how much is enough?
birds, productivity, loving oneself as we are, Chilean culture, lessons from life, and My Uncle Silas.
Hi there!
Thank you for joining me.
I hope you are doing well and your week has been joyful.
This last week I have been busy saving myself from the scolding sun, writing creative essays, reading vintage books, watching movies, cleaning, cooking, eating mangoes, editing old articles, setting kilos of yogurt, doing yoga, cycling, showering three times a day, and so on.
Days are passing by quickly. But at the end of every day, I feel I have gone through a long journey. Out of all days, the most I want to talk about is Thursday.
I have not slept my best for three months. Irrespective of whatever I have tried, I take up to one hour to fall asleep. One or two times I even woke up at night by some little noise and had to follow the procedure to get back to sleep again. I like getting up by 6 with the sun. So given everything, I haven’t been sleeping my much-needed eight hours on most days.
I’m getting the morning coolness, the chatter of birds, and the mischief of the tortoise in the lake. But later in the day I’m tired and sleepy. Though I have always napped for twenty-thirty minutes, now even naps have not been coming to me easily and deeply.
But on Wednesday night, I slept soundly. Perhaps I had fallen asleep quickly because I had put myself to bed after 11. I hadn’t set a very early alarm and woke up fresh at 7.
That (Thursday) morning, too, I walked on the pathway circling the guesthouse a few times. When I returned to my room, my partner chirped. We made cold coffee. I sat down to write.
At nine, I rode to the local food link (in Auroville) where all the farm produce comes. Everything is medicine-free, and farm animals are treated well. From there, the milk, fruits, and vegetables are sent to the community shops, restaurants, and eateries. But some produce is also sold at Food Link. I bought two liters of milk, green amaranthus, and papayas. At home, I boiled the milk and showered.
At my desk again, I was writing honestly and having a great time at it. A day before, I had seen my article on “why the process of learning is more important than the result,” and I hadn’t liked it. The essay made sense, but the paragraphs read disconnected. The message was lost in the broken writing. I felt as if I was selling someone else’s idea I didn’t believe in.
Do I really think “the process of learning is more important than the result?” A reader’s comment had made me question. It said, we put in the hard work to achieve the result. We won’t do anything if we don’t get anything at the end.
He made sense. I wiped off the existing ideas from the slate of my mind. I wrote about the time I lived in a town in Rajasthan to study for a competitive test. I wanted to pass the test. But I wouldn’t have been living alone in the middle of the desert if it wasn’t the entrance to a great engineering college.
Soon I will update “the art of learning” article and share the story through it.
But the essence of that essay now is to not rush through the process because the journey is the only thing that can take us to the destination.
In between writing, I clicked pictures of magpies and crows eating papaya right from the tree. They fluttered out and about and fell off from the slippery trunk many times.
After I had written thirteen pages in longhand, I watched the second half of the movie Mudbound. I had been watching it the previous night. The film was on the theme of the long-abolished slavery. But grotesque actions are still common in humanity. The realization that what is ugly and cruel to us is the way of living for others hit me hard.
Thereafter I read children’s Champak comics and the Sahitya Academy Journal. The journal is a collection of original Indian writings and their translations. It was soon time for lunch. My partner made parathas, and we enjoyed them together with a curry from the previous day.
I wanted to edit some more old pieces but I didn’t find enough motivation in me. So I decided to not try to make my time productive. I will just be, I thought.
I threw the garbage, washed the dustbins, put the waste water into a hole in which birds bathe every day, sprinkled raw rice for the animals, cleaned out the food packets into which hundreds of ants had poked in, hand washed my colored clothes, and walked outside in the garden. All the while a little music played in the room.
Now I was sweating. The temperature outside must have been 36-37 degree celsius. I went back in and decided to rest a while. An hour went by.
But I still had this overburdening feeling. I wanted to understand why I want all my time to be productive, to produce something. Why can’t I just be?
Suddenly an afternoon from years ago when a traveler in Spiti had done a tarot reading for me flashed in front of me. I am not a believer. But I had been curious. Also, the girl was reading tarot cards for anyone who asked so enthusiastically I wanted to be a part of her experience. I thought I would just ask her a few questions. What’s the harm?
On one of my cards sat a queen on a throne. Her index finger was pointed in one direction as if she was instructing someone. A black cat sat in between the legs of her chair. Before the reading began, I had told the traveler I placed myself below everyone else. Looking at the card, she said, it seems you are also slowly taking the reins in your hands. You look quite comfortable with your position in the world in the coming time.
But what is the black cat doing under my chair? I enquired. The cat is the key to the underworld, the temptation to the mystic. Maybe you want to explore the unknown a little more. Maybe you would benefit by letting go a bit. Trust more.
Systematic living has worked out well for me. I feel secure when I control whatever I can. But while trying to keep it all tightly together, I realize I am dissuading the unknown from showing itself to me. Randomness is only one more dimension, after all.
Even though I let go a lot, my aspiration for productive days cannot be compared with someone who just lives. Perhaps a homemaker or a gardener. Simple doing. Simple days. Not treating every day like a mountain to be climbed with yet another summit to be reached.
I’m not alone in my feelings. Recently a friend mentioned to me that in her two-week vacation she watched movies she had been shortlisting for years. She said she felt guilty of not using her holidays for something more productive. But wasn’t she having a great time? I asked. She was enjoying herself but wasn’t quite content.
I am also far from people who don’t think of life in terms of doing. Let’s consider my mother. She doesn’t want to be free all the time and only rests for forty-five minutes or so after lunch. But at the end of the day, she isn’t bothered about how much she did that day.
I know she, too, has a general feeling of being occupied or free and of being tired or not having worked. But mostly plodding along the day peacefully and happily while doing what she had planned is enough for her.
My mother never thinks of how many times she couldn’t exercise this week. Does her not being bothered enough demotivates her from working out? A little nudge in the direction helps, but thinking continuously about something(s) we didn’t do doesn’t take us anywhere, I have learned.
We care. But we couldn’t do it. And that’s that.
Will I ever be able to match the relaxed rhythms of the people who were never made to be productive and producing around a computer?
Perhaps while living in our developing country we learn to strive early on. If we don’t find ourselves struggling, we believe we aren’t doing well enough.
People around us work hard. On some days, my partner works from 10 in the morning to 12 in the night. While I would spend hours watching the kingfishers profess their love for each other by opening up their blue wings and feeding each other slimy bugs, my partner would have turned the world upside down. Or so it seems. When he wraps up his computer, he is still interested in discussing taxes and investments. My friend was worried because one of her colleagues had been selected for a much-higher paying job.
But not all of us want to be so efficient all the time. I don’t want to be wanting productivity as my greatest achievement. No sir. A life well-lived with continuous work in a chosen direction is what I want. That is why sometimes I have started to let go.
Perhaps my boredom is an attempt towards freeing myself from the chains of productivity. I am trying to change slowly.
When I think of the time passed, I want to think about how I have been, and not what I have done. I don’t want to worry about being unhappy for two hours. This doesn’t seem like the right way to think about happiness, of all things.
Time is meant to measure the passing of life, but not be a scale on which everything is weighed for its worth.
With these thoughts in my mind, I got up. I immersed myself in yoga for an hour. Then it was time to go to the library before it shut down at 6:30. My partner went with me.
We walked to the library watching the giant blue clouds sending light splitting through the sky. Once inside, I went back to the back of the stacks to find some unknown writers. And what have I found! (I’m sharing both the books below.)
After choosing the old hard-bound books, one of which is a 1947 print edition, we walked back. The clouds threatened us from above. I made watermelon juice, chatted with an old guy who has been living next to us, and showered again. Someone called to deliver a packet. Outside the light flashed and clouds roared and thundered. Wind shook the trees so hard I wondered if one of them would fall.
The power went off. I could see a storm was coming. While taking out cheese for tomato-flavored Japanese noodles I was cooking, I saw the streams flowing from the freezer section of our refrigerator; power had been playing hide and seek all day.
I had to throw away the water collected in the freezer tray and cover up the two liters of milk kept in the curd, boiled, and unboiled forms and so on. Meanwhile the noodles started boiling up. Oh, the delivery guy. Haha. I had thought I would just drink juice and eat noodles and read. But there I juggled five things while my partner took office calls.
But at the end of the week, I wouldn’t give myself any credit for all these things. My partner often tells me I keep everything running. I tell him I haven’t done anything. He says,”you just told me about your day and it sounds like you did a hundred things then why do you say you didn’t do anything?”
Perhaps my partner is so buried with work because that is the one thing that excites him the most and makes him curious. But many things interest me and I want to entwine my life around them.
The rain had started falling. I sat outside on our porch watching the frame of green trees dancing to the tunes of the wind and listening to the pitter patter of the raindrops against the leaves and grass and branches and bark. Birds were running hither and thither. I started reading H.E. Bates’s Uncle Silas and tears came to my eyes.
I felt I could have been living fifty years ago in an idyllic England town. Sitting by the side of the fire, drinking wine or a cup of tea, and reading this green hardbound book with the engraving of the author’s name and title in gold over a maroon patch. Maybe a couple of cats were jumping all around me. I felt such joy I had to keep the book aside to contain it all inside me. The cold air caressed my cheeks. Oh I had also opened up the delivered packet to find a nice soft green pajama for nights with roses and butterflies on it; It is the sweetest thing made in cotton, and I felt blessed to be wrapped in it.
I was glad I had gone to the library and to that shelf and had trusted the book. The green little thing. I read on and on stopping only to watch the lightning flash like a long zigzag stick in front of me in the dark sky. The lightning stayed for a few seconds, enough for me to be dazzled by it.
From a distance something came flying and perched on a bare, low-hanging branch of a tree in front. The owl looked at me and I looked at it. Off it flew after scrutinizing me for a few seconds.
The trees in front of me stretch into a jungle. I imagined the animals having a hard time finding shelter in the untimely storm. I kept the book aside and sat watching the night melting away into the earth.
When I went inside, I had to take care of so many chores I was sure I would never finish. Another journey on a day full of adventures of all kinds. What a day it had been!
But if I was sure of something it was that my entire day had led me to discovering that book. What we do takes us where we want to be. And that’s it.
We don’t have to build our worth around how well we have used each hour. Instead of repeatedly thinking about how I hadn’t done something, putting a little thought in my head to do it later is generally enough. Now we have created the tiny space for the thing inside. Tomorrow, while there is still time to do the task, we will give it its deserved attention.
All kinds of glories come to us if we create the space to receive them.
“One of those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” — T.S. Eliot
Do you love yourself?
First bath in Léman lake still a bit cold but 29-30 degrees outside! (even if I have to fight with swans!!!) - This picture if courtesy of a travel friend from Geneva. I met the sweet octogenarian Béatrice Bauzin in Penang. And on she travels and fills me with wonder. More strength and joy to her.
As this newsletter is already pretty long, I am skipping the quotes and things to watch. The weekly photos are interspersed.
So for this week’s letter,
Some of my writing,
and
things to read.
Past Articles I’ve Just Renewed
Chilean Culture: 13 Unique Traditions [Travel Easy in Chile]
Some of the most intriguing Chilean conventions I observed during my 6-month travel in the country.
Click to read the insights. Or Pocket for later.
Important Lessons of Life: Everything I Have Learned So Far
This collection of lessons learned in life is more a cheat sheet for me and less a guide for a reader looking for life’s wisdom. But I do hope I have shared experiences that will help one sail along this immense sea of life with a bit more ease.
Read the life lessons now. Or Pocket for later.
What I’ve Been Reading
I’ve been reading short stories, books, articles, and so much more. I can’t possibly list all what I have read in the past week so I’m putting down the things I found most relevant and worthwhile.
Beautiful books from the week,
My Uncle Silas by H.E.Bates — I have already spoken about the beauty of this book in length above. But if you want to laugh a little, and cry, too, read this short collection of stories on Uncle Silas by the great English writer H.E.Bates. Complementing today’s newsletter, this book is truly to appreciate the sweetness of small things in life. Be ready to immerse yourself in a bucolic setting full of warmth, adventure, and silliness. I recommend it to all fiction and non-fiction lovers.
I also recommend Elizabeth Bowen: Collected Stories. Though I haven’t read the book in full, these stories set in England give much to laugh about, learn from, and contemplate on. I will give a full length review in the next week’s letter.
another great read.
Thank you for reading.
I hope your Sunday is lively and the upcoming week is merry. Take good care of yourselves :)
Let me know what you think about this newsletter. Just press reply.
Yours,
Priyanka
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Thank you for a great article. I had an amazing time reading it !!!