Insignificant speck of dust

“No matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal[1].”

Sarah Kay’s advice to her future daughter plays in my mind, as the piercingly motionless stare of the 8 year old burns a hole in my chest. It isn’t dust from the playground he is covered in, it is the rock dust from the gold mines of Ghana. He has just come out of a 72 hour long unpaid shift in the gold mine he is enslaved in for life. He is 8 years old, right about the time I had discovered the wondrous world of Roald Dhal and SpongeBob and easy bake ovens. The photo of this little boy was an image from a Ted Talk by Lisa Kristine that I had stumbled upon. The blunt title had caught my eye during my daily morning facebook scrawl- Photos that bear witness to modern slavery. (http://www.ted.com/talks/lisa_kristine_glimpses_of_modern_day_slavery.html?quote=1828)

More  photos and statistics on the screen drill the hole deeper, and I feel my pounding heart fall hard into it as the photographer tells her story of modern day slavery. 27 million people. Nigeria, Ghana, Nepal, India. Children on mountain tops with their arms spread out, hoisting rocks thrice their size strapped on their back. Women forced into the dingy florescent pit of prostitution. Entire families trapped in unpaid labor. Hands dyed red and indigo with the stain of generations of slavery. Human lives wasting away as you and I breathe.

The pain inside me turned into guilt, self-accusation, utter disgust at myself. I think of all the suffering in this world, and how little I do about it. Slavery, poverty, war, disease, pain. I’m stabbed by the reminder of how ignorant, self-absorbed, and tiny, I,- most of us- am. A rather simple dialogue from a haunting movie Thira echoes in my mind- We all have eyes, but we rarely see things that don’t concern us.

The tornado of emotions from distress to agony to self-revulsion settled down in a helpless sense of insignificance. There is more suffering in this world than we could heal. No matter how much I try, my hands will always be too small. Wasn’t I, afterall, a tiny insignificant speck of dust?

“I have never met a heavy heart that wasn’t a phone booth with a red cape inside.[2]”  This time Andrea Gibson’s lines from a spoken-word poem is the voice in my head. From the pit inside me rises a little dug out hope. My hands may be too small, but they can still reach out. My voice may be too small, but it call still break glass if I scream loud enough.

The profound wisdom of this 5 year old says it all. This is the insignificant speck of dust screaming out to the universe that I’m significant.

But maybe, that’s the beginning.  Maybe the insatiable pounding of my heart, the hole in my chest is the beginning. The insignificant speck of dust feels, the ISD thinks how it can make the world slightly better, the ISD hope, the ISD believes. Because for every landmine that erupts, for every lost childhood, every wasted life, somewhere a change is fighting its way out. Somewhere a solider and her dog are reunited after the war. A baby is discovering how to smile. A little boy is breaking off his chocolate bar for his friend who doesn't have one. Someone is hugging a stranger who needs it. Someone is crying for a little girl on the streets. Someone is raising a pluck-card against war and hatred. Someone is trying to wipe away suffering. Somewhere, an insignificant speck of dust is screaming she isn't too small to make a difference.

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[1] Sarah Kay. If I should have a daughter.

[2] Andrea Gibson. The Nutritionist. 

Making sense

nodus tollens

n. the realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore—that although you thought you were following the arc of the story, you keep finding yourself immersed in passages you don’t understand, that don’t even seem to belong in the same genre—which requires you to go back and reread the chapters you had originally skimmed to get to the good parts, only to learn that all along you were supposed to choose your own adventure[1].

“I knew I wanted to write since I could remember.” This line I ascribe my identity to, now burns inside me like an overdue apology I know I should be making. I stare at the computer screen, fingers poised over the familiar white letters of the keyboard, waiting for inspiration to make them tap. I try to ignore the puny word count at the bottom of the screen, reminding me I couldn’t do what once came so easily to me….write.

It didn’t take my pre-teen self much thought to declare writing as my passion in the “What I want to do when I grow up” essays for English class, or proudly throw it at the face of any adult who asked the 12 year old whether it was a doctor  she wanted to be “just like her parents”.  When the inevitable reign of self doubt took over as teen-age set in, the only thing I didn’t question about myself was my decision that I was going to be a writer. It made sense-I couldn’t be happier than I was amongst books, I excelled in English which was the only subject I cared about in school, I loved writing assignments, and every single English teacher I had had since I was 9 had at some point told me I would make a good writer. It didn’t occur to me to question that I hardly wrote anything more than those assignments, the usual rambling in my diary, and the occasional poem for the school magazine that my father compares to the acne from teenage that had to come…and go; I knew I would be the happiest writing, and I held on to that without a moment of doubt. But when the inevitable realization finally hit, I felt “my self-possession gutter” like a man hitting midlife crisis in Eliot poetry, and I started doubting everything I had believed about myself. I questioned my right to call writing my passion, told myself I would never be a writer. But something came out of this period of self doubt and loathing-I started writing. It hit me that a lot of things could stop me from being a writer, but the biggest of them would be if I did not write. So I wrote, venturing into the territory I had always claimed as mine, petrified that I would find out otherwise. I wrote furiously, more to prove to myself than anything else, trying to make my niche and find some earth below my feet . I became my hardest- and only- critic, scrutinizing every word that fell through my fingers. Then, I don’t know when or how, but the most amazing thing happened- I became a writer. No, my words did not make their way into print where public recognition christened me a writer, but I knew I had become a writer. Somewhere along the tentative steps I had taken, I had learned how to walk….I had learned what it felt to be a writer. Writing had become the only way I knew how to live, and I loved every bit of it, growing into it steadily, little by little, word by word. The tap of the keyboard and the slowly filling word document never left my head……Everything I saw, felt, discovered, every conversation, walk in the woods, sunset, and cup of tea was turned into words in my head. True that only a fraction of what I wrote in my head materialized into actual pieces, and that I kept anything I wrote tightly to myself, but I had built my relationship with the spouse I had always claimed as mine. Some days we were a couple in love, going hand in hand, reading each others mind, and creating words that flowed out in perfect harmony; some days we were not on the same page and I struggled to find the words that could speak my mind. But I loved everything about it, from the way it starts- an idea that suddenly hits, a burning desire to put something to words;  to the process of writing- the attempts at trying to find a frame or at least a remote hint of a theme to fit in your ideas, wondering how to tell that story that someone else would want to read what you want to say, searching for that one right word; to the frustration of writers’ block….I loved each bit of it. I had what I was looking for, I was a writer.

But the emptiness that has now become part of me makes me realize that perhaps I was alone again. I have stopped seeing stories everywhere I looked, and the ease with which words formed themselves in my head seems an alien feeling now. The tap of the keyboard, the image of the jumble of ideas finding their places in a book, they are all gone. What remains is the knowledge of the emptiness, of the incapability. 

 nighthawk

n. a recurring thought that only seems to strike you late at night—an overdue task, a nagging guilt, a looming and shapeless future—that circles high overhead during the day, that pecks at the back of your mind while you try to sleep, that you can successfully ignore for weeks, only to feel its presence hovering outside the window, waiting for you to finish your coffee, passing the time by quietly building a nest.¹

So, like posting the overdue apology, I write. I make do with second hand inspiration, borrowing someone else’s words because my own lack that which matters. It isn’t the “lump in the throat[2]” that drives me to write anymore, but the menacing shriek of the nighthawk. I force myself to coax out words to pacify the hawk that never leaves my shoulder, only to find it growing louder everyday, now fat and indulgent on the empty clichés and weak metaphors I throw up. But the shrieks keep me writing, for it reminds me that a lot of things could stop me from being a writer, but the biggest of them would be if I did not write.

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[1] The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/

[2] Robert Frost. “A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”