Category: 2024

Twenty-Six

Tejas RaoLeave a comment

It has been two years since I wrote anything on my birthday – or around my birthday. 2023 was a painfully dry year in terms of writing, but there has been some kind of return this year I am pleased about. In that post, from 2022, reflecting on my desire for greater mindfulness, I wrote:

I’ve instead come to the realisation that being mindful of things and feeling this gratitude is a journey that you embark on consciously – and like all journeys/habits – it is one that takes repetition till it becomes subconscious.

Me, Twenty-Four

This remains true. Being mindful: a combination of being aware, staying equanimous, and remaining grateful, is something that requires effort from me every single day. It is something I have committed to. At 24, I called on myself to write more/daily, and evaluate where I am on this journey. As long-time readers and friends will be aware, I used to be a strong believer in waiting for the perfect moment to start something new: I would need the time to be 8:30 (or some kind of round number – none of that starting something at 5:27), or a new year, or a Monday. Aside from fueling the inherent procrastination most academic-types feel, this also meant I used to reflect, take stock of things, and set to undertake new resolutions only on occasions like my birthday, and not every single day. While I don’t do that any longer, and this may be one year later than anticipated, today feels like a good day to live up to the promise from 2022 and publicly take stock of the year and day that has gone by.

After dealing with that which demanded my immediate attention, I sat to have a quiet, self-nourishing day of reflecting, filled with books, movies, and food, interspersed with calls and messages from friends and well-wishers. Somewhere along the way it occurred to me that typically in my head, my birthday marked a half-way point in the year. Somehow this year felt different right from the off. It seems that this year is where my inner body-clock has come to align with the math. May 11th is only the 131st day of the year. There’s 234 to go. That means only a third of the year has actually gone by. I am very surprised this didn’t internalise in 2019, where I daily-blogged the entire year marked by day.

Reflecting on the year and day, I was filled with gratitude for everything I have, but also a strong sense of reality of where I was on my moral quest. Some of you will know I practice Vipassana meditation, sitting a 10-day course every August. In 2023 upon the completion of my course, some realisations about my own character meant that my moral quest took new meaning. Every day since has presented its own challenge. Sitting in the place I am, today, all I want to do is to renew my daily commitment to that moral quest. There are days that are less difficult, which are days where I acknowledge I have done well, but the days that are the toughest are the ones that teach me the most. Those days will continue to come, and all I want to be equipped to do is to accept reality as it is.

Everything else is a material bonus. There is likely no causation, but what I have found is this renewed commitment to morality has increased my own capacity to work way diligently at something because it demands that work, regardless of outcome. I hope I can continue to put the whole of my being and intention into the things I want to do – that’s what yields the most enjoyment.

All of this is rather serious, I know, but my mom bookended my day calling me in the morning and is probably the last one to call me tonight, and she’s my pocket reminder to be a child and to have fun. Here’s my pinned reminder:

Inklings

Tejas RaoLeave a comment

The weekend saw the clocks go forward, our first sunny day marking the start of Spring, and the start of Global Poetry Writing Month. I raced through Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the coffee gets cold and its sequels. A fulsome review will follow, but I haven’t been able to stop recommending the books for their warmth and their exploration of a very difficult question. Each book’s opening pages ask you If you could go back, who would you want to meet? A truly fantastic way to foreshadow what follows, but you carry the blanket nostalgia all through your time with the books. I have existed in that state since, yearning, over the past few days for parts of my pasts, and accepting, slowly, that these pasts are not my present parts.

This is how I am coping.

This afternoon, I purchased Before the coffee gets cold for a dear friend and wrote a short note in the front of the book. I have, over the past two years, essentially moved to living entirely digitally. I mostly take handwritten notes on my iPad nowadays, so getting to witness the shapeliness of my crooked (read, beautiful) cursive on paper once more was joyful. Yet a tinge of something unfamiliar wafted over me. The writing wasn’t slanting, I could draw ruled lines between my letters. The discomfort came from it being a strange experience from a faraway time. A heavy pen, the ink spilling, the worry of the words not quite flowing. The familiar, long-forgotten beast.

Why don’t I write anymore? Ah, that gnawing thought. I examined my short three-sentence note, dated, and grinned. My brain drew the connecting line, squealing with joy – my lack of writing by hand seems to be manifesting in terms of reduced verbose creativity. I do not want to generalise, but I have noticed that living digitally has changed the confidence with which I spill words out onto the page. If you have followed this blog for long enough, you know that I do not enjoy editing. This blog has been the one space I edit nothing at all. I sit, and whatever flows, flows. However it meanders, it meanders. Yet the ease of the backspace has meant all I do nowadays is edit. I have starter trouble more frequently. I have written about this.

So of course I spent the evening cleaning out my pens and filling ink. I write mainly with fountain pens. I dabbled with the odd gel and ballpoint pens, but nothing stuck around for long enough. Some pens refused to write. I spent an hour cleaning them out. They all write now. They’re in front of me as I type: one from Grade 5, one from Grade 7, one from Grade 10, two from first-year of University, and two graduation gifts.

I’m going to keep a notebook with me through the day. I don’t know how I will use it, but I’d like to set it out when I take my laptop/iPad out wherever I am. Apparently there’s something called a commonplace notebook. I need to read more. For now, I am not a thought, but an inkling once more.