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Even without a single beat inside the cranium, the dance of our desires is seemingly endless. Was it perhaps primarily built to move erratically? Or may it pause—out of generosity—to give us a breather from its breakneck speed of wondering? Does our plea have any merit in softening its spirit? How do we navigate the complexities of our minds and the fleeting nature of our experiences? Is our quest for serenity simply an illusion, a mirage in the desert of our thoughts? Seeking answers merely leads to more questions!

NOTE

The Arabic word Ma Yakfi means “enough.”

The Arabic word Qafila/Kafila means “caravan,” “train of travelers,” or “large party of travelers.”

What is heaven other than where you are not yet?  

Turbulent emotions overwhelm as you rush to set sail alone across the ocean in search of your Eden. Without feeling convinced about your checklist, you simply leap, you finally sail—and the mind locks onto the destination. A fixation on discovering your Shangri-La and a profound longing that you will arrive, ease your worries. But once you’ve cast off, the obsession begins—not with the destination, but with the vessel itself: Is the hull sound, are the seams watertight? An incessant mind to check and recheck every plank, every rope! The ship that should carry you toward Wonderland becomes the only thing you can see, your vigilance so consuming that you forget to look up at the horizon, forget even why you departed. The journey to ecstasy stalls in an endless present of anxious maintenance.

Note

Arithmetic operations such as addition, subtraction, etc. in mathematics.

Quarry: Something or someone hunted or chased.

Every waking moment of our lives is ensnared in counting—count with a clock, calendar, chart, or benchmark! Many, however, stop counting at some point when they concede that the behavior of numbers is not consistent. There was no guarantee that the numbers were immune to exploitation, forfeiting their importance and consequences. Yet this leaves most of the users not callous but benumbed. Lifeless numbers become uncaring for the laws of the physical world because of the counter, context, time, place, and purpose of count - rendering a simple arithmetic operation into a gibberish pile. When this realization blossoms in their mind, they notice what has always been around them, but they pretend otherwise: things could be uninterpretable in consciousness! At the same time, they had been sleepwalking with bowed heads—lest the truth from the heart swell out with a scream! Everybody is desperate to avoid looking at each other to hide the heftiness of their unresolved feelings, frantically trying to stay afloat during thunders of contemplation. All their attempts fail only to swell up time and time again on every crease of appearance. Everyone becomes soaked in the shame of stripped sentiments. The struggle hunts them and makes them incapable of articulating their sensations, even if there were anyone to care about listening. Utterly anguished, they conspire ways to move on with impromptu yet impermanent logic for the time being. Their endurance of mind and body can withstand only so long before their knee or heart collapses from the consequence of the false sense of security they tended to all these times.

Note

Tsimmes or tzimmes: Pronunciation is TSIM-is/uhs

Meaning:(Noun)

1. Fuss; confusion.

2. A stew of fruits and vegetables, and sometimes meat.

Etymology: From Yiddish tsimes (stew).

The future is always on my mind. But it transforms its facade into a fleeting present moment when it arrives. In my cusp, I hold on to what used to be a dream, hope, or uncertainty until it evaporates and gives birth to “now.” The idea of future events, moments, stories, actions, etc., is only a silhouette that thrives within my restless concepts. Everything I may conjure up about the future, from the contour to the color, the aroma, how it would feel to my touch, and the chilliness of suspense, is a shape-shifting dancing smoke in my mind. Yet, I am sure I know the details of my future, not from the accidental predictability of events but beyond any doubt. I don’t; instead, I relentlessly alter it simply by looking, with closed eyes, at what might come true but has yet to be born. In physics, the nature of light oscillates between waves or particles because of our involvement! We change its character by sheer mulling—the more we fine-tune our attempts, the more light varies according to our participation. So, what are we left with if we let go of the unease about the future and the past remains docked, withering every moment in our memories?

More than pursuing happiness, we want to know what our future holds. Of course, our desire is to ensure all euphoric surprises are tightly wrapped up until we arrive in the future. We are elated by the jolt of unease and unlived moments. But our millennium-old experiences made us accept, though grudgingly, that we can never quite figure out this dilemma: to know about the unseen episodes of our lives and be surprised at the same time when we reach there. Only with an assumption can we create our thriving future in our heads and strike out forcefully what we perceive—sometimes mistakenly—as a threat.

We don’t see the end of our vigor. The unknown has been a companion for eons, but we never conquered the art of coexisting agreeably with this mystery.

My pulse loses tempo when the idea of demise surfaces in awareness; how must it feel when the present dissolves—that last word, action, or emotion gushes out of my heart—into oblivion? Perhaps my life scrawl on this lush blue-green oasis might become a baton for loved ones—only if for a little while, so I hope when I do not pace on her soft ground.

Note

Kifah (Noun in Arabic): Struggle, Fight  

Once, I was young and a stranger to myself because of my disability; I was born with it, and surprisingly, no one in my family has acknowledged it. Many moons have passed since I began, in silence, to accept it unconditionally but not reluctantly a bit. So, I had learned to pray before I could coo, babble, or make any short sound. To some extent, nature instills an extra dose of hope in making categories like mine sustainable in the harsh realities.

The present instant keeps slipping away, leaving the past fixed and the future insecure, which either recede beyond awareness or approach within grasp. For now, two strangers encountered each other on a busy sidewalk in an eastern US city for a split second. A common phenomenon on crowded city sidewalks. Both immediately became incidents in the past for each other. The present moment tumbled from their consciousness, and they marched to their respective futures only to feel a mysterious pull! Soon after they left the crossroads, an acute sensation of a cosmic desire to gently hold hands or wrap an arm around the shoulder to walk each other home flared in their hearts. Where did this emotion drop from? They wondered! A decisive impulse made both turn around quickly, and they headed to rediscover each other in the sea of a crowd. As if they were toddlers, enthralled to pick up something mesmerizing from the ground! In a blink, immediately after recollecting each other, a twisted route through mysteries and toward where they both must travel begins. They are entirely unaware of the spell. But their journey begins without a grand plan or the warmth of a quilt stitched with great hopes and dreams. Their expedition starts spontaneously with zest but is shrouded in a puzzle.

Note:

Zugunruhe is a German word that describes the “migratory restlessness period” experienced by migratory animals, especially birds. It’s a behavioral manifestation of the physiological changes leading to migration. Zugunruhe is made up of the words “Zug” (move, migration) and “Unruhe” (anxiety, restlessness). It’s an internal cue that wild birds use to begin their seasonal migrations.

Moni is a Bengali word, meaning “retina.” In literature, it is used as the door to a person’s soul.

Note

Stultiloquy: Pronunciation (stuhl-TIL-uh-kwee) 

Meaning: (Noun) Foolish talk.

Etymology: From Latin stultus (foolish) + loqui (to speak).

When you’ve been avoiding it for a long time, there comes a time when you must force yourself to do the dreaded reconciliation. What have you been to others? How much have you given away or taken back? What have you accomplished? The lists of unfinished tasks might grab your attention instead. Anxiety ensues, and you squint at the shadows of undoneness at the fringes of your doing—oh, the haunting feeling of incompleteness! Even your triumphs may feel like jerry-build. A weighty sigh escapes with its full ferocity and uproots you to a higher plateau, where you faintly peek at the end of your journey; your bones feel the end beginning. You become desperate to start over but concede the most challenging part: not just the work of changing to a better self but also of unbinding everything you already knew about how you knew yourself. You feel the enormity of your concept; you let it sync in; you allow yourself to recollect. You must, however, wait to answer your inquiry since the exact ending still needs to be determined. You linger, and you delicately nurse your idea—that you can undoubtedly better yourself.

Choosing and owning a sailboat is an activity made of constant compromises. Accepting that no single boat, no matter how technologically advanced, will have all the features one desires. As you add features critical to its construction, albeit essential, another component must be sacrificed - if you were serious about sailing. Ultimately, it becomes a matter of concession: what you must select for your voyage and its remaining features that meet most of your fundamental needs but only a few of your opulence and wishes.

At some point, you stop counting. You are intensely reluctant to accept that the property of numbers is neither universal nor constant. You notice a simple arithmetic operation may yield an incorrect outcome—not to you, perhaps! Examples of numbers dishonoring the law of the physical world depending upon the counter, context, time, place, and purpose of counting are common. But you assumed otherwise all these times! You also realize numbers are not immune from exploitation, which destroys their importance and consequence, leaving you not to be callous but benumbed. Then, only then, do you begin to notice what has always been around—things that are uninterpretable in consciousness while you, me, and the others have been sleepwalking with bowed heads—lest the truth spill! All are desperate to avoid looking at each other to keep hidden the heftiness of moot feelings. Frantically trying to hold, rumbling from the reflection’s tremor. All attempts fail only to swell up on every crease of appearance. Everyone is soaked in the shame of a naked feeling. The struggle seeks you and makes you incapable of articulating your sentiments if there were anyone to care about listening. None. Utterly anguished, you conspire ways to move on with impromptu yet impermanent logic for the time being. The endurance of mind and body can withstand only so long before your knee or heart collapses from the consequence of the false sense of security you tended to all these times.

My destination was vaguely defined, or I only contemplated it partially. Yet a typhoon-like energy in my mind nevertheless made me start! I distinctly remember that I may not be returning to the same place I have called home for years, or, worst yet, the house might not be there to welcome a homecoming. It was also possible that I couldn’t return; all alternative scenarios were reasonable! No arguments, however, were decisive enough to deter me because a life journey isn’t a guaranteed path in a circle; there is no such principle that dictates it must end at the starting point. Since I needed to start somewhere, why not make it immediately? As a youth in my mid-twenties from the poorest country in the world, I left my country.

Accurately describing wounds, monsters, or ordeals is not essential when looking through the “satchel” we all possess. It must contain the experience of the death of family members, the loss of close friends, betrayal, burning from the wrath of greed, broken promises, a ruling of a diagnosis, mistakes—lots of them—and again, an account of deception. You could easily add many more episodes of heartache you endured. The scars from these affairs may wilt but never disappear completely, though I once believed time heals. It does not. It expands the canvas of our lives so that we can repaint it with different brush strokes of actions and colors of experiences. But I wrestled savagely with my mind and pinned it down to bury aches and demons six feet under the ground, then covered it with the heaviest plutonium-grade dirt called “denial!” Only to feel an unconquerable urge to escape the make-do resolution. I have yet to look back or return. The delusion ultimately chased me out until I settled in a new place twenty thousand miles away from the area of my anguishes. I was on the run, hiding from everything I knew as a home, without realizing I could run only for a while before my body would run out of eagerness. Writer David Whyte says that our past is never in the past. It is always here, in our conversations. Our narrative doesn’t follow us; we imbue it into our history to become a new portrayal! For a while, though, denial relieved me, akin to the effect of over-the-counter painkillers for a complicated and unmerciful disease. The pain returns; it always does with vengeance. First, I would smell its presence like a vapor from a distance. Then I would see it pursuing me like a shadow during the day and hear the whispers between the countless dozing on and off sleep at night. For the speakers of Aymara in Peru, looking ahead means looking at the past. The word for future in Aymara is “qhipuru,” meaning “behind time.” The four-dimensional spindle is reversed in their conversations. Like the rest, they believe the past is already known; we lived it. We can see it just like anything else that appears in our field of vision. We should look at the past rather than pretend to know the future or visualize it appropriately. Tomorrows are always in our imaginations and not a silhouette of reality, while accounts of our history are always perceptible but impossible to hide. The wisdom of the Aymara language nudged me to attend to each episode of grief, almost like a physical wound requiring regular nursing, cleaning, and healing agents. I made a ritual of greeting them instead, though reluctantly! The memory luggage was more than just a companion. It was an extension of my journey. This learning is agonizing, but I am compelled to avoid it. A tireless battle that will rage as long as the heart beats.

Nothing always happens. There is invariably an interlude, an exception, and an anomaly in how we predict our future to take shape!

Like many at my age, I used to think that time was boundless and that an elegant, charismatic self would surely bloom sometime when I traveled through a picturesque landscape. In dreams, the flowery meadow appeared endless and unwilling to greet the horizon—an expensive panorama that could soothe a broken heart in a breath. My dwelling was cranial, if you have not realized yet!

Tomorrow arrives at the clock’s rhythm. Until it does not! When we arrive on the day, its original moniker is no longer known; it becomes “today” or “now.”

The first encounter is convoluted! Every morning, we start our day by waking up to different sounds, such as an alarm, machines, the bustling of the crowd, or the cheerful chirping of birds outside our open window. Our thoughts and emotions can quickly become scattered, like boiling oil splattering everywhere. We construct scenarios like an avant-garde sculptor to make sense of everything. Sometimes, with just a tiny push from something outside of ourselves, we become completely absorbed in trying to comprehend the world and the moments we experience, as the idea of “tomorrow” lives only in memories. We dissolve into not anticipating “tomorrow” and merge into the present “today” and “now” as if we were in a parade.

With a surprised, long exhale, I say to myself, Not here, not now, not like this. Do I want to open Pandora’s box? What I have been, what I consumed, what I gave back in return, what I meant to others, and above all, how I treated myself against a mirror. These reflections tugged away in the corner of my mind but suddenly bubbled up like an old, faithful geyser. I realized the cards were decked against me: I would fail to define them. It is, however, a miracle that I continued my journey through life with unanswered inquiries and am now fortunate to rest under a jacaranda tree with beautiful purple flowers. The feather touch of the chilly spring evening breeze on my soft, wrinkled, aged skin is too comforting to welcome aches and pains—physical or emotional! Left with a profound marvel and drenched in a rain of wonderment, I close my eye and lie down on a patch of grass.

A lengthy and seemingly endless rainy winter slumped into spring—not the season we are familiar with with warmish sun and a breeze that tickles your skin—but a spring towards the summer nonetheless! One such morning, trapped in my own making, a conversation began with my imaginative partner, affectionately known to me as “I.” Documenting the dialogues with enthusiasm had the potency to unseat my inertia. If the excitement will continue beyond a few pages of writing, it is nothing but speculation.

There was never an if about the judgment; it had always been when: Regardless of our doing, the final whistle will ring not faintly. No one is getting acquitted alive. 

Everything about our existence is heartbreakingly fleeting and temporary! We go about our days either as active souls to make the most of the moments or as depressed recluses. Whatever our disposition, time destroys its keepers. Its effects become noticeable when we transition between phases, experience changes, and meet our fate. Though not always evident in our psyche, we have merely been loaned a term and only roam in our paths with others, bonding or recovering from unbinding. We still cry without mastery in the tears we wept once.

Adda - this is a boisterous yet cordial discussion. Anyone hosting first-generation Bangladeshi over a tea and treat in their apartment or house loves this get-together. The topics of conversation: how to stop climate change, inequalities in the US, poverty in Africa, or any other problem you can identify. The solutions that evaded the scholars and scientists in these subject matters are available in Adda. Attendees, primarily novices in the topics, can illustrate solutions to any situation that plagues modern times. By the display of knowledge and wisdom, they inadvertently want to show their existence matter. By sharing emotions with the group, they want to feel the warmth of a community, a belonging. It’s the chatter at Adda’s heart, not the actual doing of things -not least in a derisory sense! The sound of laughter and occasional heated high pitch opinion drift in the air far away from the gathering. Again, to spread the melody of presence, “I am here, we are here.” The back-and-forth comments and questions do not get to the “now we are talking” pinnacle without a cup of tea, which has a look of chai, but the taste is entirely different.