Quite the Quite Quiet
For the last few days my roommates have been out of town and I’ve figured out how to sit still again. Hard to sit still in a place like Mumbai which offers so many versions of distraction. There are 20 things I see here everyday that I want to sit and write about, and I am overwhelmed…so I don’t write anything! Or I jot it down by hand in a notebook because the fidget of writing something on paper is still valid and appealing.
A few thoughts from the department of quiet time:
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The banana man and his son are always sitting on the corner 1 block away. You can have 6 bananas for 20 rupees which I think might be a little more than average but the bananas are always in good condition and the banana people always remember that for some reason I have decided 6 is the perfect number of bananas to buy at once so we don’t even have to make attempts at English or Hindi. I can’t say the banana man looks cheerful… He has a bright red beard. But his son seems very cheerful. I find myself thinking that they “just came in on a boatload of bananas”. Then I feel a bit like a jerk, because if you aren’t thinking you don’t realize that it would be kind of nice to be on a boat of bananas, and the ride might be beautiful, and that’s a huge amount of pudding potential.
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There are a hundred thousand million different fantasy and real versions of the world to partake of. In Mumbai there are twice that many. If you have a little money, you can pay to enter into almost all the modes of living: If you’d like to think of passing from one ideal to another as going from one building to the another you can. Each place will claim to be the most real and the most important. People from one building to yell across to the next “You are living in a dream land!” and the people who hear it will get defensive and yell it back. The tough part is it’s almost all legitimate. You can convince people over time that any building is the best one to be in.
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one person thinks I should move to NY.
one person thinks I should spend some time in Maine.
one person thinks I should move to Chicago.
one person thinks I should move to TN.
one person thinks I should stay in Mumbai.
one person thinks I should move to Portland, OR.
one person thinks I should go back to PGH.
I think I need a shower…
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I am going to spend all day working on a presentation about the Fulbright work I am doing here in India. I have always thought you really figure out what you are doing when you are required to describe it to someone who is not at all on your wave length. That also may be the point at which you make a complete fool of yourself. What if they just don’t get it? What if your idea is not that valuable? It’s enough to make a person figure out how to at least complete a functional task. ” This project will no doubt broaden the conversation about ______ and be useful by _______ to depict _______. And in conclusion, ______. “
Done and done.
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I am afraid of a world in which I don’t make sense. Either in reason and logic, or emotion and optimism. I picked up a small booklet that one of my friends already made fun of me for. It’s one of those cheap paper back guru booklets, but the name caught my eye: “Circus of the Mind”. Who would deny there are a few elephants and monkeys in there? Not me. When the featured Guru, Sadhguru is asked about the adequacy of the mind in understanding the deeper, uncharted realms of the spirit he replies: “It’s like trying to go to the moon on a bullock cart. No matter how hard you beat the bulls it’s not going to get there.”
