beep, beep

Initiatory

Hello, this is Priya Iyer. Welcome to Ten Thousand Journeys where I explore the themes and stages of archetypal journeys through personal essays, poems, and books. If you’re reading this in an email, I hope you’ll also visit the website to take part in the community conversation and to dip into the archives. Thanks!

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As we are being driven to the airport, I open the Kindle app and start reading. It’s an old romance novel. I know how it’ll end. I know they’ll live happily ever after.

I lift my head suddenly. It’s still raining. I look at the hill, the houses covering it barely visible in the grey gloom. Instead of reading, should I be looking around instead? Committing the heat inside the car, the shape of the hill, and the squat buildings on the side of the freeway to memory? I’ll be back, I tell myself. I’ll be back. Will I, I wonder. I’ve made it back all these times. The rain is coming down heavily. It’s hard leaving home, and harder because it’s raining.

beep, beep, beep

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Dear Reader,

This is an entry in my journal from some time ago, written as someone was driving us to the airport. I have talked here about the trouble I have with leaving home even if it’s for just a few weeks. It’s a personal terror that has held me in its grip for many decades. For most of that time, I couldn’t unpack why I was experiencing it because I didn’t know I was experiencing it. And, so tightly does the terror hold me, rational thought (e.g. it’s just a flight and I’ll be back), perspective (people have experienced, and are experiencing, far worse than I am), and reason (did something happen to make me feel this way?) can’t penetrate. You may have your own experience where an old story, and an early fear, takes over the present, and that script plays out without your being aware of it. Wouldn’t it be great if a beeping went off at this time, alerting you that it’s an old story? Beep, beep, beep...

There’s this ‘80s Bollywood movie, Angoor (the word means grapes), a comedy of errors about two sets of male twin babies. Twins (played by the same actor in a double role) separated at birth and reuniting as adults was a popular Bollywood plot line in the ‘70s and ‘80s. In this movie, the two sets of twins are separated when they are very young. One twin from each set stays together, forming two dyads. Their paths cross when they are adults, and every time the wrong pair run into each other, a beep-beep would sound to let the audience know that this was a mismatch. The repeated beep-beep¹ alerted the audience to the impending confusion and comedy.

What if this beep-beep sounded at significant moments of our journey, alerting us that the moment holds initiatory potential?

Initiations are important stages of mythical journeys. They begin something new. They are about growth and they require us to expand in some way. Initiatory rites and rituals help us navigate these stages. We can be initiated into adventure just as we can be initiated into healing an old story.

In my case, after decades of experiencing this outsize terror, I realized it stemmed from an old wound². I can’t say I have healed it, but I have gained enough distance from it, and have tried to unpick and process it enough, that I can reach for a little more awareness. Beep-beep, I whisper to myself, both to forcibly interrupt the terror and to bring some gentle, affectionate humor to my situation. It is an initiatory signal to offer myself more support and a guide string out of the labyrinth of old stories.

Dear Reader, what are your tools for moments of initiation and change? Please share, so we can, together, collect a repository of useful tools.

Best,

Priya

1. Here’s a You Tube link to one of the hilarious scenes in the movie.

2. I have written about this experience here.