Idle Daze Clarity and Compulsion Driven Intuition

In April 2019, I went to Bali to listen to my Guru H.H. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar speak about Vigyan Bhairav, an ancient Indian Scripture which is understood – without wrong interpretation – by only a handful of people in the world ( < 5 ). On the last day, we all sat by the beach, ready to listen to what he had to say, like excited babies waiting for their birthday gifts to come. Why that is so, in multiple posts in the future.

Gurudev, as he’s fondly called, sat in silence for a few minutes and then said that he’d not speak anything. He asked us to speak about anything we wanted to.

Some time went by in which people expressed their gratitude towards him and how the knowledge and meditation techniques that he has shared with world has been magical in turning around how they live. We were people from more than 40 countries.

After sometime, somebody asked a question on the lines of

Gurudev, how to know if something is really what one should do? Especially when there are choices to be made between the two.

I don’t remember if it was in the context of job or something more general. But I remember what Gurudev said, paraphrasing here from my notes:

Two things will happen:

1. Clarity of thought: things which are unimportant will automatically shed away and pave way for things which are important. Clarity will come automatically.

2. Compulsion will arise as an intense throbbing, wait for it.

I’ve been feeling these two intensely lately.

Clarity

I quit my job at Goibibo at the end of January 2021. The work had started feeling repetitive and rote. I was underpaid. After months of thinking about it, I quit without having next job in hand.

I wrote a coding article on the first free day – Monday Feb 1, 2021 and it got accepted by Smashing Magazine in the next three days. I got paid for it decently. In the process of writing that article I learnt the things that I didn’t have the compulsion to learn before. As a result, I did what I hadn’t done in a long time – researched and learned purely for the sake of it. But this time as a byproduct two new things came – I could share my learning with the world through this popular coding magazine and I had a solid understanding built of the concept I wrote about.

Yesterday, I sent another pitch to the magazine for another article and it got immediately accepted. This is when I realised that I could make a living out of learning and sharing what I learn. I had had this realisation for a while, but it came to fruition when I started getting paid for doing it.

As an extension to it, if I am able to make this happen – make living out of learning and sharing – I’d have the incentive to finally put to action all the ideas I’ve had for years. I could make products, launch them, open source them, maybe even monetise them and write about the process meanwhile and get paid for that as well.

This clarity of what I want out of my career came after a lot of mental scrubbing and baking, ever since I first thought about quitting my job at Goibibo.

Compulsion

Parallely, since Feb 1, 2021, I started applying for jobs as well. I surprisingly got one very quickly at an Australian startup. I took it for good money, since I anyway needed market correction. Big mistake. The kind of work that was needed was something that I didn’t want to do. More on that later. But during this job, I started feeling extremely compulsive desire to quit. The kind of extent which started making me feel like I had gone mad.

For example I didn’t work at all today, despite the fact that I have a deadline to meet for tomorrow.

As the days are passing by, what Gurudev said about clarity and compulsion is seeming like it’s happening. I’ve clarity that I want to do something of my own. There’s some freedom that clicks finely with me in being able to be my own boss. And there’s this compulsion coming to the brink that I’m not doing work without knowing why exactly.

Let’s see what happens now.

Weekly Good Reads – Week 4

1. Laughing and Turning Away – Patrick Holloway (Short Story)
2. Why Stephen King spends months, even years writing opening sentences, an interview
3. Andrew Stanton – The Clues to a Great Story (Video, TED Talk).
4. On Writing – Stephen King
5. Changing My Mind, Occasional Essays — Zadie Smith

Weekly Good Reads – Week 3

1. The Lunar And Menstrual Cycles Are 28 Days Long And Now… – Yamini Krishnan
2. Issac Asimov’s Foundation #1 (Science Fiction)
3. Visitor, a short story by Amrita Brahmo (Trigger Warning – 18+)
4. My Short Essay About Issac Asimov’s Foundation #1

5. Mastering the Art of Short-Story Telling: Lessons from ‘The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories’ – Amrita Brahmo

6. Why People Don’t Like ‘I Love Dick’ (Hint: Because it’s about Women) – Erin Spampinato – Electric Literature
7. PoetryxPolitics, Dear Ophelia – Priyanka Sutaria – Warehousezine
8. Confessions of a Medium Writer – Sravani Saha

When Writers Don’t Ask Why

An Essay On Critical Reading And Writing

 

Throughout the article [c] symbol stands for “book/poem/writing piece”

Reading

Does it happen with you as well? You have just read a really good book or a poem or a piece of writing. You are eager to recommend it to your friends or family. But somehow when you try to tell them what it is about, or why you like it, you find yourself short of words. All you end up saying is

I really really liked this [c], it’s about… [short spoiler free, not properly thought summary or opinion or how it made you feel sentence]

And that’s all!

You forget about this struggle as soon as you pick up other chores, books and so forth. And then the cycle repeats.

The first time this really hit me was when, after reading this book called Poor Economics, despite making an attempt to understand each and every bit (because it was interesting), I couldn’t precisely explain what I’d read, to anybody. And even though I’m a slow reader and I scribble words’ meaning and leave myself short notes in between the lines and margins, it was almost as if these things go to waste.

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Writing — When I First Asked “Why”

I’ve a very ephemeral memory but I remember this date very clearly —

1st October, 2017

I attended a poetry workshop by Rochelle D’Silva, a human being I’d started to love reading just a couple of months prior.

[centre]: Rochelle D’Silva Reading Some Of Her Poems From Her Book When Home Is An Idea, in Chandigarh, India After a 4 Hour Poetry Workshop [Source]

After writing on prompts and learning a lot from other interesting writing, thinking and time and word limit exercises, we came to the point where we’d be working on and improving an existing poem. She asked which one among us would like to speak one of our poems out loud first. A man volunteered.

After he was done reading his poem, Rochelle asked him a couple of questions. He couldn’t answer any.

Why did you write that poem? What is it to you?

Like a kid dreading the next turn in a surprise quiz, I started reading my poem that I’d selected for the revision and editing exercise, to figure out the answers to those questions. To my surprise not only that poem but most of my others didn’t have a why behind them. I broke a little at that moment. I thought

Were all these years of reading and writing for nothing?

What are these questions?

It was a turning point for how I write. Those quiz questions from Rochelle now help me clarify why I write a particular piece whenever I do. You might think at one point of time, what does asking these questions really mean. I mean, sometimes you just begin to write something and it gets written, right? Let me try to explain this by a personal dread. One night, when I was going through some old poems I’d ever written 4 years back, I couldn’t recognise them. I couldn’t remember I’d written them, and with what in mind. They merely seemed like a writing exercise where I’d just given combinatorial words the power to explain the cliched, something that didn’t come from my eye.

Answering why is ensuring that this never happens. Now, as the time passes, it’s only natural that some poems will get old. Sometimes you’d feel an urge to edit them to make sense of them today, because they were written with a different state of mind back then. But you remember in what state of mind you wrote them right? That matters. And answering what is it to you comes later and can be leniently dealt with, meaning that the why is foremost.

One of the common themes that I found in those writings was that, I’d written them out of a purpose to get appreciated. Bad move. It drowned every why, even if it did exist in the first place. I decided, that I didn’t want to write for fame or appreciation, or even to get published anymore. It’s not a bad thing to desire appreciation or aim to get published. But I denied them the status of being my drive because they turned my writing impersonal. If I didn’t write sincerely, was it really me doing the writing? I had to ask whats and whys, especially for writing poetry.

In a sense writing code and writing Literature are very similar. Both of them require a lot of doodling on different kinds of white boards before, while writing, and even after you write something. And both require heavy amounts of editing afterwards.

These quiz questions from Rochelle even helped me superbly refine my TEDx talk. The difference between what I wanted to share with people in the first draft, and in the final version was tremendous, more clear. Critically asking whys and whats and hows is a superb exercise every where a decision is to be made.

Reading

I now approached reading books, poems and any form of writing, with the same manner.

What did I get out of this [c]? What did I learn? What did I/did I not like about this [c] and why?

The first book that I had a definite opinion about (and could answer all the whys, hows and whats for), was Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man And The Sea. Since it was a relatively short book, I decided to scribble like crazy in the book itself, to be able to write an essay at the end of the reading.

Which is what I did!

On Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man And The Sea 🌊 ⛵️

I spent about 4 hours asking myself —

• What did I like about the book and why?
• What did I not like about the book and why. Was there something I didn’t understand at all?
• What did I learn about language and otherwise?
• What are my takeaways from this book and the story?

It took me a long time to first come up with all the thoughts and feelings as answers to the above questions, and then to convert them into the written word. It’s a difficult thing to put thoughts and feelings into words, because they seldom have an exact translation. As John Green comments on the intricacy of giving words to a concept that might not exist in words at all (referring to his book Turtles All The Way Down) —

The big challenge for me in Turtles All The Way Down was whether I could use language to find some sort of direct form or expression for obsessive thoughts rather than only relying on metaphor. I wanted to give readers not only a sense of what OCD is like, but maybe at least a glimpse into what it is, which is like a profoundly non visual, non linguistic thing.

Link of the video blog from where the above excerpt is taken.

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How To Start Reading Critically And Patiently

Get out of your comfort zone. Write essays, write reviews, write After {This Poem} poems, write a detailed interpretation of a poem like you might used to do in school. Discuss with others about what you read / wrote, what it means to you, do you disagree with something or not. Did you learn something from it? When you’ll struggle to find words for something you’ve just read / written and felt, that would mean you are already pushing your language boundaries and barrier. It’s hard to come up with words. But

Practice makes improvisations.

People (including me) who write short (sometimes long) form poetry and share it over images on Instagram, Tumblr or YourQuote, often fail to garner either proper appreciation or constructive feedback on those platforms.

👍, 👌, “That was so beautiful! 💛”, do not actually do much, do they?

When We Sent A Cold Mail To A Poet

Amrita and I read a poem one night — Night Errand By Eric Berlin.

The poem was a roller coaster, primarily because

“What possibly could I be missing to see in a mall! Argh 😠”

I think it could have been because I’m not used to reading such refined poetry so often, and partly because as we were to get to know later, the poem had undergone numerous revisions, which made it exquisite. Both of us were particularly stubborn at trying to interpret the following lines from the poem, no matter if the rest of the poem was out of reach just yet—

through the food court where napkins, unused
to touch, are packed too tight to be dispensed,

“packed too tight to be dispensed”. Whaaaaaat!

Amrita had an idea💡💛, to mail him and ask him. She wrote

Dear Eric,

I am a 22 year old in India who happened to read your poem “Night Errand” with a friend tonight. While I realize that the concept of explaining poetry doesn’t make much sense (since it’s poetry and poetry flows, and exists for its own sake), I nonetheless have to ask you what you had in mind with this line-

“through the food court where napkins, unused
to touch, are packed too tight to be dispensed”

Why the napkins? Please indulge the curiosity of two random readers and write back.

Yours sincerely,
Amrita

To which Eric Berlin Replied!

Hi Amrita,

So sorry for the long delay, and thank you for asking about that poem. The napkins were one of those details that at first were more striking to me than significant but which gradually became more significant as the piece went through various revisions and incarnations. At first it just seemed like a funny detail, how those dispensers are so jam-packed that the napkins rip every time you try to pull one out, but then it started to suggest (to me at least) the workers’ frustration with their jobs, overstuffing the dispensers so that they wouldn’t have to do it again soon. And the fact that it relates to the hands and mouth is an important part of the gesture implied there. Disposability became a theme too, as I continued revising. And towards some of the final revisions, the line breaks began to take on meaning too… here, the line break gives a double meaning (though only temporarily) to “unused”. Just a few thoughts for you and your friend to consider, but maybe you have your own reading of those lines and that’s valid too. Thanks so much for asking, and for reading my work with a friend, that sounds like a nice way to spend a night — reading poetry in good company. I wish you the best, and I’m flattered that you took the time to consider my words.

Happy writing to both of you,
Eric

A friend Avleen interpreted the lines as

How we stuff ourselves and aren’t ready to open to new experiences somehow

It was an umpteenth time reading it, after which I could see the poem in motion picture in my mind. But when I did — 🎊🎉.

Poems are obviously open to interpretation, that’s what makes them accessible.

The whole point of this cold mail story is that when you read something, read it as though you’d written it, but somehow you have had a bout of temporary amnesia. So you are trying to figure it out for yourself, stubbornly, consistently, what it means for you now.

Kung Fu Panda 2 style 🐼 —

Your story may not have a happy beginning, but that doesn’t make you who your are, it’s the rest of your story, who you choose to be — Wise Soothsayer to Po

Takeaways 🎁

1. When you’ve written something, go over it over and over again periodically (taking a break helps), and try to answer the whys, whats and hows. Edit likewise.
2. When you read something that clicks with you, keep asking yourself those four questions I mentioned above. It will help you get takeaways from others’ writings, and you’d even be able to see the low level gears of what made a particular sentence / line work.

Write about what you read, write about what you write, it’ll help you grow on most days.

There is a poem called The Snowman by Wallace Stevens. It fascinates and intrigues me because it’s mysterious for me. Every time I read it, I want to be able to extract at least one interpretation out of it, which I haven’t been able to hitherto. But I’ve started with Hemingway! I’ve started somewhere. If only he was alive, I’d have sent him a cold letter 😆.

Hope this was helpful in some way or the other!

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Thanks to Medium Partner Program, Writing Cooperative could open the slack channel for free for everybody! If you want critique and constructive feedback on your pieces, or would like to read other people’s and help them, this is a good place to be at.

Keep writing! 🖊📓 💻

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Rochelle D’Silva’s Poetry Links

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpkhAtJ4kibeTn5V3VaozdA

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 This essay was originally published on medium

LOL Issue #12 — (7–13 May, ’17)

 

Source

Hello! I run a weekly curation of good lity/arty links and things I visit online in a week. The latest issue is out!

On the above link, you’ll find the following. If you like what I curate, please make sure you follow the medium publication, so that I could notify you new issues in your emails every week!

Contents:

1. Discovered: Hemingway’s 99-Year-Old Letters to His High School Crush
2. Sex and the Sanskari Gynaec
3. My mum, the pilot (in 1960s)
4. The Nothingness of Watching Raindrops (Essay)
5. Harnidh Kaur tries very gracious erotic poetry

   Harnidh is the author of her wonderful poetry collection The Inability of Words

LOL: ( Weekly (List of Lit) Things ): A Newsletter

 

LOL ( Weekly (List of Lit) Things ) is a weekly curated newsletter containing literary articles, poems, spoken word performances, essays, blog posts, podcasts, even songs that I read/watch/listen in a week.

This is the era of browser tab disasters. The other day I saw a developer’s tweet about how a big number of opened tabs hung his computer, corrupted his file system, only after which he stopped using his browser tabs as a todo list.

We gulp web content like crazy. Get swayed away most of the times, lose ourselves in waves of hyperlinks, to find ourselves having wasted time like it was recyclable, because of which, the word commitment doubles its meaning. I’m here to help a little.

I will ease down some of your browser tab mania through a list of small numbered things that I read in a week so that you could enjoy them, and get back to work. Who has time in this world!

I have one more BIG REASON, why I started this.

If you’re game, or you play games, or if you don’t.

Okay, re-try.

If you want to give a shot to read what I read over, in a week, please subscribe! Don’t worry, I’ll only nudge your email once a week every IST Sunday, and you’ll always have a tiny little gray colored button to unsubscribe if you happen to not like my curation!

Subscribe here

and please share, share why? Because you are BATMAN. No please seriously, if you know people, have friends who might like this, you could forward them the link. This is the only medium I can reach out to more people through you. I’m a terrible marketeer and a publicist. I’d really appreciate it. Thanks!