Grasping / Letting go
May 2nd, 2024
I’ve been sleeping a lot lately.
I didn’t sleep at all while I was in India, what with the wedding and everything that goes into the entire extended family gathering for a wedding. On the one hand, it helped me recover from jetlag superfast since there was no time to sleep during the day and I just had to wait till it was my time at night. But my time didn’t arrive until after 12 AM. I built up a backlog of sleep hours that weren’t addressed until I arrived at my aunt’s house in Sohar (Oman). There are four bedrooms with four en-suite bathrooms here. It’s the Arab way, accounting for large family sizes and more than one wife. Since our Hindu family isn’t using the house the way it was intended, each of us get our own bedroom AND bathroom. Going from sharing two bathrooms with the entire extended family to having my own feels amazing. I’m sleeping like a baby. My neurosis around a clean bathroom probably also helped keep REM sleep at bay for the two weeks that I spent in India.
Its finally sinking in that I am in a nomad phase of life. The way I left NYC was so quick and I had become so embedded in my routine that getting on the Air India flight to Delhi didn’t feel different from other times when return was assured. I tried to stir up any latent sentimentality in me about “leaving my home”, “leaving my life”, “leaving my friends” behind. And I was minorly successful. NYC is the place that I have lived the longest, it’s the only place that I have lived as an adult. And I love my friends. But my life… I can never think of “leaving my life behind” and feel it to be true. My life is my companion forever, it goes where I go. Right before I left, I had been taking classes with Michael on the philosophy of yoga and I remember him talking about an imbalance of the Kapha and Vata dosha’s which leads to a mustard gas-like state, that sinks, stifles and poisons. Holding onto “my life” in NYC felt like a mustard-gasification of myself and my circumstances. I had to get out.
I will say, I had a thought beating in my head right up until the plane to Delhi lost contact with the tarmac and lifted into the sky prompting me to fall asleep. This thought may or may not be considered sentimental and it was -
‘I can’t believe that I am leaving like this, after losing at everything”.
Now that I am cared for in a stable and safe environment and am no longer running on empty, I alternate between feeling this statement to be true and considering it an absurd dramatization of current events. My mom hates it, FYI. I try to parse through it.
The word “losing” no longer overwhelms me as it did in the days leading up to my departure. My mind spits it out only to have it fall back and splatter all over, like a kid blowing an unstable bubble of gum that pops all over his face.
To feel like you lost, you need to have a vision of what it looks like to win. And if I am being honest with myself, my view of the win has been unfocused for a while now. Like many young people, when I moved to NYC, I had a vague plot in mind that centered around the idea of ambition. But I couldn’t yet put into words the lofty goal that I had set out to achieve. I tried.
“I want to… make a lot of money![?]”
“I wanna be the smartest![?]”
“I wanna be the hottest!”
I work best with a tangible goal in mind. Any of the above objectives would have afforded me a simple clarity that makes success a lot easier to define and subsequently achieve. But none of them stuck for long. It has been a while since I allowed myself to define my goal in my natural language and in the meantime, I kept rejecting everything obtained off the rack.
When I arrived in the States at the age of 17 for college, I rode in on a childhood whim -
“I want to be somewhere else”.
It is one of the oldest and therefore stickiest thoughts in my brain.
Perpetually dissatisfied. Or the less judgmental - perpetually seeking.
I can’t pick out the point in time at which I traded in restless forward movement for anxious rootedness onto a concrete reality, afraid to let go for fear of being transported backwards. In lieu of intimate contact with myself, I attempted to build a nest with ill-fitting pieces. Which, unsurprisingly, collapsed over and over again.
The last collapse was the most definite. There was no regathering or sellotaping that would restore the nest to bare minimum integrity. More importantly, there was no impulse to regather or sellotape, no breaking into a mad dash towards reconstruction at any costs. I stubbornly sat with my failure, refusing to budge until the next direction in life floated from my depths onto the surface.
My goal has always been a feeling – the feeling of living on the edge of reality, where limits are pushed, and experiences are truly novel and beautiful. I’ve shied away from spelling it out, afraid that it sounds too corny, too magical, too unreal. And maybe it does, but I no longer care. Anything magnificent seems unattainable until someone willful reaches out and makes first contact.
New York life has never been the goal in or itself, it is merely a venue for it. I love New York dearly. It’s been my home for well over a decade and the only place in the world that has convinced me for a long time that staying was far preferable to leaving. I don’t think that I am done with the City, but I no longer want to be a New Yorker existing under a looming cloud of desperation and FOMO. If I am to live there again, I must do so in alignment with my fundamental aspiration. And until this is my reality immediately upon arrival, return is futile.