This past summer, I wrote sporadically. I know in my “About” page, I talked about my love for writing and proclaimed that I was going to try to write consistently and frequently. If you look at my posts, there is only one; the first one that I wrote during spring quarter before I left for the summer. However, that does not mean I didn’t write. I wrote plenty of stream of consciousness blurbs whenever I felt compelled to do so, but I just didn’t feel the need to share them during the summer. If you keep reading, you’ll learn why. Now, a month and a half after coming back from India, I feel ready, sort of. I still need more time to fully process all that occurred in India and I don’t think I’ll ever quite fully internalize every moment of the eight weeks. I do feel comfortable enough now to share the lessons I’ve identified that I learned from this summer. However, I haven’t yet found a way to connect all of them into one cohesive essay, so here are a few glimpses into my mind from this past summer with some commentary: A Hectic, Jumbled, Frenzied First Week June 16, 2019 This was written the day before I left for India and refined in a heavily air-conditioned Starbucks nearby our hotel in Bangalore. The past 24 hours have consisted of good-bye's in parking lots, repeated hugs with "See you later"s and "Love you!!"s, loading the rental car until it is chock-full with an impenetrable trunk, buying $4 lottery tickets, Father's Day brunch, Black Mirror binge-watching with Flamin' Hot Cheeto Fries, explanations of this summer's plan to my sister's husband's parents, and dining at the only Chinese restaurant in all of Moraga, California called "Chef Chao's." It was here, over orange slices and steamed fish and eggplant and tofu and the awry coconut walnut shrimp that I opened a fortune cookie that said, "Travelling at this time would be a good investment of time & money." My lucky number, 17, was on the back as the second in the series of six. I’ll admit, I am a symbolic person with a slight (okay, moderate) belief in superstition and horoscopes and personality tests and energy and inexplicable intuitions. But, even if I were not, it is such a happenstance that I cannot help but clutch onto this fortune. This small piece of paper is safely tucked away in the clear cover of my 2018-2019 planner, joining the five others I’ve collected over the past year. “You will find an outlet for your creative genius and accomplish a great deal.” “A treasured friend will soon visit you.” “Indulge your ambitious nature.” “You have made a brilliant choice today.” “You will make many changes before settling satisfactorily.” I don’t remember the exact scenarios in which I cracked open an orange cookie to find these fortunes, but these aphorisms all hold intense significance, whether it was in the past or presently. I’m not sure why I am so readily eager to plunge into the depths of believing these commercialized, deliberately vague slips of white paper, but I feel it is of great luck and a tinge of destiny that I received that fortune. June 16-20, 2019 I was very stressed and overwhelmed, and I needed to recapitulate what happened during this week for catharsis. An absolute whirlwind.
June 21, 2019 My first and surprisingly only panic attack. Like all mornings since being in India, I naturally woke up at 6:30 am. This is unnatural for me. I love my evenings. I tried going back to sleep with limited success. So, I watched some Shark Tank, hoping for Mr. Wonderful’s voice to lull me back into sleep. As I laid there, half-asleep, I could feel tinges of anxiety creeping from my stomach up into my throat. I tried every single distraction, my phone, self-compassion meditations, everything. Trying to ignore and squash all signs of anxiety, I started getting ready for the day, following my morning routine. I only got so far as to brushing my teeth when it started. I uncontrollably started heaving and crying, experiencing my fourth ever panic attack. Showering didn’t help. So, I called my significant other. Hearing his voice talk me down from my irrational thoughts grounded me, and although it felt as if the same panic lay just below the surface with anything remotely stressful threatening to release the panic, I was okay. I went to work, had a great day, visited the Microsoft Research campus to see TWU’s technology, and we went to an ex-pat party full of InfoSys interns the same day. I suppose the anxiety was bound to occur. In retrospect, I did not take good enough care of myself with all the sudden changes and constant stimulation. All the comforts that I was used to were all taken away from me, and I was suddenly unable to interact with people on a level that I’m used to. I was not prepared for the isolation within the second most populous country in the world. June 23, 2019 I felt more healed from this panic attack a couple days before, but I was still being gentle with myself. Today, we went to the Banerghetta Zoo and ate lunch at a brewery in Electronic City. Today, I feel okay enough to write a bit. Today, I am allowing myself to recognize my weaknesses and remind myself to ask for what I need and take care of myself. Today, I am feeling more like myself and breaking out of this haze that I’ve been in for the past five days and truly start living and being okay with being here. Today, I am holding on to my fortune from Chef Chao’s. If there has been anything I’ve learned in this constant, dizzying travel, it is the importance to be tender with yourself. Particularly if you are a naturally sensitive person, like me and especially when it comes to travelling, self-compassion must be prioritized. There is no shame is taking care of yourself by not being productive. There is no shame is just being. A State of Being This was written on the eight hour drive back to New Delhi from Agra after seeing the Taj Mahal and Fatehpur Sikri, which was near the end of our eight weeks. Being. To be. To have been. One of the most confusing yet important verbs when I was learning Spanish. It asks of me a certain passivity to new and uncomfortable experiences, all within a framework of non-judgment, compassion, and understanding. India, being so vastly different in many ways than the US and in not all ways bad, requires, demands, commands, mandates me to just be. And in being, I have come to appreciate and deeply love all of the parts I've encountered and am learning about the country, even the not so glamorous ones. It is heartbreaking to me that Gavin and I are halfway through, but this reluctance to leave is also surprising and welcomed. How secularly blessed I am to be able to travel and bud this love for another country so far away than my own. I have not been wanting to write because to write means to reflect and to reflect means to temporarily take myself out of this life I'm now living that is so beautiful and interesting and vibrant and messy. And I don't want to leave. I don't even want to be out of this immersion for even a second, let alone a few hours. I want to stay in this mentality of just being. I am enraptured by India and its beauty and imperfections and disorder. I am beholden to this life. Earlier today, I visited the Taj Mahal. I am still in disbelief. The delicacy, elegance, and softness of the Taj resembles a Renaissance style painting. I wanted to capture the tomb’s effervescent essence, not the hard contours and angles that inspire regality that I have seen in other photos. The Taj, in person, was approachable, ethereal, dreamlike, unreal. If I believed in God, I would even go as far to say that the Taj looked like a work of God. When taking in all the grandeur of the structure, I even temporarily forgot about the unrelenting and unforgiving heat that caused beads of sweat to wet my hair, drip down my face, and roll down my neck. It was all worth it to see and to be in that moment, just like how being has been the most enlightening practice I've undertaken this summer. I have had the luxury of just being the past five weeks. But, it is finally time not to be, as the visit to the Taj Mahal has shaken and disrupted me out of the tranquility I lived in the past multiple weeks. I recognize the importance of writing and reflection, so here I am. Here is a poem that provides snapshots into small, poignant moments of beauty: Being, in an aromatherapy shop with our new friend Samir and relaxing into our unfamiliar yet comfortable kinship, as he plays Bob Marley and Led Zeppelin over his Bluetooth speaker system, drinking chai, chatting about our lives and travel, writing on his aquamarine walls to join the dozens of other notes and drawings from people who have visited all over the word. Being, while in Mysore and our new auto driver friend, Babu scoots over on his chair and teaches me to drive an auto. My hands are sore from gripping the clutch and accelerator, but I am loving the wind in my hair and the freedom of control. Being, as we exit a TWU auto driver's house in a rural village in the taluka of Challakere in an already smaller district of Chitradurga, and we are suddenly surrounded by dozens of children and adults watching us in curiosity. Being, while sitting and drinking hot chai or kaapi in the monsoon heat with drivers in the offices or their homes from tiny aluminum tins. Sometimes, it’s served in small ceramic teacups. Being, as I sit crammed in the back of an auto with myself, Swati, and the CEO of Three Wheels United for a twenty-minute ride, ending in Cedrick and I sprinting to the metro to catch the train. Being, as I translate back and forth between a Buddhist monk and a German teenager in Dharamshala. The Buddhist monk, Gong Mei shows me photos on his phone of his home in Tibet over tall cups of hot chai. I still message Gong Mei to this day on WhatsApp. Being, as Gavin and I race through Havelock Island's one main road on our two-wheeler mopeds, through the lush forests and palm trees and glowing markets. Being, when things happen that I don't understand or have control over and learning to trust that all will be alright--that India just works a bit differently, a bit looser, with more wriggle room than I'm used to. Being, in the long car rides to Agra with our driver Raul from Nepal. Being, in Chitradurga when we explore a fort, only to find a beautiful temple that leads to dewy greenery and freshwater ponds. Being, as I see piles of trash being burnt on urban street sides as the inner environmentalist in me screams in resistance. That is how many currently manage their waste here, because they don't have the affordable infrastructure to manage it effectively. Being, as I lay in bed, curled up in fetal position and clutching my stomach as waves of nausea and pain hit from eating a hastily washed starfruit. Being, as Swati, Gavin, and I sit in The Park hotel restaurant at 12am and throw masala peanuts in each other's mouths and fold our napkins into Christmas trees per Gavin's instructions, in a sleepy stupor. Being, as we try not to inhale the dark fumes being spewed out of two, three, four-wheelers, and buses, on all sides of our yellow and green rickshaw as we sit idly in traffic like a duck in a flock. We narrowly avoid anything moving in traffic with each vehicle’s honk almost indistinguishable among the layered cacophony of constant honks. Being, at Cafe Kaara, which Gavin and I must've frequented 5 out of the 9 days we have been in Bangalore for either lunch or dinner, where we discussed anything ranging from weighing the risks of ordering a green smoothie (it was worth it, we were alright) to what we would do if we were the richest people on the planet to questioning the ethics of humanitarian work in foreign countries to discussing what life means to us for hours on end. Lessons with Ashwin This was written the morning after a four-hour long dinner with Ashwin, the ex-COO of Three Wheels United, where he asked us about our time in India. This was at the end of our time, when we were to leave in a couple days. Working and living in an entirely new and drastically different country has now made the option of working in a different country a much more foreseeable, pursuable one. Living and growing up in the US, I grew up believing that the US was the best place to live, to work, that everyone wants to move here because of the feasibility of the American Dream. I assumed that anything was possible, that the best jobs were here, that innovations were the best here. I had always known that this belief was Eurocentric and likely false in some areas, but I had fully internalized the idea that “America is number one.” Not until after living and working in India did my worldview suddenly balloon and expand to one that realizes all the benefits and endless opportunities in living and working in a different country, including India. This was reinforced especially after asking the CEO of TWU if he would ever work and live in the US. He said no, said that there are way better opportunities abroad, that the US is too boring. Hearing this from someone I respect was shocking, particularly because we are all indoctrinated with nationalism from a young age. And as Rosemary had said earlier, once you’re out of the US, you’re out. I’ve also learned that I have to work with people. I want my work to surround people. I recently got my tarot cards read, and the very first answer the reader told me was that I need communication in every aspect of my life, especially work. I already knew that I didn’t just want a technical job, but this summer has reinforced that. I want more. Lastly, I’ve internalized the idea of “shanti shanti,” to slow down, to be okay with having things be out of your control. This especially negates our American and Silicon Valley tendencies of timeliness and promptness and control, but it is a good lesson to learn. It decreases stress, it allows us to take in moments, it allows us to be. It allows us to be compassionate for ourselves and others. This brings to mind a moment at the airport in Dharamshala. It had already been half an hour after planned time for boarding but there had not yet been any announcement, so I turned to the two men sitting next to me and asked if they knew if we were boarding soon. With unwavering calm and trust, the older man with long, white hair donning a white dress shirt and pants said “Don’t worry. It will come. Just wait.” Even though the plane never did arrive due to inclement weather and low visibility, the resoluteness with which he answered was almost transcendental. I am a stress planner. If I don’t plan, I stress. When things don’t go to plan, I stress. Especially if things are out of my control, I stress! But, being in India, I have learned to be okay with things I cannot control. Talking to Ashwin in Watson’s, a longstanding neighborhood bar in Bangalore over margaritas, Kingfishers, and Simbas, Ashwin told us that the best lesson he’s learned from India is learning to let things go when they’re out of control; to be compassionate. Ashwin quoted the Ender’s game, saying “In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him.” By understanding another culture and their differing relationship with perception of time, I am able to be more compassionate towards others and understanding, therefore dissolving walls rather than hardening them.
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