2024-12-21 Journal Entry
Day one of the wedding down. (This is Dan and Tania’s wedding – saying that for posterity.) Admittedly, the mehndi was a lot of fun but also made it clear how the next few days will probably be at least a bit awkward. Like many weddings, there’s the “bride’s side” and the “groom’s side”, and you generally have to sort of pick one and go with it. In a way, that’s also how Dan and Tania’s friend groups fall, with the added divide of people they met before and after college. For Dan’s friends, there’s essentially all of his college friends, and then there’s me. Similarly with Tania, there’s family and friends from college, and then there’s the friends from work or from SF. I’ve mostly ended up straddling the line and hanging out with Zeek, Amelia, and Mel, all of whom mostly know Tania from working at Square. But more importantly they’re essentially hte people who don’t have other predefined friend groups at the wedding, and so we kinda all get to know each other now. Dan’s college roommates all kinda hang together, and Tania’s college friends all sorta hang together, and we’re a bit of the etc. group. It’s not too bad, but it is one of those time that I wish I were better at socializing. There are so many people at the wedding that I wish I was better equipped to make friends with strangers, and I’m really not. Ce la vie.
I’m also feeling like I really have to figure out this whole travel vs. vacation thing. On the one hand, there’s so many things that I want to do that I could spend a lifetime doing them, but there’s also so few days in life that I have to aggressively cull down my options into something of a manageable size. Like right now – I’m intentionally making the decision that I am going to write a good bit today, but that comes at the expense of spending time on the beach or whatever.
But that comes with the territory of really wanting to be a writer.
I was reading Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, and she talked a bit about fiction being a place to look at suffering and to imbue meaning into it. At first blush, I really liked that, and it reminded me of the Craig Arnold poem “Bird-Understander”, which makes me cry every time I read it.
But then of course I’m also not so sure that fiction is really about making sense of things. It is about looking plainly, though, about not turning away. Perhaps that’s the thing that has so troubled me about Dubai so far, which is that it’s a place that’s unwilling to look at pain and hurt. That’s perhaps something that bothers me about cities in general – so many people who are unwilling or unable to look squarely at suffering and to do anything about it. In a way, looking at suffering causes us suffering as well, a phantom pain. We know all too well that the suffering of others is suffering of our own, and so we turn away. Our own interconnectedness is a glory too great to bear, and so we shy away from it like nervous lovers, too awkward and embarassed to admit our glory and our shortcomings.
If I had the knack,
I’d sing like
Cherry flakes falling.
- Basho
And so anyways, I don’t really have much more to say right now. I’m just sitting around leisurely, having woken up far too late for my own good, and I just felt like putting a bunch of words down. Writing like this is a bit of dharma practice, really. I can sit here and feel all the tension, see the grain of my own thoughts. Feelings come and go much more often when I sit and observe them like this. I have a feeling I want to write more about traveling, but I’m not yet sure what to say yet. There’s an openness that I want to have and not to feel the need to crystalize things yet, but I do want to be saying something about why I’m going this. Maybe I don’t really even know either.
To some degree it’s an unwillingness to do several things. One is the unwillingness to live a life that others live, which of course comes out of this deep-seated desire to be special. I would like to tread my own path, so to speak, and to experience things that are different.
Another is simply a dissatisfaction with the way we structure our work. To work for another is to implicitly cosign their worldview and to do work on their behalf. That’s not to imply that the people I worked for are bad by any means, but I do think we’re going along with something that probably isn’t great. Working for a huge tech company that ties into the global financial ecosystem is something that I’m increasingly somewhat concerned about, not because I’m specifically anti-globalization or something but because I personally don’t find satisfaction in that. Sure, it’s great to get products from around the world, but that comes at the cost of being less resilient at an individual level. Resiliency is sorta the name of the game for biological beings, and so do feel a desire to be more independent, more self-sufficient, and to have a wider breadth of knowledge about other things. If I had to grown my own food, could I? Could I wire up the electricity in my house? I don’t think it’s necessarily a requirement for everyone to know about everything that they interact with, but I do think a healthy skepticism about our position in the world is probably good. What actually is the implication of the thing that you’re buying , or what you’re eating, or the work that you do?
And so getting increasingly comfortable with not-knowing lends you the ability to more plainly look at the world around you. In Buddhism, the root of suffering is confusion, not because the world is inherently a good or bad place but rather because we cannot see it plainly. That is our conditioning as animals, to see it as terrible. You could make this place beautiful goes the Maggie Smith poem “Good Bones.” But indeed you do not have to make the place beautiful so much as you have to stop papering over its beauty.
And so why am I writing all of this? I suppose it’s really just a way to try and make sense of the world, but I’m not really sure I’m actually making things more clear. I’m just continuing to write because writing feels nice, I want to share these things but have nowhere real to share them. Perhaps it’s loneliness, I don’t know. I think I’m just tired today, which usually means I’m kinda sad, and that’s why I’m writing so much. I should take a nap.