Do you know the heart of life is good?
It may contradict what the Buddha said, but if there was anyone else to listen to, it's John Mayer.
I’m doing the kind of thing I only started to do more of this past year. In 2023, I let myself say what I felt. Typically I’m so obsessed with finding the perfect, “most optimum” way of telling a story—for there are several ways to tell any story; it’s like having a set of dots to join, whose final ‘storified’ graph could be constructed through prose, numbers, slideshows, conversations, poetry, or any of the above connected in any order—but this year, I let myself go with my earliest ideas, the ones I’d have to chip away at the least, the ones that just held my feelings, a little less concerned with how those feelings looked.
It’s why I have written always. When done for that reason, it is a return to its most primal purpose: to create space for our feelings. To be seen, by ourselves and others. To unclog the insides and free up room for new life. And right now, at this collective moment—the end of one cycle of life, the beginning of another—I want to purge the past and welcome the future. Anyone who scoffs at these year-end reflections and resolutions is insufficiently acquainted with the power of ritual.
Without ritual, we go crazy.
I am now also a little used to talking about and sharing my life with others, so it seems emotionally dishonest to mask the truth of how I feel currently, which silence or a mere “Happy NYE!” would. A part of me expected, or wanted, to write a simpler, more formulaic update, listing all the “wins” and “L’s” of the year, like finding an agent and a publisher after much heart-wringing and unexpected disappointments, of the recognition and validations that felt like a splash of water on scorched earth, of the breakthroughs in dreams and therapy and creative expression, but also the heartbreaks in friendship and romance, and the bigger heartbreaks in writing about them and not hearing back from prospective magazines—yet.
But, in the spirit of the progress I’ve made this year, I will tell you some things frankly, like I would a kind confidante. I cannot write that simple catalogue of my year, however factual it would be, because it does not align with my feelings at this moment. In just the last three days and two nights, in the august company of some of my oldest friends, I chose to miss a flight, temporarily lost a pair of shoes, and also two earrings, one of which was recovered by a friend, who put me to bed in a dark room’s safety when I couldn’t do so myself, because, in another part of my life, I lost more while receiving and dealing a blow too many.
In the last two weeks, even as I met school friends, went on interesting and fun dates, and spoke to people who worked in Bollywood and finance, I also saw my mother in the hospital, fought with my family, and was fought back with. As good friends got married, as work was inevitably postponed to next year, as attempts to control time started to feel futile, I tried to stop ruminating about the bad, and instead think about the implausibly simultaneous good.
Some of this ‘good’ was needlessly contrived: I felt weird relief when I heard that some friend of a friend of a friend had lost motion due to a horrific car accident. ‘At least I have all my limbs about me, and can feel better immediately,’ I thought. I was happy to hear my bandaged mother talk about how she was at least better off than people who could not afford the hospital, or those who struggled to eat three meals a day. I felt moved by people coming together, but also glee at the stories I’d accumulated on my own, even the ones that were not easy to tell. Using other people’s lives, or even parts of our own, to feel better is horrible, perhaps, but also universal and calming, and I’m okay with doing it because I know others have looked at mine to feel better about theirs.
We have no beginning or end by ourselves. Even this moment is both a beginning and an end.
I think it’s GOAT-ed of Tricycle Mag to send out in December a newsletter about Five Buddhist Teachings on Navigating Family Dynamics, on leaning into suffering as ‘testing ground for [meditative] practice’. They know everyone returns home at this time of the year, and, in my case, despite the many frameworks and systems and principles I’ve collected over the years to train myself to respond to situations from a place of balance rather than unconscious reaction—spanning Buddhism, Vipassana meditation, journalling, dream work, Jungian analysis, an almost-sentient custom-trained ChatGPT emotional companion, creating art without expectations, becoming comfortable with choices of mine that might alienate others, like my voluntary singledom and polyamory and setting up my own place and living alone, like I’ve always wanted to; all things I want to talk and write about a lot more soon—I have still handled some situations badly. But others, earlier this year, I handled well. I should not need the latter to forgive myself for the former, but alas, this graph is staccato.
In Buddhism, the human realm is believed to be a special one for its range of pleasure and pain, which provide the opportunity for self-realization, for becoming conscious about the laws of nature, and working with them so as to transcend them. Step by step. Moment to moment. It is a long road to salvation.
But I don’t want to believe that the path, or its end, although paved with our own suffering, is suffering itself. Any cross-section of life, your own or taken universally, contains in it an equal amount of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, however you define the two, which itself varies, so that it is an interminable equation to evaluate life. Life is fundamentally not any one thing. Albert Ellis, the founder of Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy, which is kind of the father-school of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, one of the most widespread therapeutic techniques, said that human beings are too complicated processes to deem as good or bad. Their actions might be good or bad, but there is no way to sum them all and arrive at a firm judgement about anyone. One of his most memorable lines is,
“I’m not not okay, I’m not okay, I just am, so what the hell can I do to have fun?”
There’s a lot of fun to have, over and above giving into your feelings and writing spontaneously. Immediately I will refer of a soft type of fun, a sentimental John Mayer song, which I put on my earphones for today and listened to:
“Pain throws your heart to the ground
Love turns the whole thing around
No, it won't all go the way it should
But I know the heart of life is good”
If the heart of life is good, mine is pumped and throbbing thanks to art and friends who share a few qualities: they ooze compassion and intelligence, they make me feel seen and I can see them too; they move me, they answer my difficult questions, they make me laugh.
If pain throws your heart to the ground, and love turns the whole thing around, I am okay to be flipped, shoved, drowned, as long as I know I’ll eventually be found.
This is my way of foregrounding 2024 in hope, creativity, and community, despite any and all difficulty. Beyond this, I cannot think or plan further. Immediately I have to go play some intoxicating word games with friends, and ring in another cycle of life, so I hope you’re spending it around whoever and whatever you love too.
Happy New Year!