Don't Leave Yourself Behind

I have a piece out in The Atlantic today! For me, this is a huge milestone and also a very important piece, so give it a read.

A chocolate cake with red jello balls on top.

It’s the day before NaNo and all through the house… I’m throwing around drafts and outlines trying to get settled in.

As usual, my writing mind is exhilarated by the constraint and the mad fury that is writing 50,000 words in a single month. I’ve been working on a lot of shorter projects and have tried to build my discipline with research, writing, pitching, etc. But I am drawn to staying in a character’s head for a longer period of time, testing worldview and characteristics for pages and pages rather than paragraphs – even if much of it gets chopped later on.

Armed with a few earlier draft pages, I’ll be growing my story during quick timed exercises. I tend to work better with an overly formulaic structure that pushes me to think creatively within it. I also tend to work better under the cover of night with a bright screen in my face. We’ll see how annoyed my family members become with the cranky, somewhat sleep-deprived version of me that will undoubtedly show up by the end of the month.

I turned 24 this past week. It was a silly sort of day. Here in Dhaka, my family doesn’t really do birthdays. A cake was delivered; a biryani was cooked; several truly terrible jokes about age were told. In the evening, I started a new small notebook and wrote down a birthday intention for the upcoming year. This year: don’t leave yourself behind.

I spent a lot of age 23 in boom-bust cycles. I moved three and a half times – across NYC, across the country, across the ocean. I changed jobs four to five times. I attended births, organized events, grew a magazine, survived yet another long winter… And although I did a lot of great healing work for myself during that time, I also felt like a large part of it was spent worrying.

The challenges of living abroad are simply different challenges. I still worry, of course. But I am blessed to have more time and energy to invest in myself and my own work. Though I don’t have the expectation of returning to the US an entirely changed woman (I will certainly still be a workaholic and a chronic list-maker), I hope that I can return with the skills to hold space for myself no matter how intense the world around me.

With that in mind, let's take a deep breath and start novel-ing!

Celebrating Life in the Small Moments

From humble beginnings...

In the spirit of ringing in the new year, let's talk about beginnings.

First, a cliche: for every beginning, there is an ending. I have been thinking a lot in the context of endings recently - our school semester ended, then the year, and several more personal events ended their long sagas during the month of December. It's a mixed bag of positive and negative. Sometimes you are dreading the imminent conclusion and sometimes you are looking at the potential opportunities to follow. Beginnings and endings? Inextricably linked.

All I Want for Xmas...

As you may (or may not) know, I do not celebrate Christmas. Although I could celebrate it in a secular way, the holiday has never really held that much appeal for me. However, I do know that it is a day of great joy and festiveness for a lot of people, thus there's a general good vibe on that day that I like to take part in. I hence resort to other forms of celebrating life as we know it on that day - such as doing ridiculous things or otherwise soaking up the good energy.

This year, I made hummus and pita from scratch in our kitchen and ran out of chickpeas for the mixture just when my hands were good and covered in sticky dough. I was listening to Lupe Fiasco and - after pausing said brilliance - had to flee the apartment in a flour-covered hoodie and barrel down 6 blocks to buy another can of chickpeas and finish the ever-so-important hummus recipe. When the clock struck midnight, I was checking the dough in the refrigerator for the last time before morning and going to bed.

My Christmas present was my father waking me at 8am to say that he'd arrived at my apartment and we spent the morning again covering our hands in sticky dough and trying to figure out the best possible method of making our pita into something that resembled the Middle Eastern variety - because, being Bengali, any bread we try to fry instantly becomes a paratha.

In the end, we walked all over the city, particularly through the barren trees of Central Park and marveled at the quietness. In my apartment, on the streets, in the park... all was hushed. We ate ice cream in the cold. We spent time in whatever way we pleased.

It is in these moments that I feel that living in the moment really takes on meaning. Oftentimes we go about our day on autopilot, moving from one spot to the next with some sort of envisioned end result. But destination mentality distracts us from the small moments that make life a fun and exciting batch of choices. Every moment, we have the ability to look at our situation and recognize its sanctity. Though it may sound obscure when our mornings are filled with pressing meetings and our afternoons are bound by schedules and our nights are too short to catch even a wink of sleep, when the holidays roll around, it's all we think about. I have said it before in many different ways, but here again:

We must invest in ourselves the good energy that comes on holidays everyday. We must bring out joy in the small moments. And we must allow ourselves the capacity to feel all emotions, not just the easy ones, and move through them in our regular lives.

Enjoy your post-holiday relaxation, everyone!

Overbooked: Keeping Present in All Situations

I got to the end of Erasmus* and began to fizzle out.

This week was the first of many "normal" weeks that I'll be having this semester: chock full of required readings, event planning, and learning to skate. And each day I come home more tired and more ready to cut out early on anything that I'm doing in order to get a few more minutes of sleep - and that does not exclude writing blog posts!

The weariness that befalls me each semester at college is often rewarding, but nonetheless it takes a lot out of a person. Activities that I use to get away from academic work are often just as draining, but in different ways (roller derby, cough cough). But I struggle forward day by day, moment by moment, with my head working in lists and my path traced out by schedules on notebook paper.

However, I've noticed one discrepancy between class and outside activities: I live in the moment more when I am doing outside activities than when I am in class. I start to drift off and think about what I'll be doing next rather than what I'm involved in at that moment. And I used to think that was ok, until it wasn't. Until I realized that I shouldn't be privileging some moments of my life over other ones. Fortunately, I know the trick to keeping present, even in the moments that I'm least engaged in.

Breathing.

Simple, but effective, I am making the commitment to myself this week to focus on breathing and living in the moment regardless of the situation. Because every moment of life is important; none has a special tag labeled "URGENT" that should be given more attention.

Do you agree?

*Renaissance author whose book, Praise of Folly, required 130+ footnotes.

Living in the Moment

I realized quite a bit late that most of my posts from last week were food-related, which was not necessarily a bad thing, but a little repetitive! So, this week I am going to avoid food and talk about something completely different.

I have had one problem for pretty much my entire teenage and adult life: not living in the moment.

At first, I did not identify this as the root of my problem. I would get depressed easily in my youth and believe that it was because of all the problems that were weighing down on me from the outside. And, although there were some times when that was truly the case, most of the time I suspect that my bigger problem was the fact that I was dwelling on something that was either in the unchanging past or the unknowable future.

Have you ever had the experience of playing back an embarrassing memory over and over again and cringing each time you do it? I did that on repeat for so long that I started to believe that I was the most awkward middle school or high school student in existence. And sometimes I still get hung up on the little peculiarities that happen in my daily life, the ones that stand out as not-quite-right or just plain ridiculous. The major difference, however, between my middle/high school self and my current one is that I no longer let those feelings overtake my life.

I have always heard the phrase that life is too important to be taken so seriously; but, for many of us, the serious mode is the only way we know how to operate. The better way to approach it, at least for me, is to start living in the moment. Feel whatever you are feeling right this minute, this second, and don't let seriousness bleed into the other dimensions. That past and future will never be fully under your control. It's better to embrace the facts and not, as I have, allow the feelings of being less-than-perfect in the past affect your current life.

This philosophy, of course, is easier said than done. So here are some ways that I have found useful to start living in the moment:

1. Yoga. This is how I learned about living in the moment in the first place. When going to a yoga studio that focuses not just on your body, but you as a holistic being, they guide you through meditation and other important calming ways to live inside your body right at that moment. Doing yoga regularly builds up this discipline, and definitely helps take the edge off those past experiences and worries about the future.
2. Breathing exercises and mantras. Sometimes it can sound a little "out there" to have a personal mantra, but I think it should be treated more as a way to remind yourself to check in. I like to take them not from a prescribed list, but from articles and other inspirational writing, such as these pieces on Think Simple Now or from poetry on DeviantArt. When you recite a mantra in your head, take a moment to breathe and release any tension that you might feel when thinking about past or future events.
3. Taking a self-care moment. I find that when the worry or self-judgment gets too great, I have to really force myself to do this one. Often, I have to have someone remind me, in a loud voice, to calm down! It is much easier to take that advice when I step out of whatever the work is that I am doing to re-evaluate and do something for myself. Making tea is definitely a go-to for me, but you should find your own way of going about bringing your focus back into your body.

Please leave any suggestions you might have about living in the moment in the comments!

Check out some other lessons I've learned.