1. The thing about meaning
Dear Jash,
This year I discovered a thing I really love doing. It’s ridiculous how much joy I get from such a simple activity. Every. Darn. Time!
I am talking of course about going on walks. Putting on headphones, playing Spotify radio, taking random walks in the city and getting moderately lost, I have discovered is a surefire way to exercise my serotonin receptors. Being directionally challenged comes in very handy here. I simultaneously discover new neighborhoods and new songs along the way. I don’t remember most of the streets I’ve been on and most of the songs I’ve listened to. I skip streets and songs I don’t find particularly interesting. That’s the best thing about random walks. There is no purpose, nor a destination. But the feel of some streets and the tunes of some songs always stick. It’s wonderful to flit through the streets and watch the world pass by, going about its sonder ways. It’s almost an introvert pilgrimage of sorts. The ideal level of social engagement. All of the perks, none of the costs.
I went on one such walk today. I walked to the pier and back home. It was a relatively short one this time. But I didn’t play the Spotify radio today. Since it’s the year end, I noticed today a playlist called “Your top songs of 2017”. The app had auto-curated it based on all of my listenings over the past year. Such a beautiful gesture! A testament to the fact that, technology can also be beautiful. As I listened through the playlist, it kept hitting me with these “pleasant surprises” one after another. Some songs I had forgotten, I had decimated the replay button for, earlier in the year. I was standing at the pier, staring at and listening to the waves crashing on the wall, over the sound of my headphones. And then Midnight in Harlem came on. You know that super fleeting moment of extreme bliss you have sometimes for no specific reason at all? It’s not because you’ve won the lottery or you cracked an exam or an interview or you realize you’ve fallen in love, it’s just for the sake of itself. Nothing has changed. But the world around you in that particular moment is perfect, just as it is, for no reason at all and for all the reasons. I had one of those. My brain juices were having an early New Year up there. Then I started walking back, grinning stupidly.
As I walked back, I realized that, the pleasant surprises were pleasant indeed, but they weren’t really surprises, were they? They were a consequence of me scrolling through all the songs over the year, replaying the good ones and skipping the not so good ones along the way; and the app silently and diligently keeping track of and learning from my behavior in the background. Choosing to randomly walk to the pier instead of a brutish parking lot was also not that random. It was a subconscious decision based on all the walks I have taken in the city in the past. And all of this had crescendoed into that one blissful moment. There is a concept in Systems Theory called Emergence, that applies perfectly well here. In that, while my individual left and right turns and the individual replays and skips in the past weren’t too meaningful just by themselves, in unison, they were creating something very meaningful all along. Their whole, far exceeded the sum of the parts.
And this is true not just for random musical walks, is it? It’s true for life in general! Although it might feel so, a meaningful life is not stumbled upon just by serendipity. It is carefully and intricately crafted from really small and individually trivial actions. Heck, this is even true for society in general!
I see these weekly notes as one such attempt by us to create something valuable together, one note at a time. To create a whole, greater than the sum of the parts. To communicate beyond the monthly or bi-monthly ‘ssup’s and ‘nm’s, in a way that would be meaningful not just to us, but also to anyone else who stumbles upon them. I hope we keep this endeavor up for a long time, so that when we’re older and wiser, we could fondly look back upon these notes and realize that they had some part to play in who we would be as people then. The fact that we are literally separated by time and space and by work and life, almost adds a strange charm to it.
So, the thing about meaning, is that it happens in small moves, and here is my first.
Jash, I’ll see you next week! :)
Pushkar
P.S. Here is the playlist I was listening to.
