Resolutions or something of that nature…

Year X, Day 1, New Beginning Resolution Number: Infinity. The morning is bright- cheerful music, blue sky, golden sunlight– but it hardly enters our angled rooms. The sunlight, that is. The music pushes in through wood and brick and cement, making you feel like the accidental guest who has not been invited to the party.

What are resolutions worth? For years I’ve been making and failing them, but sometimes I wonder if I fail them on purpose. Say we fulfill all our dreams and resolutions, what after that?

‘A man saw a bird and wanted to paint it. The problem, if there was one, was simply a problem with the question. Why paint a bird? Why do anything at all? Not how, because hows are easy- series or sequence, one foot after the other—but existentially why bother, what does it solve?’^*

And yes indeed, why do anything? Why sing, make art, bleed into canvas and paper? Why get out of bed every morning, commit to a daily commute, the crowd of office hours, ten million excel sheets- for food on the plate and rest at night? And when that’s done, ask why again. Wake, eat, work, sleep, wake, eat, work, sleep, die at some point- what does that achieve? Wake, eat, work, return home, then tear your hair out trying to make sense of something, anything- why do that at all?

You ask the teachers, they say you don’t exist. Everything is Soul, everything is Self, everything is Divine without ego. Then why the need?

The poet offers an answer that leads to more questions:

‘Blackbird, he says. So be it, indexed and normative. But it isn’t a bird, it’s a man in a bird suit, blue shoulders instead of feathers, because he isn’t looking at a bird, real bird, as he paints, he is looking at his heart, which is impossible.’^*

And every incoherent poem or incomprehensible blobs of colour or frenzied dance is just that- an impossible act of looking into one’s heart. A heart that is not yours, they say, because you don’t exist. In the end we only do what we do to feel alive, to feel sane-

‘What is alive and what isn’t and what should we do about it? Theories: about the nature of the thing. And of the soul. Because people die. The fear: that nothing survives. The greater fear: that something does.

The night sky is vast and wide.’^*

(*From ‘The Language of the Birds’, War of the Foxes by Richard Siken)

Everywhere, the air throbs with the thrumming beats of newness, and all you see is the dreary sameness of twelve months lying ahead of you, twelve old months of desperate hoping and twelve new months of crashing despair when nothing changes. Outside the window, the sun shines, cheering yet another of this planet’s successful round, but your rooms are cold, shadowed places. You shiver, walking from room to room in search of warmth, and your feet take you up the stairs to the terrace, and suddenly the sun and the green and the blue is all yours and you’re soaking up the heat and the wind and you remember, irrelevantly, how sunlight helps to form vitamin D in the body to stave off depression. You go back downstairs, because nobody is given an unlimited amount of sky and air, and there are harsh words and gloom. You breathe and try to remember how it feels to be happy.

Happy memories. Smiles. Visualisation of a future that’s truly new. For if you do not want something with all your heart, you must learn what you want instead. When you want something, it happens. That is what Shahrukh Khan had said, years ago. And so you keep trying.

Year X, Day 2, 3, 4 and infinity.

Sometimes I think I will wake up and find myself discovered as the pretender that I am, an imposter in a room of bright words that know just how to create an impact, my wilted words like frail paper flowers- an imitation of the thing I was trying to be. And then I think, if one must pretend, why not pretend we are all part of the great cosmic soul, with equal access to meaning, and perhaps it is my lot to express a sliver of it, in the way I can, and someone somewhere will find their own share of meaning in it.

I am trying this new thing this year where I try to be wilfully, determinedly happy. I watch my thoughts, and I watch my mood, and when I sense the weight of everyday settling like a load upon my heart till it becomes impossible to breathe, and then I try to shut out the world, somehow, anyhow. Humming unplanned tunes help, sometimes. Sometimes my voice hums on its own, and if I notice I try to watch my mind, see where it is going, track its path across the notes. Lately, I have spent moments craving solitude, unable to function at the most ordinary stage. It seems to every bubble of optimism there’s a bigger cloud of ennui trying to overwhelm me- basic, seventh grade physics, really, but so far, I’m still fighting.

The only thing I can do to fight off stasis is to take action, and keep taking action. It’s taken me a while to learn this, and I intend to win. When in doubt, participate. That is all.

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