Caught between living and dying

Arun Kumar

 

It is the wee hours of morning and lying in bed I am thinking that sometimes it would be refreshing to wake up without needing to pass through the test of solving a crossword puzzle to figure out how to live through the day.

 

It is not a matter of just living though a day on an autopilot but living in such a way that at the end when light in the sky is fading, and I am sitting alone and the silence of evenings starts to feel like moments of being caught in a twilight zone, I can look back and say that it was a day well lived.

 

Instead, here I am half-awake thinking about the tiresome prospect of solving a crossword puzzle hoping that if I complete, magically a door to a room would open where I would find the correct recipe on how to live through a day to my satisfaction.

 

And that is not the only issue that I grapple with when the day begins. There is also the dilemma of not quite knowing how to reconcile the start and the end of a day with the cognizance of mortality, while trying to find some meaning in between.

 

Is there a way that one could live through the sequence of days and still be at ease with mortality? What could possibly be good about living through the days and realizing that afterwards there are fewer left to go?

 

And what is the meaning of living anyway?

 

I am not even sure if those are the right words that express an emotion I am trying to gel. Perhaps, what I am trying to ask, and trying to understand is that is it even possible for us to reconcile the passing of a day with the finiteness of (our) existence. How can the two stand side by side, pretend to be friends and not leave us utterly confused?

 

Is there a magical cure that can be internalized (and not be redoubted or questioned or revisited) and will make me feel at peace again.

 

But let me get back to the beginning of my day.

 

Even if I don’t quite know how to live a day and reconcile it with mortality, I think I do know about the measure that can be used to judge if my day was well spent or not. The measure is this - at the end of the day if I feel that if my engagements are connected with what I value that will be a day well spent. That will be a day I would not mind living again.

 

And perhaps, in spending a day well lived also lies the key to coming to peace with mortality. After feeling that the day was well spent, and I am serene and peaceful, I may feel a moment of connectedness with the universe. In that connectedness, perhaps, I can transcend my boundaries and hope to reconcile the eternal tension between the inevitability of the passage of time and of my mortality.

 

Perhaps one day I will find the elusive recipe and from then on I can wake up in the morning and there will not be crossword puzzles waiting to be solved.

 

One day, I will just get up, and without thinking, live.

 

Ciao.

A pier to my dreams

 

One day this pier
would take me to my dreams
even if I have to walk alone
and have to step gingerly
over the turquoise waters
or have to float
like a bird's feather
in undulating waves,
but one day,
I shall reach
that distant horizon.

We were meant to spin forever

 

And we too are walking like others before
slowly across the bridge with heavy hearts
holding words but souls ready to pour;
we who thought
were two wheels of a bicycle
and will spin forever and will break the lore. 

Bicker Masala

 

Arun Kumar

 

There is a saying that the amount of bickering between humans is inversely proportional to how high the stakes are. The lower the stakes, the more bickering.  I am not making this up. This is something known as Sayre's law.

 

The saying is generally used in the context of academia where the department politics puts politics at the world stage to shame.

 

And what is the bickering in academia for? Aiming to become the department Chair? Or perhaps a financial grant to support a graduate student and to add papers to the CV?

 

Does one think that being the department Chair gives one the power to lord over others?

 

Mind you, bickering over small things is the state of affairs among the most educated people society has to offer. These are people who hold PhD degrees (also referred to as the terminal degree) from prestigious universities. These are the people who are supposed to set an example and guide us to a higher level of consciousness and lead us common folks out from the darkness but...

 

...like the rest of us, these stalwarts of society fall prey to the same basic human instincts, one of them being the desire to be the leader of the pack.

 

In all of us, there continues to be an unshakable desire to be the alpha male and the PhD’s are no exceptions.

 

The deeply rooted desire to be the leader of the pack is the desire that served our genes well along our evolutionary trajectory. You see, the basic purpose of genes is to carry their lineage forward and traits that help achieve that, over time, evolve to become automated behavioral preferences.

 

Being an alpha male and being at the top of the pack can bring us some privileges - access to more resources (think food), access to more mating partners. These privileges have the consequence that the genes have a better chance of propagating forward.

 

We may or may not be aware, the constructs of human minds are shaped by the basic desire of genes that themselves are only self-replicating molecules that have no thinking mechanism per se.

 

But over time, parts of human consciousness have been slowly molded by the invisible hands of a potter, who without an understanding of what he is trying to create, follows the instructions from the genes.

 

The pace of social evolution has advanced at a much faster rate than the timescale on which the evolution of genes takes place, and we have not adjusted to the new paradigm of a society that is no longer a hunter gatherer. But could one ever be free of such gut level instincts that helped us during our days as hunter-gatherers, e.g., the instinctive desire to be the leader of the pack?

 

Assuming that we would not self-destruct and continue to survive as a species, given enough time would we rise about the traits that genes and natural selection promoted in the past but may no longer be required or beneficial anymore?

 

The argument that we will not change could be made based on a plausible assumption that resources are always limited, and survival and efficiency of procreation, is a fight to corner limited resources. In this fight someone would always want to be the leader of the pack, and in academic departments, there will always be a bickering to be the Chair.

 

Is there a solution? There may be one.

 

The solution is to send faculty members to one week retreat where they are reminded of their mortality. It is only when confronted with their finiteness that they will realize how futile, and petty our bickering for inconsequential outcomes is.

 

I am not being cheeky. When we wake up in the morning and remind ourselves that one day we will no longer be around, it could result in a powerful change of our perspective. That reminder has the power to be the antidote of Sayer’s law. It can make us cognizant of the fact that low stakes are just that – low - and are not worth bickering over.

 

I am positive that if everyone reminded themselves that they are mortal, this world would be a much better place.

 

Ciao.