Throughout my life I have had periods of absolute silence. Growing up, I didn’t make too many friends, so I learned to amuse myself with books (I was just beginning then), the Nintendo (for a short and dangerously addictive period) and movies (a love for which I carry till now). A’s chaotic, gregarious family made me realise that my family had always been into long silences where each member would disappear into his/her haven within the house for hours till the Mother or a rumbling stomach propelled them outwards.
In the past year I have grown to first notice, then resent, and now cherish these periods of complete, utter quiet. Being on my own meant dramatically less social interaction, so I was back to amusing myself, much like when I was ten or twelve years old. I resented the silence because it reminded me in what felt like loudspeaker volume, of my crazy decision to throw away my career to “determine what work I do with my time”. Over and over again. It has taken me a better part of the year to accept this dramatic change. Being independent meant that work could be irregular, so there were bound to be quiet times. I would have to learn to tide through these times if I wanted to be ready for the high tide, when work would come flowing in and the number of hours in my days wouldn't be enough for the work that needed to be done.
It seems now that along with a career decision, I had subconsciously put a number of other significant life changes into action. Not knowing when or from where the next project was going to come from effectively halted the long term planning I used to spend hours doing earlier. Not to mention the stress of these intricately made plans not working out, well, just because. I had bigger problems to worry about now, like where my next billing was going to come from, and how I was going to convince that new client to give me the project.
In the silence of my own thoughts, I became more aware of my weaknesses, but at the same time more appreciative of my strengths. It would be my strengths that I would have to play to, in order to make my freelancing career work. I learned to celebrate milestones, big or otherwise. I realised how impossible the task I had set myself was - to be superlative and nothing short of perfect in everything I do. Now that I actually had a choice on how to spend my time during the week (no office to run to or boss to put up with), I gravitated towards doing a few things well -
- I am a cook by necessity, but I learned to enjoy it by choosing to do it when I wanted to, and making the dishes that I enjoyed eating
- I prefer depth in relationships to width. I eschewed the conventional ‘networking’ that everyone insisted I needed to do in order to survive on my own, and contented myself with keeping in touch with the few people who mattered to me, and enjoyed having the flexibility to meet them during the week at their convenience. Those long, leisurely chats propelled my thinking and I came away with more ideas, because I now let them in
- I accepted that I would be bad or less than perfect at some things. I could swim the shallow depths of mediocrity across multiple oceans, or deeply discover one. I choose the latter and that was it.
More than one erstwhile colleague remarked that I looked so much happier now than earlier. I would call this change acceptance. Across multiple levels.
I still do not want to admit to myself, that I did not have the courage to listen to what my heart has been telling me for a while now. Today I came across this interview and multiple incidents clicked in place in my head.
During a training session I conducted recently, a participant celebrating her 30th birthday described her feelings as “depressed” and “old”. Someone else piped up, saying that for him, the 30s were far more fun than the 20s. To have known in the 20s, the clarity with which he could think in the next decade! I silently concurred. The blurred mess that was the 20s was important. It was the dirty, sandy water at the top before the clear blue of the ocean deeper down. It was a necessary rite of passage, of a kind.
I remember feeling in school, irrelevant in the larger scheme of things just because I had missed the top mark in the class by one or two points. It had meant the world to me then, like a symbol of achieving something. Of course my fourteen year old self did not know any better because she didn’t know anything else. The fact, however is that the very same test became irrelevant as soon as I found some other missed goal to obsess about. I realise now that - for the most popular girl in school, who also topped all tests and was a star athlete to boot, the answer to the question “what next?” was way more difficult to answer. Mine was a relative cakewalk - get to the top of the class.
There is nothing wrong with early success. It’s great validation and has many advantages. Sometimes, though, it can obscure the real story; the real calling. Jhumpa Lahiri echoes this when she talks about her decision to move to Rome and write in Italian:
“The answer, I believe, is that I’m seeking the freedom to write in my own way, to write whatever I want in whichever language, form, length, and without any pressure.”
She should know. She won the Pulitzer at 32 for her first book, The Interpreter of Maladies, and has written three other books (The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, The Lowland) thereafter on similar themes, in a similar language. The same thing that propelled her to fame restricted her growth as a writer. In other words, there is such a thing as peaking too early.
In sharp contrast is the feeling of collectedness I got from Vivek Shanbaug when he spoke about his Ghachar Ghochar entering mainstream publishing with its translation into English and further release in the US. Of course, this is no comparison to the Pulitzer, but a new, exciting and potentially significant step for a Kannada writer of more than three decades. I will never forget the deadpan expression with which he told us that Ghachar Ghochar as a story had been in his head for ten years before he put it into paper! To have waited so long, first for it to materialise and then for it to be translated into English.
While there is extensive documentation on how and why one can recover from failures, we underestimate or even ignore that some recovery, and a lot of of effort is required to turn around from one successful peak and make another one happen. Absurd and ungrateful as it may sound, there is such a thing as a problem with success. What can help here, though, is a little perspective. That’s what the doldrums, the turbulent times, the slow times, the bad times, the silences are for. They are scary, but necessary. They are there to remind us of all that we have not done, lost, chosen to let go, all to get to the next summit. That’s the path, I believe, to multiple peaks in one life.
In the past year I have grown to first notice, then resent, and now cherish these periods of complete, utter quiet. Being on my own meant dramatically less social interaction, so I was back to amusing myself, much like when I was ten or twelve years old. I resented the silence because it reminded me in what felt like loudspeaker volume, of my crazy decision to throw away my career to “determine what work I do with my time”. Over and over again. It has taken me a better part of the year to accept this dramatic change. Being independent meant that work could be irregular, so there were bound to be quiet times. I would have to learn to tide through these times if I wanted to be ready for the high tide, when work would come flowing in and the number of hours in my days wouldn't be enough for the work that needed to be done.
It seems now that along with a career decision, I had subconsciously put a number of other significant life changes into action. Not knowing when or from where the next project was going to come from effectively halted the long term planning I used to spend hours doing earlier. Not to mention the stress of these intricately made plans not working out, well, just because. I had bigger problems to worry about now, like where my next billing was going to come from, and how I was going to convince that new client to give me the project.
In the silence of my own thoughts, I became more aware of my weaknesses, but at the same time more appreciative of my strengths. It would be my strengths that I would have to play to, in order to make my freelancing career work. I learned to celebrate milestones, big or otherwise. I realised how impossible the task I had set myself was - to be superlative and nothing short of perfect in everything I do. Now that I actually had a choice on how to spend my time during the week (no office to run to or boss to put up with), I gravitated towards doing a few things well -
- I am a cook by necessity, but I learned to enjoy it by choosing to do it when I wanted to, and making the dishes that I enjoyed eating
- I prefer depth in relationships to width. I eschewed the conventional ‘networking’ that everyone insisted I needed to do in order to survive on my own, and contented myself with keeping in touch with the few people who mattered to me, and enjoyed having the flexibility to meet them during the week at their convenience. Those long, leisurely chats propelled my thinking and I came away with more ideas, because I now let them in
- I accepted that I would be bad or less than perfect at some things. I could swim the shallow depths of mediocrity across multiple oceans, or deeply discover one. I choose the latter and that was it.
More than one erstwhile colleague remarked that I looked so much happier now than earlier. I would call this change acceptance. Across multiple levels.
I still do not want to admit to myself, that I did not have the courage to listen to what my heart has been telling me for a while now. Today I came across this interview and multiple incidents clicked in place in my head.
During a training session I conducted recently, a participant celebrating her 30th birthday described her feelings as “depressed” and “old”. Someone else piped up, saying that for him, the 30s were far more fun than the 20s. To have known in the 20s, the clarity with which he could think in the next decade! I silently concurred. The blurred mess that was the 20s was important. It was the dirty, sandy water at the top before the clear blue of the ocean deeper down. It was a necessary rite of passage, of a kind.
I remember feeling in school, irrelevant in the larger scheme of things just because I had missed the top mark in the class by one or two points. It had meant the world to me then, like a symbol of achieving something. Of course my fourteen year old self did not know any better because she didn’t know anything else. The fact, however is that the very same test became irrelevant as soon as I found some other missed goal to obsess about. I realise now that - for the most popular girl in school, who also topped all tests and was a star athlete to boot, the answer to the question “what next?” was way more difficult to answer. Mine was a relative cakewalk - get to the top of the class.
There is nothing wrong with early success. It’s great validation and has many advantages. Sometimes, though, it can obscure the real story; the real calling. Jhumpa Lahiri echoes this when she talks about her decision to move to Rome and write in Italian:
“The answer, I believe, is that I’m seeking the freedom to write in my own way, to write whatever I want in whichever language, form, length, and without any pressure.”
She should know. She won the Pulitzer at 32 for her first book, The Interpreter of Maladies, and has written three other books (The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, The Lowland) thereafter on similar themes, in a similar language. The same thing that propelled her to fame restricted her growth as a writer. In other words, there is such a thing as peaking too early.
In sharp contrast is the feeling of collectedness I got from Vivek Shanbaug when he spoke about his Ghachar Ghochar entering mainstream publishing with its translation into English and further release in the US. Of course, this is no comparison to the Pulitzer, but a new, exciting and potentially significant step for a Kannada writer of more than three decades. I will never forget the deadpan expression with which he told us that Ghachar Ghochar as a story had been in his head for ten years before he put it into paper! To have waited so long, first for it to materialise and then for it to be translated into English.
While there is extensive documentation on how and why one can recover from failures, we underestimate or even ignore that some recovery, and a lot of of effort is required to turn around from one successful peak and make another one happen. Absurd and ungrateful as it may sound, there is such a thing as a problem with success. What can help here, though, is a little perspective. That’s what the doldrums, the turbulent times, the slow times, the bad times, the silences are for. They are scary, but necessary. They are there to remind us of all that we have not done, lost, chosen to let go, all to get to the next summit. That’s the path, I believe, to multiple peaks in one life.
No comments:
Post a Comment