On the curiosity of our times..

And what time means to us.. A reading into some of the pages of a curios book about curiosity..

If you’re new here, these musings are meant to be reflections that are unfiltered, non-refined, and as much as possible, non-reviewed. The goal is to write authentically, achieve a state of flow with ideas, and not to think too much about ‘audience’, but about ‘ideas’ both in intellectual, and grammatical mistakes senses. :) Welcome!

Reader and friend, a pleasure to share with you again… I hope you enjoy this one, but let me get something going for you.. Here’s a song that can be a good accompanying sound..

If you’re a subscriber who’s attuned to the chat feature, you’d be aware that I’ve been reading (and sharing some of) Alberto Manguel’s “Curiosity”, which is an interesting book to say the least. In it, he talks about his relationship with time, and he says:

Today, summers are so short that barely have we put out the garden chairs when we are storing them away again; we hang up the Christmas lights for what seems only a few hours, while the new year comes and goes, and a new decade follows. This rush doesn’t unsettle me: I’m accustomed to the accelerated pace of the final pages in a story I’ve enjoyed. I feel some mild regret, yes. I am aware that the characters I grew to know so well will have to say their few last words, perform their last gestures, circle just one more time around the inaccessible castle, or drift away into the sea fog strapped onto the back of a whale. But everything that needed to be tidied up is tidied up, and anything that must remain unresolved will remain unresolved. I know that my desk is ordered to my satisfaction, my letters mostly answered, my books in their right places, my writing more or less finished (not my reading, but that, of course, is the nature of the beast). My list of “Things to Do,” propped up in front of me, still has a number of uncrossed items on it; but they have always been there and they always will, however many times I reach the bottom of the list. Like my library, my list of “Things to Do” is not meant ever to be exhausted.”

Today’s sunset was something.. I don’t know why the photo is so washed out though..

It resonated me with for many reasons, but most importantly, I remember my late father saying:

“Life ends, but work doesn’t..”

He said this to me when I was in my early twenties, and I never really understood it, or internalized it, until I had to go a good amount of time without work to move between countries and get immigration documentation and all that nonsense.

Our being in time is work..

I was desperate to be working again, and to be tied to a job and a career and progression and all that, and my father - in one of his usual gems, shaped by a life of harshness, struggle, and separation from his family, when I wanted to change jobs early in my life - he said: “comfort is half the salary” and now I am realizing this, 13 years after his passing, and around 17 years since he told me this. 3 jobs later, 3 countries later, an academic degree higher, I think of what my father told me about the price of comfort. He definitely didn’t mean “laziness”. A man who was paid in dates and milk for a day’s wage in construction will never talk about being lazy. He meant content.

I still want to progress in my career, and change my “title” to be more senior, to gain a bigger salary and bigger responsibilities, because I have signed up - willingly and unwillingly - to the notion of tying ourselves and our worths to work.

Now I am working, and I have a salary that pays my bills, and my work is something that I mostly enjoy, and I am still looking to create something else to tick out of my never-ending “Things to Do”. How did we get here? How did we get to this mental status of ‘having to do stuff’, otherwise we are failures.

For some reason, in another passage opposite of the one earlier, Manguel says:

“I find it easier to imagine my own death than to imagine the death of everything. In spite of theology and science fiction, the end of the world is difficult to conceive from our egocentric viewpoint: what is the stage like once the audience has departed? What does the aftermath of the last universal moment look like once there is no one left to see it? These seemingly trite conundrums show up to what point our capacity to imagine is bound by the consciousness of the first-person singular.”

And I read this at least 10 times. How much are we filled of our own egos that we equate or weight the death of ourselves against the whole world? It’s an eerily comforting one though. Contrasting this with the notion of ‘work as self-value tool’ is somewhat bizarre. ¹

Honorable mention to

Andrew McDonald

’s poem, aptly named “The Rat”.

“Mad, my lady..”

“Mad, my lady, is the traveler who annoyed by the day’s fatigues wants to go back to the beginning of the journey and return to the same place for all those things in life that we possess, it is better to possess them than to expect them, because nearer is the end when we have more advanced from the beginning. There is nothing sweeter or more pleasant to the weary man than an inn². So it is that, although youth be merry, the truly wise old man does not wish for it, because he who lacks reason and good sense loves almost nothing else but what he has lost.” ~ Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina

And we can extend this beyond the concept of youth to how we engage with our lives writ large. I think of this passage and I also think of how we can and should turn pages of our lives, yet we still try to hold on to the page without turning. I think of all the times I thought of wanting to go back to being 26, or whichever age the reader might think of or fancy, but then I think of this and realize, what’s the point of doing it all again? It really is madness to wish to toil again..

And I would argue, is it really something we lost? Is time really lost once we’ve passed through it? I caught myself sitting on the floor watching mindless YouTube, and realized: “Ok, let me get this writing done, which I have been putting off for like two weeks now..” And as I’m typing this, flipping through the pages of the book, scouring the quotes and all the underlines to share and reflect on, I’m thinking: is that time really lost?

Seneca, writing to a friend of his, says³:

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

But is it? When did we become the “ruthless capitalists” of our own times and our own lives?

I think of two of my friends, one who has lost a significant relationship, another who is hesitating on getting married, and not moving on with the decision. And I contrast both losses. One is from experiencing an actual loss, and the other is afraid of this experience of loss. Both are in a difficult situation, in their own unique ways. Both - I believe - think that they are ‘lacking’ something that prevents them from enhancing their own experience in life, or their own lives. Yet, what I see is two people at the epitome of life, in its paradox. My advice (or suggestion) to both of them, is to loosen the grip. Yes, it’s hard. Yes, I fail at this a lot. Yet, in my reminder to them is a reminder to myself as well. Sven-Göran Eriksson, one football’s most famous coaches passed away around 2 weeks ago. He still released a message through a documentary, and this message is the epitome of what I am trying to get at. “The life is about death as well.”.

The loss both of my friends carry within it the lived life, that is its realness and its truest form. No life lived has no consequences. Only the dead don’t face consequences. This consistent negotiation process is what allows us to sit later on and say, “we have lived”. If we haven’t gone through this negotiation, either winning or losing, then I don’t believe we can say with confidence that we have lived. The scars of battle, eh?

“We are not lost, we are here..”

Northrop Frye tells the story of a doctor friend who, crossing the Arctic tundra with an Inuit guide, was caught in a blizzard. In the icy dark, outside the boundaries he knew, the doctor cried out, “We are lost!” His Inuit guide looked at him thoughtfully and answered, “We are not lost. We are here.”

Our recognition of our position is what makes life livable, not our mere presence in it. The active stance does not necessitate the active action, instead it necessitates an active awareness of this position in time and secondarily, in space. I say secondarily in space because I believe in a universality of being that manifests itself in a similarity beyond the space, and within time, with time being on an individual or historical scales. I don’t believe my experience in this lived life has not been lived before in modern or ancient times. I also believe that we strive for as societies has not changed significantly throughout time.

For that reason, “We are not lost. We are here.” even when the going is tough, or when life is dark and icy.

I think of this notion, and think of the notion of “being here”, and ho we always chase being here, but sometimes we feel in the most important part, which is being somewhere. Manguel contextualizes this in the form of travel when he says:

And so we believe that in one place we are alone and look out onto the world, and in another we are among our brethren and look back upon our self, lost somewhere in the past. We pretend to travel from home to foreign countries, from a singular experience to a communal alien one, from whom we once were towards whom we’ll one day be, living in a constant state of exile. We forget that, wherever we find ourselves, we are always “here.”

One Day..

I think of these things: an examined and experienced life and living, “being here” and not “being lost”, our curious case of the elusive time, our attempts to maximize it and waste it at the same time, and I think of my perception of time passing both in the religious and the mere human senses. What is time well spent? Is it work? or is it ‘living’ even with the difficulties of life? do we consider ourselves ‘living’ if we’re so uncertain about our lives, or is that just toiling that precedes living?

Never ask the way of someone who knows it, because then you won’t be able to get lost.

—Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav.

The film “Perfect Days” is something that possibly resonates, answers and also investigates these ideas. “In praise of the ordinary life” is how I would tag this movie, but it is not an ordinary film for sure. We can talk about the perfect sound track later. It really moved me, and it’s a visual masterpiece.

Until the next one, you’ve made it to the end of this rambling.. I thank you..

📚: “The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings” an interesting read on what happens when things end for artists and athletes.

🎵: I might have shared that I’ve been on some Qawwali binge for the last couple of months. Classical music from South Asia, mainly Pakistan these days.. Here’s an article about Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan from

Hamnawa

..

On Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and his Chain of Light

Mainly famous for his Eddie Vedder song “The long road”, and I can talk about how the lyrics resemble the original lyrics of Qawwali, the longing for the beloved, the feebleness of life, the passing of moments, but I “somewhat directed” this video, because I was driving..⁴

We talk again soon inshallah…

1. As a Muslim though, I do believe that death isn’t an end, but a gate into another world..

2. Here, the analogy of death as an inn is derived from the Christian tradition. Muslims used similar metaphors of rest, such as a port, an end of a race, etc to soften the blow of “end of this life”..

3. This friend of his is Paulinus, the supervisor of Rome’s grain supply. Seneca has a book aptly named: On the Shortness of Life. For more.

4. You hear me say “Allah” and “hmmm”, and this level of interaction is common with Qawwali or poetry in general, when “it hits”..