Yet Untitled 043 - An Anatomy of Intense Times
Communicated via a not-so-elegant metaphor
Dearest Yet Untitlers,
I really have to be inventive this time to come up with a post, but hey, the upside is that this doesn’t feel like a stretch. It’s been a week of needing to be inventive in other spheres of my life as well - meeting deadlines, balancing work and life, managing a workout in the midst of madness…my inventive muscles have received a helluva workout!
I’ll keep it short.
I remember how it felt in the run-up to my MA exams at university. It was an intense time - loaded with the feeling of an immanent future pushing back at me from beyond the exams. The shape of that future was ever-changing - feeling so contingent on how a mere two weeks of blackening pages in a room with a bunch of nervous students went. If they went badly, what would that future be? I had less of an idea about that than how things would turn out if they went well - that felt far more calculable. The other outcome was a dark, frightening hole. I wasn’t alone in this I saw more than one fellow student succumb to what I presume was the same anxiety - I saw them first freeze and then break down, unable to write their exams. The university - totally used to such spirit disintegration - had been very compassionate, allowing them to write their papers a few days later.
Life after college has not overtly advertised such compassionate, ready provisions in the face of anxiety. One has had to look hard for those. I’ve been lucky. All hail all of you around me. You know who you are.
I’ll say a few more things about that intense exam time. I had felt as if my brain was functioning at a different level of operation - calculations were quicker, solutions came easily and multiple tasks could be carried out simultaneously in the space between my ears with ease. Despite the intensity of the time, despite the mountain of course material I had to cover, this - I remember feeling - wasn’t a bad outcome. I remember walking down a street a day a few days before my last paper thinking - “I don’t want this state of being to go away!”
Sounding like a bad plug for Limitless? Unintended.
It was a surprising outcome. I had never expected to desire remaining in the churn of that supercharged time. My university was known to make a big deal out of of the end of the exams - traditions of friends waiting for you outside the hall where you write your last papers with champagne and flowers. How I had looked forward to this just weeks before as the summit of the exam experience. But that day, acclimatised, I didn’t want to leave that mountain, high on the rarified air.
I finished my exams. I received my champagne and flowers (an experience laced with the disappointment, because the friend bearing them wasn’t the lovely lady for whom I had done the same a few days ago). Days later, it felt as if a tightly wound spring at the center of me had started to unwind. Life returned to normal, and it became progressively more and more difficult to perform the accelerated antics my brain had shown the surprising capacity for.
I wonder, is is this a cousin of the feeling that lies at the heart of post partum depression for young mothers? Nine months of intensity culminating in that pinnacle of birthing, followed by…a complete change of gears?
A change of gears. I feel that’s what we’re speaking about. I’m writing this while sitting in a car, hearing the sound of its engine as the automatic transmission shifts to negotiate one of the overpasses near Thane that you use to exit the metropolis of Mumbai for Karjat. The engine sounds different for a few moments after the shift, adjusting to this new ratio of translating effort to movement as circumstances change: a few seconds of protest, after which the sound settles and we’re cruising again.
The drive engulfs me. The metaphor engulfs me. I’m suddenly thinking from the lens of automobiles, directly applying automotive metaphors to my very carbon-based, organic life. I’m thinking that the higher gears are thrilling. I’m thinking about how amazing it had felt manoevering an M class BMW along the curves of The Great Ocean Road in Australia in 2013. Look at my smile in the photo below:
I suddenly think of my father, who negotiated the same turns on the same road in a much humbler automobile half a century ago, perhaps pushing that not-made-for-an-autobahn car to its limits, feeling the same thrill. I hear two engines scream at two different moments in time, shifting power along their transmission, slowing and accelerating as the road asks of them.
Cars accelerate. Cars slow down.
Life accelerates. Life slows down.
All these these intense times slam against each other, throwing off bright sparks. The sparks are illuminating. Suddenly, in the Gulf Stream of my now, I get a sense of how ocean currents work.
All of them. All at once.
Thanks again for reading! Do hit comment or reply to this email. I’d love to hear from you!
Life speeds up, life slows down. The car is a good analogy. And further — sometimes crisis feels like a car accident. I remember that heightened state of capacity & function from grad school, and similarly not wanting to lose it. But also needing A BREAK! So strange to want and need such different things.