Master and the Middle

[It was my birthday last weekend and I have put together this  piece of rambling over the last few weeks, as a present for myself. Those of you who know me well know that I have a tendency to be random and rambling  in conversations, but I like to think that if you listen closely, there are threads that connect them. If you think this essay below is totally bullshit rambling, you should be glad that I spared you somewhat by editing out parts in the end where I found myself talking about ‘Lolita’ as a work of art.  I will let you  make your own guess how  I got there -:). More than a song with a catchy melody, this turned out to be more of a jazz piece. Hope you enjoy half as much as I enjoyed writing it.]

Maintaining long distance friendships is more difficult than one realizes I think. Unlike their more sensual and demanding cousins, the long distance relationships, they do not suffer from the strains of exclusivity.   This makes them less fraught with jealousy and all the related poison that can bring to the mix. However, all the same, long distance friendships, and any friendship for that matter, does take conscious and continuous effort. While it is true that technology has brought us multiple ways to re-connect and reminisce with old friends, physical reunions are the top dollar that one can expend to this end. Instant messages, Facebook likes, tweets etcetera may help keep the ambers of old friendships alive, but often, it takes leisure and slower pace afforded by in-person meetings to fully rekindle the glow. In the monetary system of maintaining friendships, an instant message is perhaps a penny, physical reunions, dollar bills. I find that one needs to spend such top dollars every so often to maintain and grow friendships that one cares about. And finding such spare dollars can be difficult amidst the demands of our daily routine and immediate surroundings. Course, there is also a large dose of living-in-the momentness that’s necessary for one’s sanity and personal growth, enjoying what’s in front of us than pining for what’s in the past and what’s far away. Sometimes, opportunities to meet up with old friends come about through a confluence with one’s obligations, like when you find yourself in the vicinity of where a friend lives for work or for family reasons or vice versa. However, in the lack of those, it’s easy enough to neglect this investment because it takes enough of going outside one’s immediate concerns. One you neglect it, over a period of time, the inertia grows bigger and bigger. Ultimately, shared experiences are the foundations of friendships and without personal visits to replenish the well of common ties and experiences, they run the risk of going dry, going stagnant.

Further compounding the weight of distance and inertia are changes in terms of family circumstances, relationships, jobs, moves to new countries, cities, newborns increasingly, that steer our lives in different directions, changing our courses drastically in some ways, subtly in others. Invariably, through passage of time, whether one realizes or not, although our core selves, the fabric may remain the same, time brings about changes in texture, color and feel. Some new creases appear, some old ones get smoothened out. In the midst of all this, decisions and choices that one makes under changing surroundings and circumstances are not easily relatable often to outsiders, maybe not even to good friends. Definitely not over an instant message or a short phone call. Maybe I feel this way more as someone who falls towards the introverted end of the expressiveness scale. Last year, I met up with a good friend who happened to be in the city I live in for work. There was about an hour before her train departed and I found it was just not enough time and space to expand into various things we talked about. Instead, we just fleeted somewhat glibly from one topic to another. This made me restless and impatient and I felt bad afterwards for being a bit short, unforthcoming. In-person reunions, longer ones, a weekend spent together, a trip taken together, provide time, leisure and space required to not just revisit old things but also fully share, observe and appreciate each other’s changing circumstances. Subtle and drastic.

Underneath the waves of changes that steers life in various directions, there is also a strong, underlying current, an ever-present one perhaps. This current is that of the privacy of our experiences, our emotions in particular. Physical experiences engage all of our senses; emotions are by nature, not entirely logical or rational. As such, it is hard to capture the privacy of such experiences and relay it to others, friends or not. Maybe one just has a much better shot with good friends. The further out you go from the actual occurrence of an experience, both temporally and by subject, the sharpness, the fullness, the rawness diminishes. For better and for worse, for better with shitty experiences, for worse with ones that bring pleasure. Experiencing something directly is like going to a concert; relating it to others maybe like listening to a CD. To express ourselves, most of us who lack artistic faculties resort to talking, words, language, which are reductive, limiting even. I recently read Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, his famous philosophical treatise, at a friend’s recommendation. One of his central ideas there, I thought was that only the material, objective truths of the world can be expressed clearly with language we have because that’s how language came about; the big metaphysical questions in life can’t be expressed clearly with language and words we have at our disposal as they lie beyond the objective material world. It maybe a bit of a stretch, but I think a defensible one, to say that the same inexpressibility applies also to what we feel, our emotions. Emotions and experiences expressed with grace, authenticity, and beauty becomes art, good art. Be it through music, literature, paintings. Any medium really. Thoughts clearly expressed is articulate. Behind art and articulate lies a vast expanse. In this expanse, today we churn out reams and reams of posts, pictures, tweets, likes, dislikes, shares to fill this space with various social media tools. In this context, physical reunions with old friends are valuable because they provide us with time, space and presence necessary to talk, not talk, remain silent, observe, engage in nonverbal communication, through eye contact, body language, facial expressions.

Besides what we can’t share, there is also what we do not want to, particularly with people who may not know us very well beyond the immediate surface of our lives. When I think about why one values privacy, among many reasons, I think a major one is that we do not want to be judged by people who do not know the intricate circumstances of our lives. We human beings have a tendency, almost a reflexive one, to judge. Judging is essentially comparing what we encounter with what we already know. Judging is innate and necessary even, as it helps us process the world around us. If we can quickly sort things into boxes we recognize, we avoid ambiguity and uncertainty, which helps to make decisions, take actions. Understanding the nuances, intricate details of every person, every single situation requires time, energy, patience which, we do not have or don’t want to invest in. I myself often think life is too short to be friends with everybody, I am quite selective in investing time to build friendships. So I am in no way trying to be holier than thou here. We judge, therefore we are. As such, we like things to be this or that, black or white. The upshot of all this is judging, whether by nature or necessity, it that we tend to judge more than we try to understand. Labels such as nihilist, communist, capitalist, elitist, sexist, racist are all manifestations of our propensity to judge, label, theorize. In addition, everyone today has access to their own loudspeaker in the form of social media outlets to air and amplify their judgments. In this echo chamber of noise and clamor, defining and labeling us by our choices, what we read, and don’t read, like, share, show we care, do not care, the value of old friendships also lies in providing a refuge from the snap judgments of the world. With old friends, we share a common knowledge of each other’s trajectory and evolution over a long period of time. With this time comes understanding, empathy, forgiving. And abstinence from judgment. Hopefully.

Well, I have rambled on for a bit here and I am not sure whether this has been somewhat articulate, much less art. But I suppose you could reasonably knit these themes together and say that if you sum them up, our desires for privacy, the privacy of emotions and the difficulty of maintaining old friendships, what one is left with is a life that has to be navigated alone.  And I don’t mean alone here in the sense here of not having company for a Friday evening beer or a Sunday afternoon movie, but alone in the sense that life’s journey inherently is a very private one. Each life, each person has his or her own unique circumstances. And the journey is always a solitary one, at its core. In my experience, friendships, relationships that allow time and space for that solitude, while also providing an anchor of stability amidst the waves of changes that life brings are the best and the most enduring ones.