, living with a clearer awareness of mortality than I once did. At this stage, one no longer takes for granted that time will continue to unfold indefinitely.

In two years, I will be 70, and I am certain someone will ask again, perhaps half in jest and half in wonder, what it feels like to be 70. I am equally certain that I will not have a satisfactory answer then either.

And if, in the community clubhouse, I were to meet someone older than myself, I might ask in return, “Do you feel 90 now?” I would not expect an answer. There is no handbook that tells us what one is supposed to feel at 90, or 70, or 68. The question is less about information. We ask it because age is visible from the outside, but never fully knowable from within.

Answer or no answer, I am glad to be here. I am glad to be 68. I look forward to the pleasures that remain — playing pickleball, and now and then finding myself on a river cruise, watching towns drift past as time continues its patient onward march, carrying me toward 70. For now, that is enough. All I can hope is that I will still be here to hear the question--Do you feel 70?

Ciao, and thanks for reading.

 

The Vortex of Happenings

A candle burns.
Time slips.
You and I
caught in the vortex of happenings
—oblivious to death.