Mourning the loss of here and now
In an overcrowded world that is bustling with opportunities and priorities, it is harder than ever to be present and awake to the present moment.
It’s the middle of a busy work day. I am tight-rope walking on my calendar’s diktats. Between appointments, I am going through tasks when I remember a photo I needed for planning an upcoming birthday.
Skimming through my phone’s photo roll, I hover over sun-kissed ones of us from the summer of 2023. Not too far away in time but its memories nevertheless weathered under the insurmountable weight of responsible living.
Gone are the days of getaways planned on a whim. Losing myself in the idyllic countryside as the train I rode snaked around a gigantic rainbow that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. Walking in quaint towns, seeking out solitude in medieval churches or ornate graveyards, reading the tombstones of strangers and conjuring up their lives. The grey winter afternoons at work suddenly turned around with impromptu plans for the Christmas markets afterwards.
The feathery sensation of sands swept along with the waves tickling the soles of my feet as I sauntered along the coastline. The simple joy of evenings spent lounging with coffee and having a chat with a friend, watching the sun recede into an orange speck that is eventually engulfed by the gargantuan shadows of the banyan tree as night falls.
I remember those days like I wouldn’t from most holidays I have taken in recent times.
Adulting took away a piece of me that was content spending hours mooning at the sky or walking the longer route home because I wanted to talk to a friend longer without innately weighing in on how much more I could do with that time. It eroded my ability to be wrapped in a moment, feeling it in a way that etches itself in your subconscious without a cost-benefit analysis. It is nudging me out of this moment to seek the next and the one thereafter in the quest for sublimity and bliss.
I suffer from pathological productivity, as Oliver Burkemann puts it. I am trying to do many things because, it is true, my time here on this beautiful planet is limited. And planning for a good life seems sensible because there are far too many facets of it that cannot be otherwise tended to.
Except for all our trying, the good things in life seem to lie in the future, which never arrives.
On a recent trip, driving through the cold desert of Spiti in the Himalayas I remember waking up to the snow-clad peaks of the magnificent mountains from our window and feeling displaced. It was as if I was searching for something more appropriate to feel with the grandeur before me instead of the emptiness that prevailed. I was like the bird you let out of a cage who has no idea what to do with herself.
My reverie was broken by the aroma of the breakfast spread that had wafted onto our balcony, signalling that the day had begun.
In our modern lives, there is an itinerary to be met, places to see, and photos to be taken and checked off the list, even when off the clock.
I sat down with a copy of Suleika Jaoud’s ‘Between Two Kingdoms’ to accompany my morning coffee. But my eyes wandered to the vast grey and dusty green canvas in front that was barren and thirsty, punctuated only by a pearly mountain stream that had receded into a sliver. The mountains that rose behind them stood like lonely warriors on a battlefield. I wondered about the people who traversed across them, their stories, which must have permeated through the snow to become one with the peaks. Footsteps that carried the weight of ambition but were nevertheless erased.
We changed plans that day and decided to stay another day.
I needed to be out there. To walk a nameless, rocky trail, surrounded by the unappeasing cold cutting through the artifice of living, to expose raw and tender nerves underneath a surface I have worn for most of my life.
To do nothing but stare at the slanting midday sun as it poured over us.
Living in a world obsessed with extracting everything quantifiably possible from every measure of time, it was a reminder as to why it is necessary to unmoor oneself once in a while. To slip through the cracks between the hands of hours and minutes to a place where we can be, just in that moment.
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