The Wait of Things
I spent a large part of my time this year trying to find my way back home. What was once a quick mindless exercise of clicking buttons to make planes fly was now turning out to be an arduous task as countries gradually shut their borders. “Why are we under a lockdown?” is what I asked my cat, Lulu. “Maybe because you want everything fast,” she should have replied if cats could speak.
This slowing down has brought some clarity to a question that has puzzled me for a long time, much like Douglas Adams, who has been seeking “an answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" calculated by a supercomputer named Deep Thought over a period of 7.5M years.
It felt like reality jumped out of a science fiction novel and was staring at me right in the face. While my cat sat on an untidy, half-made bed, which I did not care to fix this morning as responsible adults do, I felt lost and powerless in the general scheme of things. The difference in my deliberations with the universe this time was more realistic. While experts worldwide are trying to pass the blame on this pandemic, I have woken up to my role in it and the power of individual action. It is easy to blame governments, myopic capitalists, and the world's crumbling healthcare system for the sad state of affairs. Still, it will be a very futile and hypocritical exercise. The amount of plastic and other human-made fibers that are clogging our life-giving systems long after we have consumed it dazzles me. How fair is it to keep blaming others when my actions are part of the reason we got here? The solution is not to start living a life of a hermit but to re-think how we consume as a race, become more aware, and then modulate this 'culture of fast.’
Gene Tracy, who is trying to decipher the world through science, writes in The Icarus Question: “Post-humanism does not reject this emancipatory impulse, but instead attempts to enlarge the frame by placing people within a spectrum that stretches from animals on the one end to machines on the other, seeing all of us as part of nature, engaged in one large co-evolution as companion beings.” In Greek mythology, Icarus was a figure who tried to escape imprisonment in Crete with his father Daedalus, using wings Daedalus crafted out of feathers and wax. Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun or too low to the sea. This in itself could be my biggest cue to living a life that is more balanced and in harmony with the planet. Not the planet. Our planet. Our planet is a complex system of various living and non-living processes, which often get disrupted when individuals like I separate ourselves from the problems the planet faces.
So my search for a utopian society ends here with me and my constant procrastination. My cat wants to know when I will completely stop using plastic. The key here is to achieve a balance till we can find a way to defeat all our demons and become one with nature. And the only way to do that is to acknowledge individual action and stop this ‘want of everything fast.’
Every crisis comes with an opportunity, an opportunity to transform based on what we know and the resilience to learn from ‘what we don’t know.’ The poet T.S. Eliot translates in his poem, the Four Quartets, summaries Lord Krishna’s view from the Bhagavad Gita: ‘And do not think of the fruit of action. Fare Forward.’ Eliot explains: ‘Not fare well, But fare forward, voyagers.’
Maybe this time, slowly, like a turtle. If this is a sign of how we will live, “a team of archaeologists led by Chea Socheat of Cambodia’s Apsara National Authority discovered a large turtle sculpted from sandstone at the Kandal Srah Srang temple of Siem Reap province’s Angkor Archaeological Park. Socheat said the statue, which measures approximately 22 by 37 inches, is estimated to be about 1,000 years old and may have been used in the preparation of offerings to the Hindu god Vishnu associated with the Sea of Milk churning ceremony” reported the Khmer Times this month. And back in India, thousands of tiny Olive Ridley turtles were found scurrying across a deserted beach in Odisha across the Indian coastline.