I paused to take one final stock of the room. When I looked out of the window, I could see the mezzanine balcony. I doubt he had stood there, looking at it as I did. From his vantage point on the bed, he’d have seen the far wall. Photos, an album of life. I sat for a while on the bed, looking at a suitcase that wrapped up the last remnants of a life.
But one day, years after the convergence has begun, you cannot only sense the inward trajectory of the walls, you can begin to see the terminal point in the offing even as the terrain that remains before you begins to shrink at an accelerating pace.
…the three infirmities amount to the same sentence: the narrowing of life at the far tip of the diamond. Step by step, the stomping grounds of these friends had shrunk from the world itself, to their country, to their county, to their home, and finally to a single room where, blinded, breathless, forgetful, they are destined to end their days. Though Abacus had no infirmities to speak of yet, his world too was shrinking. He too had watched as the outer limits of his life had narrowed from the world at large, to the island of Manhattan, to that book-lined office in which he awaited with a philosophical resignation the closing of the finger and thumb.
The Lincoln Highway, Amor Towles
In the second half of my life, I am now able to visualise this a lot more easily. There is something bittersweet about this. Like when I give away clothes. I am sometimes forced to pause for a minute because a particular tee would trigger memories of a different time. A different me. And by giving it away it is almost as though that part of me is now beyond retrieval.
Later, when I got home, I looked around. The contents of our life, now. I’m sure all of it is subject to change. Home is after all a construct of the past, present, and future.. Things that point us to the past and helps us remember it as we grow older. Things that point us to the future, and help us visualise it the way we are imagining it now. And things that point us today to our self image. The things we possess, and the things that possess us. What would happen when they all start shrinking? As we clutch what we can remember of the past, struggle to imagine what can change in the future, and watch our self image shrinking? I suspect that is how the physical space too starts shrinking. Or maybe it works both ways.
As I think about that suitcase now, and the remains of a lifetime, I wonder if he would have liked them to be in ‘the foreign object‘, a part of his happier days, which I had appropriated a decade later. I have no idea what will happen to the latter when I am gone. A cross-section of a life that no one needs to remember. And it makes me wonder as I look around again, all of these possessions which seemingly give our life meaning now, only have that meaning when we are around.
Maybe it’s a 40s thing, or maybe it’s just me projecting my top-of-the-mind thought on to others, but these days, ‘the place to retire to’ is a recurring theme in many conversations with friends. Once upon a time, in line with Pico Iyer’s “Home is not just the place where you happen to be born. It’s the place where you become yourself”, Bangalore was an obvious choice. A few years ago, Cochin got back into the consideration set, as I veered more towards who I was than what my self image was. The mind and its narratives.
During a recent trip to Cochin, when a classmate described my school-self to D, I had a moment straight out of a Kazuo Ishiguro book. He is one of my favourite writers, and at least two of his books feature narrators with flawed memory constructions. In the books, it is fascinating to watch the peeling of reality against the narrator’s reconstructions. Ishiguro is kind, and usually brings the narrator down gently. In my case, I was first shocked to realise how I was like one of his narrators, and then pleasantly surprised at how my friend remembered me. Maybe he was being kind. But this isn’t the first time. When a similar recollection about me had happened with one of our other classmates during a reunion a few years ago, I had brushed it off as his false narrative. Because my own perception of who I was then was different. But after this, I realised that this was the key to Cochin behaving like a magnet!
In Capital, Rana Dasgupta wrote – ‘when one becomes homesick, it is not a place that one seeks, but oneself, back in time.’ Despite my conscious mind’s narrative constructions, my subconscious probably remembers it more accurately. It remembers someone whose sense of humour did not have the cynicism that an adult life gifted it. Someone whose whistling skills seemed like magic to his friends because it was not self-conscious. Maybe, by pulling me back to a place, the mind believes it can also pull me back to a time and a self that was happy with itself. That him who I was.
And maybe it’s not just that. Before I left Cochin, I made it a point to visit an old hangout. An aunt’s home. My mother’s cousin, whose granddaughters were roughly my age, but insisted on calling me ammava (uncle) especially in public. My memories of that place and my aunt, and these I am sure of because there are physical spaces that could testify to it, are ones I cherish and am deeply grateful for. The place and the person brought a sense of warmth and security to a teen life that was troubled by loss, and a mind that did not even realise it was unmoored. I see the afternoons and evenings I have spent there as an incomparable act of kindness. A refuge from the world at large.
So maybe what drags me back to Cochin is a little more than who I was. It is also about those around me at a certain stage of my life. The friends who made me feel special. The people who made me feel secure. And places that are so deeply etched in my memory that it would be impossible to feel lost even now. Even as I realise that the places and people may no longer be around and that this construct is one that fits the current idea that I have of myself, I also think that somehow the mind will conspire to project an environment that can anchor me.
P.S. As I began writing this, I had an intense sense of deja-vu. Very meta. I had gone through these thoughts before, I was sure. And indeed I had. That is somehow reassuring.
My surname is very unobtrusive. It is present in all my official documents. It’s absent in my signature, and when I am casually giving my name in say, a form, I stop at my middle name, which exists courtesy Kerala’s matrilineal ethos. The surname’s modest behaviour is apt for the person it represents.
Erich Fromm’s Fear of Freedom (1941) has been my favourite read this year. The book was largely meant as an explanation for the rise of Nazism, but by tracing historical patterns of man’s interaction with society, it ended providing some fantastic perspectives on the self. Specifically, man’s contradictory needs of wanting to conform and wanting to be free. As Fromm points out, across ages, we have attained a variety of ‘freedom from’ (nature’s whims, Church etc) but have also systematically discouraged the expression of emotions, our spontaneity.
He lives in a world to which he has lost genuine relatedness and in which everybody and everything has been instrumentalised, where he has become a part of the machine he has built. He thinks, feels and wills what he us supposed to think, feel and will; in this very process he loses his self upon which all genuine security of a free individual must be built…
By conforming with the expectations of others, by not being different, these doubts about one’s own identity are silenced and a certain security is gained. However the price paid is high. Giving up spontaneity and individuality results in a thwarting of life.
Fromm explains how spontaneous activity is the means by which we can attain “freedom to”. This is positive freedom.
Spontaneous activity is the one way in which man can overcome the terror of aloneness without sacrificing the integrity of his self; for in the spontaneous realisation of his self, man unites himself anew with the world – with man, nature and himself.
The inability to act spontaneously, to express what one genuinely feels and thinks, and the resulting necessity to present a pseudo self to others and oneself, are the root of the feeling of inferiority and weakness.
Somewhere in all this, I sensed the indirect presence of a favourite topic – the abundance mindset. Specifically, in the idea of spontaneity. In my immediate circle, I know three people who are quite spontaneous. Interestingly, they also share an abundance mindset. Yes, correlation, not causation. But maybe…
Let me unpack the connections. One reason to not be spontaneous is conformism. But I have never really been a conformist. (I have recently figured out the probable reason, but that’s a different story.) However, there is a wrinkle, perhaps best explained by this:
If loneliness is to be defined as a desire for intimacy, then included within that is the need to express oneself and to be heard, to share thoughts, experiences and feelings. Intimacy can’t exist if the participants aren’t willing to make themselves known, to be revealed. But gauging the levels is tricky. Either you don’t communicate enough and remain concealed from other people, or you risk rejection by exposing too much altogether: the minor and major hurts, the tedious obsessions, the abscesses and cataracts of need and shame and longing. My own decision had been to clam up, though sometimes I longed to grab someone’s arm and blurt the whole thing out, to pull an Ondine, to open everything for inspection.
To refuse scrutiny is to dodge the possibility of rejection, though also the possibility of acceptance, the balm of love.
The Lonely City, Olivia Laing
I’m still working out the paradox, but while I am nonconformist in most things, I also avoid getting judged. It doesn’t help that I am shy and introverted. My trade-off has been similar to Laing. Rather than conform, I clam up, as a shield against judgement. But it also means that I am forgoing chances of a genuine connection beyond a handful of close friends, and yes, this blog. Clamming up and spontaneity don’t mix well.
“…to be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.”
There’s another factor that works against my being spontaneous – a scarcity mindset. My reaction to it, instinctively to begin with, and by design later, was to create predictability by planning my life. Or, in the insightful way that Khaled Hosseini has framed it,
But I had a plan for spontaneity. My thinking was that by making many things routine (clothes, diet, finances) etc, I can use choice avoidance to have the space and the mind space to be spontaneous. (read) But the extreme is a bad place to be, and in my case, I not only became a slave to routine, but also got upset if it didn’t happen in a certain way. As it goes, the neurons that wire together, fire together, and over a period of time, it also led me to seek efficiency in everything.The instrumentalisation of life, in Fromm’s words. Also, the crowding out of spontaneity.
Before we get to possible solutions, a few reasons I need to solve this. At a human level, the combination of non-conformity and the slavery to routine and efficiency is practically a fool-proof way to push people away! Also, the uncertainty in things around us is only rising. Trying to have a plan that covers everything is just hubris. As a species, we will have to draw upon the innate strength that got us here – adaptability. And finally, there is philosophy
People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
Joseph Campbell
So what’s a possible fix? In Atomic Habits, James Clear argues that we can behave in a certain way until we get to the mindset. Intuitively, and from experience, that seems relatively easier than theoretically changing a scarcity mindset. If one isn’t blessed enough to have an abundance mindset, maybe behaving like one does – spontaneity to begin with, will get one there. So, if spontaneity is the behaviour change, I have to go oxymoronic – force myself to be spontaneous! In other words, use my nonconformism to unlock the ‘freedom to’ be spontaneous. Hopefully, its positive results will temporarily override shyness, introversion and the desire for efficiency, and an abundance mindset might find a way in. The first baby step is to watch myself when killing spontaneity. I also have another clue. Money is a factor that has a disproportionate influence on my mind, and I have discovered that when something doesn’t make a dent there, I am more amenable to spontaneity, and joy.
At a daily level, to quote from this fantastic read on happiness, “any neuroscience article will tell you that the “reward centre” of the brain – the nucleus accumbens – monitors actual reward minus predicted reward.” In my efficiency play, I will have predictable happiness, which will get normalised to practically zero happiness over time. I have found a couple of ways to engineer prediction error – one is not to plan the minutiae of travel, and the second is to spend more time with people who are spontaneous. Or as Venkatesh Rao puts it, ‘differently free people’, in this fantastic post. The good news is that I have three readily available ones and I am now ‘awake’ enough to spot others when I find them. Predictable unpredictability!
Thus the idea is to go from choice avoidance based on efficiency to choice avoidance based on the freedom to be. As Venkat so brilliantly put it, “Detachment does not mean you don’t care what happens. It just means you don’t care whether a specific thing happens or not.” I have solved it in terms of conformity (freedom from) I now need to solve for spontaneity (freedom to). To live for an in-the-moment version of the want in Hosseini’s quote.
After a failed exchange plan, I gave our TV to the apartment security guy. I had thought it would be an upgrade for him, but it turned out he had no TV at home, and therefore no clue what to do with it. I suggested talking to the cable guy in his neighbourhood, but the next day he gleefully announced that his daughter had connected it to the mobile and they were now watching YouTube. I told him about data charges but overall, the issue was resolved.
Them
Around the same time, D got a call from a relative in Kerala about her daughter joining a college in Bangalore. She wanted to know if we knew about the college, and also check how far we were from it. We were especially far away, and I wondered why they didn’t use Google Maps since all relevant locations were known to them. Later, it turned out that they even visited Bangalore to get the hostel sorted and apparently went right back because classes had not begun and any stay in the hostel would involve extra charges! This time I wondered why they didn’t use the phone to call ahead and ask the college before setting out! I found it especially surprising because the girl’s brother claimed to regularly shop from Amazon! I automatically compared these two kids to the security guy’s daughter, roughly the same age. Did staying in Bangalore provide a kind of ‘tech privilege’, or was it a mindset?
Us
We also have a few friends in their 40s who have settled abroad. A conversation about waiting times for doctors in Europe led to a quality of life comparison. We have now spent close to two decades in Bangalore, and never really made any attempts to settle elsewhere. I remember how in my 20s, my mindset was that we’d be second class citizens anywhere else in the world. I also didn’t want to move far away from Kerala, though this was at a time when culture – food, movies etc – wasn’t as portable as it is today. Traffic notwithstanding, I really like Bangalore and wouldn’t trade places, but the 40s are when you face your “what ifs” head on, and ideally get some closure! But I digress.
The discussion made me wonder how an objective observer would evaluate our decision to not move abroad. I think we could have easily done it in our 30s if we had decided to, especially given we had no procreation plans. And yet we didn’t really consider it or even have a serious discussion about it. Arguably, the quality of life in at least some parts of the West is better, and so, would that observer think of it as an opportunity wasted? And think of us the same way I thought of D’s relatives – not using the access they had to ‘unlock’ information and opportunities?
Everyone
The concept, of course, is bounded rationality – the idea that rationality is limited when individuals make decisions, and under these limitations, rational individuals will select a decision that is satisfactory rather than optimal. Satisficing vs optimising. But what I am realising now are a couple of things. One, it is practically impossible to be objective about it. I continued to rationalise even as I wrote about our domicile non-decision! And it’s not just for the self after time has passed – it’s a moving target because one evolves. Not stepping into the same river twice and all that. It is also for others about whom one can be relatively more objective. Funny how I expect them to optimise when I don’t always do it in my personal life. Yet another reason to stay from being judgmental about others, and self! And two, the increasing levels of satisficing that happens as one grows older. Interestingly, I automatically compartmentalise work and life and am an optimiser in the former. But in personal contexts, it’s a struggle because there are two opposing mindsets – “growth happens at the end of your comfort zone” vs “you do you”. And I can’t even say do what you’re comfortable with because that’s clearly in the comfort zone. Maybe a better framing is “what makes me feel alive”.
