For every beginning, there is an end

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Yesterday I was looking at a the copyright page of Dance Dance Dance and under “Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data,” I saw “Murakami, Hakuri, 1949— ” . The “1949— ” gave me a small panic attack. I couldn’t breath right. I couldn’t think straight. The palms of my hands were sweating. (It didn’t help that I was on a plane and we were taking off. I’m always afraid of plane take-offs.)

1949— : Murakami, Hakuri is still alive, but he will die. We don’t know when, but his death is so certain that we put a long dash and left a space after his birth year. And when he dies, we will add the year of death, and the information will be complete. Our job will be done.

Murakami, Haruki 1949-“

We don’t have shelf space for aging, death, and dying. They are so unfashionable. But small signs remind us that deep inside we know the truth. Journalists write obituaries when people are still alive. We make wills. And yet we maintain the illusion that what is true for everybody else will not be true for us. That, as Christopher Hitchens says, God in our case will make an exception. It’s not surprising. The experience of the end, as the experience of the beginning, is something we don’t know anything about.

When it comes to human experience, I have a graphic and unstoppable imagination. When somebody dies, especially if they die in frightening circumstances, I cannot stop myself from imagining how it must have felt. I can feel their fear, hear their screams, think their thoughts, even sense a shadow of their pain in my body. An extreme form of empathy, I suppose.

But this is still experience of living. The final, scary, moments of life. I cannot go beyond the wall of an experience that is no longer life, no longer human.

An interesting situation, if you think about it. We are trapped in this interval between a beginning and an end we don’t know anything about. The end is particularly mysterious. The end is unthinkable. We don’t know when it’s going to come. We don’t know how it’s going to come. We don’t know what will happen (or not happen) thereafter. Yet it belongs to our history and the history of all the people we know.

Grateful to the City

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I’m grateful to the City because it doesn’t make me forget about what life is about, what death is about, what money and lack of money are about.

Brooklyn Bridge

The City (and the Subway most of all) doesn’t allow me to forget me what urine, shit, and spit smell and look like when they are out in the open, communication devices as much as bodily excretions. I come home and wash my hands, but I cannot wash my soul clean and blind as I did when I lived in the suburbs.

At night, the City is magnificent, paralyzing in its beauty of lights and skyscrapers, crowds of people and cars, loud noise and incessant movement, a futuristic dance of humans, buildings, and machines.

I’m grateful to the City because it reminds me every moment what being human is about: in small gestures, in the kindness of strangers, in the expressions on people’s faces early in the morning.

A family taxonomy of anxiety

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I grew up in a family divided by attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors and united by anxiety.

My father was constantly afraid that something horrible would happen to us, to the point of being controlling, unreasonable, and occasionally violent. I don’t know for sure what made him that way, but I have an some thoughts about it; let’s call it the “fear of flying” hypothesis.

Let’s start with a supernatural event that happened when my father was a child. I don’t remember all the details (the place, the people, or the exact time); my brain has decided to save the story that my father told us so many times in the form of a few clear images.

I see a child, perhaps three or four, standing on an unprotected sundeck on top of a building. On the deck there are two chaises lounges with faded blue and orange stripes. It’s summer, and it’s a hot sunny day with a beautiful blue sky. The child faces south and the sun blinds him. He steps forward, stumbles, and suddenly the familiar sense of standing on solid ground is replaced by a new sensation: he is flying.

His terrorized parents found him on the ground unscathed but somewhat delirious. He told his mother that a beautiful angel made of light held him in his arms and delivered him safely on the ground. The doctor who later examined him found nothing wrong with him. I wonder if he absorbed some of his mother’s terror after this event and decided that relying on angels for his survival was not necessarily a wise choice.

A later event might have reinforced this belief. My father had an older brother. He was a cool guy who flew helicopters and looked really handsome in his uniform. He had survived the war and seemed untouchable. Unfortunately, he wasn’t. One day—my father was a teenager—he did not come back from one of his routine flights. No angel showed up to save him.

My father never took an airplane. He made a practice of choosing safe, familiar routes over daring and exciting ones. He tried to teach us the same, with fairly poor results. I still crave very much for my freedom of choice and for daring and exciting experiences. Except that I live them with this nagging feeling that if something can go wrong it will and that I’m risking my life at each step.

My mother’s anxiety was of a different kind. She was afraid of dreaming something good for herself and her family, because she learned early in life that desiring beautiful things (like spending a vacation her father or marrying the man she loved) can turn into devastating losses and long-term suffering. So, she never wished anything good for us, and actively fought our dreams. But really, she was just trying to protect us.

Although I’ve absorbed quite a bit of my parents anxiety, my own anxiety is different and much more American: it’s about having to make every moment of my life productive and valuable at all costs. The result is that I waste a substantial amount of time and resources because I can’t just take time off and relax. If I relax, it has to be productive relaxation or else it would feel as I’m wasting my life. Most of the times, my rebellious other self takes over and decides that it would be a good idea to just waste time: playing a useless video game for hours perhaps, or doing some useless but complicated research online. Anything but relaxing productively or going through my to do list.

I have been out of work for almost a week, and I’m just starting to feel that relaxing may be a really good idea. For example, I could take a walk: no, not an exercise power walk or a walk to the store to buy grocery. Just a walk, for no reason whatsoever except that walking is pleasant, it’s a gorgeous Fall day, and I want to.

And while I’m just walking, I realize why it’s so important for me to do things that don’t have a predefined purpose. I’m taking time to explore what’s happening to me. I give time to my brain to process the latest events rather than thinking of (obsessing over) them. I do what feels interesting at the moment and let myself be aware of how it feels. Does it feel good? Exciting? Boring? Is it enough? Should I move to something else? I realize that I rarely use my own internal signals to drive my decisions.

So, I take some of this hectic time with so many things to do to relax, and spend some quality time with myself. And now that I’m not bossing me around with errands to do, places to be, things to worry about, I even start to enjoy my company.

Time to leave, again…

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I resigned from my job today. It took a long time, but what did it was the sense of being trapped, like in a dream where I am moving through a high viscosity fluid and each movement forward is too many times harder than it should be. At work, success meant being able to do my job in spite of the obstacles. I’m sure many people like that type of challenge. I personally prefer to do work, solve new problems, and being able to see and touch the results of what I have done every day. Having authority figures always say no and having to convince them over and over again it’s not my type of challenge. Been there, done that, hated it.

Wai-O-Tapu boiling mud on Flicker

I truly enjoyed most of the people I worked with. The ethics of the organization are outstanding. The benefits are to die for. My company is a very good company. Yet it suffers from the corporate disease of excessive bureaucracy, overorganization, and overprocessing that happens when you put too many people working together with a reward systems that doesn’t understand human psychology.

The natural reward is to be able to see what you have accomplished and feel proud of it. But in this environment rules and habits win over the pragmatic drive of getting the job done; anxiety and fear of failure win over the excitement for new and better solutions; politics win over collaborative synergies that create exceptional results. So people take pride in holding tight to their own territory and their job roles; they get some nourishment and recognition from the small control they can exert on their environment and on the work of others (which usually means stopping others from doing something or resisting doing something). I understand it; I’ve done it. It doesn’t work.

Moving from the fluid satisfaction of being happy because of your accomplishments to the frozen sense of security that comes from exercising control on others is endearing and deadly. Endearing, because it’s so human and so desperate. Deadly, because it’s the early symptom of the crystallization process that transforms an organization from a vibrant living and growing organism to a paralyzed bureaucracy. In the end, it becomes inefficient, wasteful of talent and resources, and soul starving. In the end, the tiny amount of nourishment that comes from control over others is not enough to keep you alive.

Train from Pyin-u-lwin to Hsipaw (Flicker)

I’m talking for myself. I’m sure other people see and feel things differently. People thrive on different things. The barriers that suffocate me can be reassuring for others. Rules and bureaucracy that draw my energy and enthusiasm away are felt as necessary checks and balanced by others. I respect that, it’s just not for me.

So today it was like saying good-bye to my friends and family at a train station. I said goodbye and I was sad because I will miss the people; it’s a big piece of my life I’m leaving behind, as many times before. But I can feel the future and the road ahead of me and it’s a powerful, irresistible call.

Guilt and shame

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These past days, I’ve been wondering what is that holds me back. I have ideas, I have plans and desires, I have dreams. And yet, it seems that I spend most of my time distracting myself and wasting time.

Then, yesterday, riding the train to the city, I put the book I was reading down for a moment (Carol Shields’s Collected stories, just at the beginning of Mrs. Turner cutting the grass) and I turned my head. There she was. My guilt was looking at me from behind, watching my every move.

She was silent, but clearly questioning my trip to the city. “Stop looking at me that way, I need that backpack that can hold my laptop and my camera,” I said. “No, you don’t. All the bags you have are perfectly fine.” I perceived what she was really saying: “You don’t deserve it.” You don’t deserve to travel with your computer and your camera. You don’t deserve to do what you like. You don’t deserve to have dreams.

(Who is she? As much as I strain my neck, I can never make her face up. She is always behind me.) “Just wait a little longer,” she told me in silence. “All will end and you won’t have anything to worry about. All the angst about what to do with your life will be behind you. As a matter of fact, it’s already behind you. it’s already too late.”

I suspect she has been with me for a long time. Perhaps from the beginning, before I could speak and even before I learned there was a world outside of myself. She’s followed me in all my moves from one place to the next, as I left behind family, friends, lovers, homes, pets, and possessions. She is the one that has always suggested me to wait and to ask for permission before trying: “Perhaps you need to ask around, just to make sure that you are not deluding yourself. You know, I just don’t want you to fail and get hurt.”

Perhaps you too have your guilt following you all the times. It’s easy to know when she is there. You can feel her breathing behind you and you are surprised every time a police car goes by without stopping you.

But why?

* * * * *

For some reason, she grew up believing that preserving things was better than using them. She learned how to save energy and stuff. Her mother told her periodically of a box of chocolate she received when she was a child. She loved chocolate with a passion and yet she exercised great constrain and disciplined herself to eat not more than a piece of chocolate a week until the chocolate became white and stale and had to been thrown away.

She behaved as she expected to lose everything she had at any moment; as if nothing was to be taken for granted. It’s strange, because her family was never that poor or economically unstable. Her family wasn’t very rich, but always in good enough shape, even at the beginning, where her dad was earning little money, was still looking for a stable job, and they owned a tiny white Fiat 500.

She never had to skip a meal, although she remembered that one time when she stumbled walking from the kitchen to the dining room and dropped a plate of penne pasta on the floor. It wasn’t her fault but her father got really angry at her. The plate must have not been broken, because he ordered her to pick up every single penna from the marble floor and put then back in the plate. “This is your dinner,” he said. (It’s possible that her mother had complained, with no result. It’s unlikely, though; when it came to disputes with the children, her mother would take a break from arguing with her husband and take his side).

Perhaps, her psychotherapist suggested, she did lack something. Love, recognition, understanding, safety. Safety. That would explain it, wouldn’t it? Even if she had enough to eat today, she didn’t feel it was safe to expect that she would in the future. Perhaps her family would split, or her mother would send her away as she did when her sister was born, or her parents would die.

At that time she was probably 7 or 8 years old. When her parents were out she would start imagining what would happen to her if they had an accident and died. She would probably move with her grandmother. What would she bring with her? How would her grandma know? Luckily, she knew where to find her phone number. Grandma it’s a long ways away. She would have to take the train. Where would she find the money? And how would she get to the station? Could she find something to eat? How long would she able to survive?

Making plans. Preserving energy. Be prepared. She always traveled with a backpack that would have enough to survive for a week. Several pens and paper—that was essential. Some money, a book, phone numbers, keys. The case for her contact lenses, in case she had to spend the night out. You never know. You can never be too prepared.