Musings

I recently started reading some poetry by the famous Chilean, Pablo Neruda (Nobel prize in literature - 1971). Its called El libro de las preguntas (the book of questions) and was given to me by someone who knows me very well, better than I would even admit at times.

The publication’s introduction by William O’ Daly, immediately grabbed my attention, as it referred to things like ‘revisiting the deep well of perpetuity’, ‘radical trust in the quest to know himself’, ‘by vocation seeks the roots of belonging’, ‘beyond rehearsed patterns of thinking and feeling’, ‘when we run in place’, ‘what we learned was forgotten so that we might learn it again’, and ‘only he can rightly accuse himself of being many men, of never knowing “who I am, / nor how many I am or will be.” It struck a chord with me at a time when my own questioning process felt more like a desperate wheeze than a righteous roar .

Surely one of the greatest challenges I face, when running my life’s race, is to not look behind me or around me at where everyone else is. After all its not really a race is it? That is tough and no man is an island as they say, but I’ve learnt more and more that life is filled with much that is temporary and only our fear (sometimes panic) convinces us otherwise. That being said, we surely shouldn’t let the fear of change or the pain of loss hinder our ability to embrace, love and cherish that which is still there and more importantly, what is still to come.

We’re all kids when it comes to facing the unknown. I can see it in the old man who shakes and trembles uncertainly at the supermarket check out, for instance. His already dented pride evaporates in the daily challenges which he used to skip over without a second thought. Never could he have imagined asking for help to pick up a packet or suffering the humiliation of having to ask twice about the price of what he is buying, seeing as his pension won’t cover what the till flashes brightly for all the other shoppers in the queue to see. I see the same trepidation in the small girl on the Metro, from the poor Barrio on the edge of town, wide-eyed and questioning her acceptance amongst richer classmates, based on what her working class mom can afford for her to wear. So it goes, over and over again. I see all the everyday cycles, as the poor work harder for their kids to have a brighter future and the rich kids squander their gifts as poverty has now overtaken their hearts and minds.

When we get shoved onto the path of this involuntary journey, I believe that all of us have the key that unlocks our ability to feel all that pain, loss, insecurity, loneliness. To feel it all, and to move forward without carrying it with us, while still having allowed it to affect us. Problem is that when one feels a certain kind of pain for the first time, the fear of it often becomes bigger than the pain itself and hence, we carry a little piece of it forever so that we can always remember and ensure that it never happens again. Some of us carry more than others and when we do, that drowns out the spaces in our hearts which could be filled with the wonderment, love, and exhilaration, but also the pain and sorrow, of the here and now. Very much like the passage on Happiness and Sorrow in The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. The choice then becomes about whether we would rather feel less in general than risk more of the moments where there is pain in the same form as that which we felt before. Here I must add that I really don’t think many of us consider the pain that we have not felt yet. Moreover, we also surely wouldn’t last very long if we knew what lay ahead in advance, right? Life is certainly not a bed of roses and within the smaller lifetimes that I seem to have navigated up to now, I am often struck, in the reflective moments, by 1) how much harder the experience was than I could ever have imagined and 2) how I would never have made it through had I an inkling of what lay ahead. Climbing Kilimanjaro is a great analogy here. That in itself should be encouragement for what we can cope with though.

So how does the questioning thing tie into this? Well it really boils down to whether we are optimists or not. Let’s use the analogy of walking along a previously undiscovered jungle path, for instance. Walking, in this instance, is analogous with a healthy outlook on life and a general openness to that which comes across our path. We are thus always moving forward. It implies security in oneself (to maintain a healthy attitude towards the journey and the unknown) and a level of introspection (which allows for us to see what the path offers us daily and to question how it affects us). We have a small bag with us (our heart). We then might come across something beautiful along the way, if we‘re lucky. I reckon that we mostly are, and that it’s a question of seeing rather than luck. Anyway, it fits neatly in the bag and we hastily (or sometimes carefully) stick it in there along with the couple of other belongings we hold dear. Bear in mind that family are generally sewn into the seams of the bag, but they tend to take up space nonetheless. This is important to realise seeing as some of us are blessed with bigger bags than others.

Seriously....I carry this thing with me everywhere!

So, you keep walking and as you do it becomes obvious that what is in the bag affects the way you walk and starts to literally make an impression on you. That’s the bit we can’t really change and control. But, maybe some way down the line you start to see new things and what you find beautiful changes, or maybe what is in the bag starts going bad cus it was never meant to be carried around anyway, or maybe your bag just starts to get a little heavy to carry and you realise that if you want to keep walking, something is going to have to stay behind. This is where the choice and the questioning comes in. Can you, in other words:

1. Question yourself to the extent where the reality of these scenarios becomes something that you can accept?
   
2. Consciously make the necessary choices e.g. to leave something behind?

Here it becomes important to clarify that leaving something behind often means that the space in the bag will still be there and the impression on you (e.g. the way you now walk) will be there possibly forever (not always)?

Not half full yet

You see, being affected and holding on are two different things, in my book. Being affected is like coastlines getting affected by the sea. The impressions can stay there forever, but the elements which affect us never go away, so that, at some distant point in the future you might only see a small crack where there was once a gaping crevice, violently torn open by a stormy sea of the past. Hardly anything is permanent as long as the weather keeps changing. Holding on is like the gambler sitting at the roulette table, nervously counting his last chips and consulting his magical sheet of scribbled paper, as if it will now tell him some illuminating truth that it was not capable of doing 10 minutes ago. This then, is where the choice comes in.

Do we carry that something with us, even though it could mean that we have to stop walking, or that we become ill from it having gone bad (or vice versa) or through our own sadness? Do we hold on until the effect is nothing but crushing and painful? Sometimes we hold on so long that what is in the bag can never exist outside of it again. Sometimes we choose to break off pieces to make sure that we carry something tangible with us forever. This however, means that what was in the bag can now never exist as a whole again and we can also never really put anything else in there either. Sometimes we actually do choose to never put something in the bag again out of fear of the same thing happening. We keep an empty space in there and we learn to only look at our feet as we try to become blind to what we are walking past. We then often carry the bag as if it were even heavier than it was before, even though it is now empty! All these scenarios result in a hindrance which often times extends beyond ourselves and has a kind of chain reaction with everything linked to our bag and ourselves.

Sometimes we’re just plain lucky and something fits in there so well, that it becomes part of the seams and material of the bag too. It grows with us and may even make us stronger. It might become so light (supportive, constructive, positive) that we scarcely remember we have the bag on, and quite often (life seems to work in this way) the space inside becomes even bigger. A good sign to me. What many of us forget though, is that world around us and its effect is something quite personal and when all is said and done, there really was only one person who experienced that from beginning to end: You…. with your trusty bag of course. We’re born with it empty and we hopefully die with some things that have travelled a part of the way with us.

When we are free of carrying the bad stuff, and that which we have only affects us positively, we are able to merrily skip along, sticking all manner of other weird and wonderful things in there, as we unashamedly and spontaneously swap, share, collect and take in treasures from our fortunate path. If your bag is open then something can either fit or not. Horrible scenarios do exist where people don’t have something in their bag but something bad still hangs onto some part of them like a nasty parasite. The bag represents the essentials and everything else hanging on you is unnecessary and often destructive. That does not imply that interaction with the world around us does not take place and that we do not gain from many things that might not eventually end up with the essentials.

Look out cus you could be missing some treasures along the way

During this journey there should be no need to close our bag or protect it because everything in there is plain to see, and the effect of anything new can be handled because the choice to hold on is never taken away from us. That gives freedom to what is in the bag too. You’d have to agree that a prolonged outlook like this would certainly result in a fairly interesting and distinctive walk! This is because we do not fear the path or what we encounter / pick up. The ultimate choice of being affected, whilst not having to hold on, is ours.

The truth is that this choice exists for us in all circumstances, but only if we let go of the fear of the undiscovered, as well as the apprehension of what we can and can‘t carry. The key is the questioning and the choice is our freedom.

Let me end with one of the poems by Pablo Neruda:

When I see the sea once more
Will the sea have seen or not seen me?

Why do the waves ask me
The same questions I ask them?

And why do they strike the rock
With so much wasted passion?

Don’t they get tired of repeating
Their declaration to the sand?