Deciding a Gift or How I Got Anxiety for No Reason

The dates of a calendar mean nothing much for work means weekdays and some sacrificed weekends. But then it’s a particular day of some month and you realize that an event is about to occur soon for which you have to be prepared. The preparation involves very less about the physical make up of your attire or body and in the rarest of times remotely constitutes which you are an expert of. It is in concern of a composition, well thought out, expertly crafted, uniquely suited and fashioned in pursuance of conveying a birthday gift. At that point, with a pen or spoon or phone in hand, or standing, lying, sitting, jostling as the case may be, you encounter what the astronauts often talk about - ‘zero gravity’, except in your case, you have those feet firmly planted where you left them to be, attached to a body that has not left the known neighbourhood of solid ground, and yet you are now losing yourself rudderless in a maze, starting with the question –“What to gift?”

There can be no right answer. Trick question.

In the recent months to come, there are several occasions of such quality which will present a similar dilemma. Batman has taught me to have a contingency plan ready, but being a generally bad student, I have no plan prepared yet, although the thought buzzes annoyingly around me. I have begun to take longer walks in order to have time to think and figure out the perfect gift. I have become a brooding monk, and as the days fly away in the dust, the mad scientist at the verge of discovery will gradually take over. I hope it won’t come to the stage of a desperate and cornered politician. Nevertheless, I have learned a valuable lesson, something I learn every year but every year with flowers and the paddy, once the harvest is cleared, the lesson too fades away. I realise I know nothing about the people close to me.

I know something about what they like or they don’t because I have my choices to catalogue them by. However where I have no point of reference, the librarian simply jots them down in pieces of paper, stuffing them anywhere that is handy at the moment, and promptly forgets afterwards. I have listened to these people talk, enthusiastically, ardently, compassionately, honestly, but I have absorbed nothing. A sponge has more retaining capacity than me I am sure. I tell myself that it doesn’t make me a bad person. Unfortunately, I am not that confident that those persons will tell that to themselves about me too when I end up giving something that, when ripped out of the wrapping paper, doesn’t scream out “THOUGHTFUL.”

I honestly love people. I love their stories and minds. But I find no energy to judge them on the encounters I have with them nor the information I obtain. I simply immerse myself in the conversation, like a holiday maker in some beach, sitting on the sand, cradling a bottle of beer, looking at nothing but seeing everything, and leaving the beach unburdened. Conversations, when they don’t involve work, shouldn’t be like work, having to sift through for broken knowledge. Because that’s what assumptions precisely are. We find the pieces spread across many interactions under incomparable circumstances, and expect the jagged, scarred picture to be what the person is. It’s easy to just ask what they want and gift them with something they would truly enjoy. Instead I am expected to find something they may just like enough to smile saint-like, and hopefully not put it away in some Narnia closet, never to be found again. The worst case will simply inspire the three R’s of gifting – Re-packing, Re-gifting, Re-cycling. And by saving that person from suffering through this same anxiety of having to decide what to get as a gift for another, I shall consider my stupidly overthought gift to be the best one actually.

As I said, there cannot be a right answer.

Un-deading a Writer

It didn’t take long for life to squeeze out my dreaming and fantasising self. It was a mostly painless process. I imagine I was like the frog that thought it was enjoying a Jacuzzi while slowly being boiled to soup. It was the end of creation, nothing Armageddon-like, just the quietest of deaths in general. No one mourned for no one noticed nor cared as quickly surrogate amusement increasingly became part of the daily routine. Somewhere in the virtual drug induced sleep, I lolled once too often, and let my creativity guzzle out the last spit of life. It could have returned as a vampire, nocturnal and sporadic, if I had given it a proper burial, but there was a growing discomfort of self-doubt that worked wonders to let the loss remain unacknowledged and ignored; it became a glob of putrefied old idea and the liquid stank of failure.

It hasn’t been great without that nagging and attention seeking self which would make me vomit out words one after the other to see if they made any sense as they appeared in some physical form.

But death cannot be eternal as life isn’t eternal too. So, I returned to the undead. I realized for another time that it’s not happiness or sadness that made me write, it was my stupid ego that pushed the cart over the rainbow bridge, hoping to avoid the absolute muck, and land on a semi decent piece of literature to remember the day by. I would forget what I had written just as soon as I put the last full-stop in place, and would write again the next day, the desire to express clawing at the keyboard in synchronized patterns.

The gladness of having made something that at least sounded good when read out loud satisfied me, and pushed away that heavy blanket that continually bows us down in. The thick cosy blanket someone had put over me, over you, promising safety and security. It is woven with the needle pressure of getting a good job, the thread work is pulled with the will of finding a profitable career, the covers hide well and present a functional family, and the frills uselessly advertise a life well lived though all they do is get dirty. This blanket or adult sized tent keeps you safe from the sun and the rain, the cold and the storm, but is the weather all that a place has to offer? You sometimes get curious to see what else is out there but a sudden breeze proves to be too chilly sensitive skin, and you never dare to pull it away from you. By the time you may have realized that you have lived the life of a slave with the total experience of a child, that tent becomes your shroud and all you have the energy left for is to lie straight with your eyes shut, waiting for the grim reaper to roll a dice and place you in your box.

It doesn’t matter how I started. I have reached where I was supposed to though I didn’t know it when I began.