entry sixty six
(written on jan 2)
On January 3, I will board an Air Canada flight. After a 2 hour layover in Frankfurt, Germany, it will land in Toronto. After hitching a one-hour bus to Ontario, I will reach the place where I will spend the next four years of my life: the University of Waterloo. As is natural, I am grateful for the opportunity and am cognizant of the privileges that have accumulated to lead me here. But there is no doubt about it – my whole life will change. In the long run, I will be proud of myself and things will be better. My life is happy now, but the notion of “happiness” seems far more temporary and attainable. This is about building the life I want, and a million other goals and objectives and all those boring career words.
zielschmerz n. the dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream, which requires you to put your true abilities out there to be tested on the open savannah, no longer protected inside the terrarium of hopes and delusions that you started up in kindergarten and kept sealed as long as you could. German Ziel, goal + Schmerz, pain. Pronounced “zeel-shmerts.”
But right now, the emotional magnitude of what this represents is not lost on me – everything I have ever known will be erased from my life over the course of a day-long flight. New sceneries, buildings, eateries, and faces will take on new kinds of meaning in my life. This change is terrifying.
I may never have a good vada pav ever again.
I've calculated now though – there's about nineteen things that I think I will miss the most.
I will miss Mumbai (1). I will miss how pretty everything looked when it rained (2). I will miss the constant waterlogging and traffic that even Google Maps failed to account for (3). I will miss the vada pav (4) and the pani puri (5) and the pav bhaji (6). I will miss how early the city wakes up and how late it sleeps – times that can overlap. I will miss this magical forward momentum- everyone keeps walking, walking, walking, forward. It’s humid and capitalistic and crowded, but it’s my home, it will always be my home. (7)
I will miss Powai, the neighborhood where I have lived the majority of my life (8). I will miss its food joints – Utsav (9), where I had the first birthday party I clearly remember, and Pizza Express where I had my 18th (10). I will miss the never-ending factory mill of shops that closed and opened on the lane- this lane. I will miss getting stationery from Lucky Stores (11) and fries from The J (12) and samosas from Trupti (13).
Powai in the evening
atigo n. a dizzying sense of awe at the sheer scale of modern society—looking out at a city so vast and complex it can barely be mapped, with millions of miles of roads and power lines and water mains that must be continually repaired and replaced every few years, feeding a labyrinth of supply chains and regulations and contracts and algorithms—a system so massive that individual people seem almost beside the point, that if everybody were to vanish all at once, the city would sigh and carry on its business. From labyrinth,a maze of tortuous complexity + vertigo, the whirling sensation of looking down from great heights. Compare Spanish látigo, whip. Pronounced “lat-i-goh.” (Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows)
I will miss my room (14). I will miss the walls (15) that have seen me celebrate my college acceptance and the bed (16) that supported me as I fell on it, crying under the weight of college admissions pressure. I will miss the posters (17) I have so painstakingly collected, representing the breadth of my passions and interests, and the assorted knick-knacks (18) that have come to adorn my desk. I will miss my desk, where I ate the majority of my meals, which supported textbook after textbook, and which never sunk under the weight of my workload. The same cannot be said about me.
Most of these things will stay behind when I leave. But some things I’ll take with me, starting with my friends. I carry my friends everywhere I go. I carry them in the way I belief in myself, in the reassuring knowledge that I am loved, and in the confidence that what I have to say matters. I carry them in all the movies and songs and TV shows we have come to love together over the years. I carry them in the food I eat – items as disparate as vada pav and instant coffee brands and momos elicit specific memories of the meals we have shared together. Everywhere I go, the smile of my friends are reflected back at me, everytime I fall, a gentle nudge guides me back up, and every time I cry, a careful finger flicks off the tears.
Most importantly, every time I laugh, I am accompanied by a cacophony of loud, crackling, unfettered, echo of laughter.
But still, I will miss my friends. (19)
on tenderhooks adj. feeling the primal satisfaction of being needed by someone, which makes you feel that much more rooted to the world, even if the roots belong to someone else. From tender, emotionally raw + hooks, a tool for binding one thing to another. Compare on tenterhooks, which is a state of anxious suspense. (Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows)
For me, the feeling manifests itself as a sharp, twisting ache of the heart. Like, literally where the heart is supposed to be. It isn’t loud and violent and it doesn’t demand attention. It’s quieter and deeper, and it’s always waiting behind the turning, ready to pounce. It spends it’s time in the back alleys, and when forced into the limelight, is neither pretty nor repulsive. All at once, it’s face is mocking, joyous, and comforting, and it is definitely wearing a pair or rose-tinted glasses.
KLEXOS Maybe it's not so bad to dwell in the past, and muddle in the memories, to stem the simplification of time, and put some craft back into it. Maybe we should think of memory itself as an art form, in which the real work begins as soon as the paint hits the canvas. And remember that a work of art is never finished, only abandoned.” (Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows)
So much effort has gone into going to college abroad that you could be forgiven for thinking that it is the kind of thing that's the objectively correct thing to do. You MUST go to college abroad, I MUST study at the University of Waterloo. But after these four months, it doesn't feel that black and white. Mumbai's a beautiful city too, and it's not like it's lacking for opportunity. And shouldn't you try to live with your family and the majority of your friends for as long as you can? Realistically, what else matters?
Why, why, why? Why teeter alone through a Mumbai airport no less imposing and overwhelming than it's city, or fumble through an apology to the lady at the Zurich airport because you forget the PIN on your forex card? It fascinates me, how much we (read: I) put at stake for things we don't know will make us happier.
These are, for the most part, first-day jitters.
If you really asked me the 'why' question, you'd get back promptly a hurried, scribbled together list of reasons: a better, broader education, the potential for highest salaries and a greater proximity to innovation, and more creature comforts like bigger, cleaner dorms and a campus literally bigger than the town I come from.
And this what makes me deviate from the epicurean perspective: there must be something more than happiness. There's happiness in Mumbai: in the food, in being at home, in knowing precisely which restaurant makes which dish best, in the incredible privilege of being able to go down on a walk with a friend you've known for the last 10 years.
As i sit in this Air Canada flight that hurtles towards Toronto, I hope there's something more that awaits me in Waterloo. Once my friends and I realised we could do better, that it was something that was attainable, it became a reality we couldn't shut our eyes from. And in the most pedestrian act of everyday bravery, we jet halfway across the world in the hopes of a “better life”.
And that's what I hope awaits me in Waterloo: the part of human existence that transcends the epicurean: the ability to have a calmer existence, to be intellectually challenged, to come out stronger (and also, hopefully, happier, because for all the philosophical bluster that's all the really matters).