Day 12 - Bombay Mornings
Somehow I have landed in Bombay and its 5 o'clock in the morning and I can't help but notice how away I am from anything I have ever known.
How exciting?
No longer relegated to the typewriter I want to express my deepest love for the community of friends in Washington and how I wish you all could take a collective step back from what you are doing in this moment to appreciate just how important you all are.
This morning I am staring at an empty chair in front of me. I have put myself in another place, and I'm a stranger there. And it feels good to take off the weight. There is a silence that has reached me. And I am not frightened by it. Maybe, I need to wake up earlier. Maybe, I just needed to wake up.
You see, before the chatter of the day – There are hardly any sounds. Before the light of the world cracks open your mind, there is a slight possibility that a calm energy can wash over you.
And that to me is the only thing that matters. The silence. Maybe that is where peace is. And remembering it to wherever you go, however you choose to go. Doesn't have to be India, but I think that moving can, inevitably, lead to a reset of sorts.
I can remember that after losing my job, after losing faith in the country I call home, after seeing how ICE officers treated people who looked like me, I fell in a hopeless depression. Despite all of this, I want to fight it, that feeling. I want to contribute some sort of sensible reaction. A protest against all that supresses the basic freedoms of each of you as a form of empowerment. To dream and to live freely is the most integral part of living in a human society, and if we don't have this, then we are not free.
If we are living in any form of fear: fear of loss of a job, our body, our way of living, our families, our health, our mind and the education of it, we must find a way to break through the chains of those fears to penetrate something much deeper than any of those fears. That is love. And the practice of that love will always deepen the freedom of the other person and not break it down. That kind of love will uplift and encourage.
At first, I didn't know how to express it or if I wanted to express it at all. How would people react? Because, ultimately, I held this feeling for so long, I kept it away from most of you. Living in this fear. Of not belonging. Of Anomie.
anomie/ˈanəmi/
noun
- a sense of alienation from society, characterized by feelings of hopelessness, loss of purpose, and isolation.
I'd like to continue to write and see to it how this feeling came to be and how it came to pass. And I know this writing challenge of 30 days will, in effect, not happen every day but I would like to strive to practice it. Practice expressing myself freely. And through that practice, I hope it can be found as a method to drop any of the aforementioned fears and just do.
And not just because tomorrow might not come. And not to impress anyone. And not for the sake of writing because it feels good. This feeling of wanting to write comes from this inexpressible longing to put down on paper with ink or type on this intelligent device of sorts, a way of moving forward.
When I look at the driver of the auto rickshaw in Bombay from the seat behind him, I see only the back of his head. We don't exchange any conversation. And most of this journey is seen through his eyes as he weaves through the crowded streets of Bombay, dodging people, motorbicycles, and cars. The paths the driver takes to evade any sort of collision baffles the mind and eludes any sensible understanding of traffic standards. Beyond the understanding, there is a flow state. Senna talked about it.
"That day I suddenly realised that I was no longer driving it conscious, and I was in a different dimension. The circuit for me was a tunnel, which I was just going, going, going and I realised - I was well beyond my conscious understanding"
When I write there is part of me that goes well beyond my conscious understanding. I saw it with the driver of the auto rickshaw.