Mid-Week Observations: Where is Home?

Home has been a strange concept for me since moving to New York, and perhaps even since I started thinking about my own cultural identity. I feel as if I am only renting in this life - both the physical space that I inhabit and the thought processes that I use to define my life and personality. Going to Bangladesh this year presents another sort of home. An ancestral home, a place that I have relatives that are not in my nuclear family. And in some ways that strengthens my sense of home and in some ways it fragments it.
Let's start with the first one.
Having more homes in my life will be a good thing, I believe. It will bring me away from my thoughts that there are only 3 of us - my father, my mother and myself - and widen the bonds between all of us. Bangladesh is also an adventure, a faraway place that I don't remember very well and haven't had much connection with since a very young age. These things all foster my sense of "home" and may allow me to find it.
But, as for the second issue, it also introduces a completely new place that is hard to reach and also disparate from the two homes that I have struggled to forge in the States. I live in New York, but I am from Seattle and the Seattlite in me wants to go home while the New Yorker in me wants to stay and appreciate the beauty of this big dirty city that I love. Seattle is comfortable and it has all the old friends; New York is hard to put up with at times, but has been a big factor in some of the most fulfilling moments of my life. Bangladesh... where will that fit in?
Having multiple homes is something that a lot of people struggle with - for me it's a struggle of personal identity, but for others that I know it's more about the literal space. Living in China and living in New York, for instance. All international college students and people who hail from faraway states can echo my sentiments. Who are the people that you want to know forever? Who are the people that you want to have around you? What kind of house/apartment are you going to live in wherever you choose to be? These are the questions that plague us and excite us at the same time.
So, when I think about my own situation, I think about the negatives a lot. The fragmentation of my culture from my location, the separation of my family members across oceans and large tracts of land. But there is always a silver lining, a bright patch in the cloud of negativity. It is the new connection and safety net that I will garner from having people I know I can trust around the world. And if that bright patch shines enough, it might just blot out all the sadness of being isolated here on my own.

You may also be interested in reading my post The South Asian Question or my opinion piece Discrimination and Mixed Metaphors.

Mid-Week Observations: Mindset

Perhaps my brain has been wrapped too tightly around finals these days, but I have been having a mental block on work. Everything I attempt, everything I go to for stress relief, and everything I should be getting done get lumped into the same unpleasant association in my mind. There is something negative about taking time off and there is also something negative about working on something for a number of hours because it is due the next day. Where is that coming from?
This post is going to sound a little bit preachy, considering that I already do a Monday Muse about these sorts of things, but I think it deserves to be restated. You are influenced by your mindset towards situations and what you choose to think about something.
I have been testing myself on a small scale this semester: treat everything as an opportunity rather than a stresser. It has worked with limited success. When it comes to thinking about the zine library work I do, I treat it less like work, which has a negative connotation, and rather like an opportunity to read a bunch of zines. But with things that I don't want to do, it gets a little harder. Who wants to write an analytical paper for class if it's not an intriguing subject to you? I know there are researchers and people who enjoy writing analytical papers, but for me that's not a mindset that I can put myself in easily. So, I have to come up with a new challenge.
What could that be? Brainstorming ideas for it even gives me a headache. What could make work like that seem more fun when we are so close to the end, so close to not having to do it any longer?

I think it has to do with brain science.

Now, I'm not talking about the brain science of memory function or re-wiring your neuron connections so that you become some sort of cyborg worker - I mean stimulating a very primitive part of everyone's brain: the reward center. For me, that is perhaps the only way that I can get through these troubling times. Reward, reward, reward yourself for your accomplishments. Even if they are little, even if they seem like they aren't chipping away at that mountain of tasks that you have to complete, give yourself something that you love. It could be a shower or it could be a few hours of extra sleep, but give yourself those opportunities to supplant the opportunities that may be "lost" in doing the drudge work that you don't necessarily want to do.
Good luck with finals, college kids, and know that you are every day inching closer to the point where you will be doing something you love and that will not seem like work at all.

Check out some other lessons I've learned in this lifetime.

Mid-week Observations: Near Death

I recently heard from my father about a death of someone close to him. I did not know this man well, but I knew him in passing. He was in poor health and there were a lot of complications; we knew that he was going to die at some point, though it was still a shock when it happened.
This death made me very emotional - not because I knew the man well, but just because I knew him. I started thinking about the reality of death, the fact that we don't know when it comes, but it will come. I have always thought that I will not be scared of my own death, and I ascribe to that, but the death of others is different.
I believe that on the first day I heard the news, I described it like this: the saddening thing about death is that we no longer get to cross paths with that person again.
This is perhaps a simple cognitive piece. You can understand this intellectually without much effort. But the emotional impact is much less straightforward. In my heart, I cannot reconcile the passing of any person I know.
Their bodies do not vanish, this we know. They are put into the ground or they are burnt into ash, but they do not physically leave. Instead it is the mindset that they are unable to rise from that place and come back. They are stagnant, while we move.
So this brings me back to my earliest musing on death. I feel the loss of this man, even if I do not know this man so well as my father or his family. Because I can no longer experience the awkward moments of saying "hello" to this man, I can no longer spend time with my father and him at the movies, I can no longer wave goodbye after dropping him off at his home.
And that means that someday I will not be able to do any of those things with people that are close to me. I will not be able to cross paths in any capacity with those people again.
Being near death is much scarier than being dead.

Read some more lessons I've learned in this life.