Tag: moment

  • Besting myself

    One of my only birthday rituals has been getting a call in the morning from an aunt and uncle, though they have been more friends than uncle/aunt. This year there was no call in the morning. I wondered what happened. I realised that our last conversation ended with me reprimanding them for calling me in the middle of a work day morning! The no-call bothered me and I thought to myself that at some point in their life, people should let go of their egos and silly sulks. The note to self was to be more conscious of the ego’s manifestations.

    At work, a colleague wrote, asking for some work to be done at the very last minute. The team was already stretched, and I wrote back curtly, reminding him that we had met for this a few weeks ago, and discussed the deliverables in advance, precisely because I wanted to avoid this! I had a feeling he would escalate this.

    My aunt called in the evening. I couldn’t pick up since I was on a call. She left a voice message. She had woken up with a migraine, and had been in bed all day. We spoke later in the evening, and bantered as usual.

    The colleague wrote back, profusely thanking us for all the help we had given him thus far. He understood that this would be tough, and he was fine with whatever we could manage, even if it was nothing.

    In the many podcasts and books I have read/heard (Jack Kornfield on the TKP podcast being the latest), the lesson is usually about the present moment. Every moment, we have a choice. To be the best version of ourselves, or not. I have had a gazillion misses, and a handful of hits. What I have learned from the latter is that there is an afterglow when we are able to be the best version. It is possible to do that without an expectation in return. In fact, it is quite selfish – such is the feeling.

    In addition to pausing ‘in the moment’, there are two tricks I read/heard to repeat this. The first (from Unwinding Anxiety) is savour the moment and update the brain on how good the feeling is. Because the brain is most likely trained on a notion of loss we might suffer if we say, let go of the ego or interest. Updating it repeatedly redirects it to a new habit formation. The second (from an episode in The Hidden Brain podcast) is also related to habit-changing. Though it was discussed in the context of more standard habits, I realised it could be tooled for this purpose as well. Buy a band or a ring, and make a covenant with yourself – of sticking to the habit you want to create. Each time you fail, switch the band/ring to the other hand.

    Besting myself, as the birthdays pile on, is possible, but it does take effort. However, I am quite sure now that it’s also a journey full of joys. Time to march with the band!

  • A momentous truth

    Joydeep Roy Bhattacharya’s “The Storyteller of Marrakesh” is not among my favourites, mostly because it didn’t deliver what I look for in  a work of fiction. But I’m a fan of it for a different reason – there is prose in it that will haunt me for a long time.

    The book’s narrator begins the tale with the statement that there is no truth, because the moment it is revealed, it is transformed into one of many possible opinions. A few pages later, he says “Our imagination spins dreams; memory hides in them. Memory releases longing; the imagination waters the rivers with rain. They feed each other.“

    In terms of memory augmentation, despite the best documentation, I’ve felt many times that there are moments that have not been captured fully, or perhaps not captured enough at all. A presence that is felt, but cannot be captured. It is humbling to realise that acts which we lay importance to, moments which we considered precious, will be forgotten altogether or remembered in a different way from what actually happened, not just by others, but by us too.

    Much later in the book, a character shares a wonderful story, “This professor while addressing a large audience on the subject of beauty, asked that a piece of ambergris be passed from hand to hand until, by the time it reached the last person at the back of the massive hall, it had crumbled away to nothing. But the entire hall smelled of ambergris, and every person there had been touched by its essence. The professor concluded his lecture at that point, stating that he had nothing more to say on the nature of beauty.”

    ..of life, I would say. The smell of ambergris would drift between memory and imagination. If someone found words to describe it, it would exist in the imagination of the reader, but probably in a much different form than it actually was. The moment was the truth, everything else would be an opinion.

    until next time, truth be told…