Instructions for life

On living

Dear Reader,

How are you? It’s about 8:30 in the night and the house is quiet. I’m standing at the open back door. A spring storm is coming in tomorrow and the wind is starting to pick up. Because of the grey-white clouds, it isn’t totally dark outside. Many years ago, I watched a tutorial on watercolor painting where the instructor demonstrated how to do a watercolor wash on wet paper. That’s what the sky reminds me of, as though the instructor, standing just out of sight and to my left, has slowly spilled a blend of grays, and the translucent paint has spread with a design of its own. The cloud art vaguely resembles a train leaving the station (🚂).

It’s cold, and because of the wind, the branches of the persimmon trees sway gently while the olive trees bend this way and that with mad abandon. The air is richly scented with the smell of orange blossoms, the perfume intoxicating. I can see someone moving around in my neighbor’s warmly-lit kitchen and for a dizzying moment, all the contrasts- of stillness and the wind, of small amber lights in the surrounding homes piercing the cool grays of the clouds, of in here and out there- are spellbinding. The other, more immediate, contrast, Reader, while I’m standing on my doorstep in the semi-dark, is that I’m also standing between two lives, the old and the new.

I can feel my old life, an older way of being, fading, until only fragments of songs remain from that time. The new is here. (I feel I should add one thing here. Some people grow easily. Maybe they don’t hear the creaking, groaning, and squeaking pulling of their joints. I think some of us, for a hundred different reasons, do. And we don’t know what the noise means, whether we are falling apart and everything is collapsing, or if it’s the sounds of stretching into a new way of being. All this to say, for some of us, growth isn’t easy.)

Reader, do you remember that feeling of being on the cusp of a new life? If you could be intentional about it, what instructions (wisdom) would you take with you? The only requirement is you have to pack lightly.

I’ll go first. I have condensed my initial rambling list to just three essential points. Number one, track your dreams.

“The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.”
― Carl Jung

Number two, learn to trust yourself. And number three, learn to live in, what Rilke called, “the questions.”

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”―Rainer Maria Rilke

I’m going to write essays about these three topics - dreams (what do they mean, where do they come from), the self (can we trust ourselves?), and living in the heart of a paradox- over the next three weeks.

Thanks to a young friend, I have started writing letters again. There is a physical immediacy to letter writing and yet you have to wait for a response. It captures that spirit of living in the questions. If you are reading this post in an email, I hope you will click through and read it on the website because, just like I would in a letter, I have attached photos and quotes there.

Reader, what are your three instructions for life?

Best,

Priya

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