Yet Untitled 055 - Apocalypse Always
Dancing my way past Existential Threat
Dearest Yet Untitler
Howdy!
I hope you’re in well and in good health - in ‘the pink of health’ - as we absurdly used to be encouraged to write in letters when I was younger. I’ve seen people turn pink when they’ve been rather angry too, so sincerely hoping it’s the happy, healthy pink in your case!
I’m writing early this week, primarily because I came across an early inspiration that, unfortunately, filled me with terror! It was a BBC news item about a recently observed, accelerated warming of the Earth’s oceans that’s puzzling scientists and raising our world’s temperatures much faster than expected. It was very upsetting to read and unfortunately it pulled me into a bit of a downer - so much so that I spent a good part of the day in the pall of gloom soundtracked by Monty Python’s ‘Meaning of Life’.
I did get over it in about a day, even though I reminded myself that it should not really be a thing to get over. It really is an all-hands-on-deck kind of situation for the world just now, and it’s triple absurd that most of the world - like me - experiences these little shocks and then gets right back to carbon-heavy life, air-conditioning, online ordering and trans-Atlantic flights. No wonder Amitav Ghosh wrote a book on climate change and called it ‘The Great Derangement’.
While I did get over my existentialist hiccup, I have been thinking about this feeling of being under Existentialist Threat and how to respond to it. While it feels like I’ve been born into a precarious world (my children, even more so), I wonder if this is something that’s experienced by all humans, no matter when or where they were born.
The Apocalyptic 80s
Thinking about it, I’ve experienced Existential Threat in some form throughout my life. There was a series of very frightening movies in the 1980s that - god know why - my family rented in quick succession watch at home on VHS.
The first was a documentary on Nostradamus that scared me out of my chuddies and more of less convinced me that it was highly unlikely that I would live beyond 14. And then there was another doomsday peddling documentary called ‘The Jupiter Menace’ which my parents rented and watched soon after the Nostradamus happy-fest which brought down my self-projected life-expectancy even further inside my terrified 7-year-old mind. The fact that both these films were available to rent from Lali the electrician’s video rental shop in small-town north India in the 80s is another wonder. The fact that I watched them along with all my adults is another wonder.
The Nuclear 90s
I remember thinking during the start of the Gulf war in 1991 that everything rainbow-shitting Nossy had predicted was coming true. Somehow, (phew) we had made it through those dodgy 80s when the world had a hole and was letting in crazy radiation…and now this.
The Terminal 2000s
This decade had so many versions of Apocalypse Advent - 9/11, Afghanistan et al, that is it even worth listing? I think not.
Armageddon Throwback
Education indicates that potentially world-ending events were happening decades before my waking life as well. In one of the courses I took at Cambridge, we studied the Cuban Missile Crisis (which I tried to understand better by watching Dr. Strangelove multiple times. My mom, who lived through the peak of the deadly USA-USSR brinkmanship in 1962 - confirms that it really felt like the world as we knew it could have ended back then.
Pushing this thesis of ever-present existentialist threat further - I was struck by the writings of Nichiren Daishonin - a Buddhist monk who lived in the 13th Century. In “On Establishing the Correct Teaching for the Peace of the Land” - one of his five key writings - he addresses a Japan on the brink of a Mongol invasion, already shaken from within by earthquakes, famines and epidemics, declaring that the cause of all these threats was first and foremost the spiritual decay in the hearts of its people. I see it as Nichiren’s response to the Existentialist Threat of his time. Rather than addressing the issue on the surface he went deeper, cutting to the heart of things as he was wont to do.
Nichiren’s writings pointed something out for me. After a week of pondering, I wonder - is my apocalypse anxiety, my Existential Threat, unique to my times of domesday clocks and melting polar ice caps, bleaching reefs and despots prone to nuclear-speak; or is it something more perennial to human existence?
As my Gen Z readers might say - Apocalypse is a Moooooood🙈.
Nichiren would have agreed. The core Buddhist texts he referred to - most notably The Lotus Sutra - describes our times as The Latter Day of the Law; a time rife with difficulty, where the world is referred to as the Saha World (‘Saha’ from the root Sanskrit word that means “to endure”). If we’re born here, there’s a lot to endure; the kind of stuff that could lead to Apocalypse Anxiety because of the predominance of Existentialist Threat.
An Aside on BKS Iyengar…and Death
This is a remembered anecdote, so forgive my paraphrasing. I looked but could find the exact article where I had read this.
Yoga maestro BKS Iyengar was walking among his students when he saw one of them struggling to get into a back-bending asana.
“This, you see here, is the fear of death,” is what he said to the person with him.
He went forward and with his knowing hands, goaded the student’s reluctant body into the posture.
This anecdote has stayed with me over the years. I think of it every time I myself struggle with a back-bend. Letting your body fall backwards is like leaping into the unknown, because…we don’t have eyes at the back of our heads 🙄.
I remind myself that I too - like that student - am actually struggling with the fear of death when I struggle with a back-bend.Making the connection, I remind myself that at the heart of my Apocalypse Anxiety, is, ultimately the same fear.
Now here’s a photograph of my daughter Ananya doing a backbend happily:
Can I go as far to say that my child finds it much easier than me to conquer her fear of death? Can I go as far to say that perhaps we are all born without that fear and learn it slowly by rubbing against this Saha world every day?
Dancing
This is not a segue. Or perhaps it is.
I once heard a particularity about a particular actor. I was told that the camera loves him when he’s in motion, but if you filmed him sitting still, the frame went dead.
This is a good point to segue into what I really want to say:
If you know me well, you may have seen me dance. If you’ve seen me dance, you would not forget it, not because it’s some amazing feat of technique but because it’s a spectacle. I forget myself a bit when I dance.
However, forgetting myself doesn’t mean forgetting where I am and what’s going on around me. I love it when my groove gets others to groove with me. Even more so when it causes them to forget themselves as well. Writing this, I think I understand now why I vibed so much with this gem of a film whose trailer I’m sharing below. It’s about a ‘party starter’ somewhere in middle America for whom getting people to come forward to dance at bar mitzvahs is really about encouraging them to take the next step forward in their lives.
So, far from looking at dancing as fiddling while Rome burns, I see dancing as tapping into that part of life that tells us to keep moving, that proclaims “Apocalypse-Shepocalypse” and tells us to just take the next step forward.
Here are a few mildly embarrassing photos of me dancing:
…did he not Emerge Dancing?
In the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha is described as one who sees the world as “…this saha world of mine.”
Mine!
There’s more than acceptance in that sentence, there’s ownership. I find it to be a declaration of mission.
Another part of the Lotus Sutra speaks of the concept “casting off the transient and revealing the true”. In my Buddhist practice, a Bodhisattvas (trans: “one who seeks enlightenment”) is described as someone who has cast off their transient identity to reveal their true identity. The Buddha’s sense of mission - accepting the saha world as his own - is intrinsically linked to the Buddha’s identity as an enlightened being.
In his writing ‘Great Evil and Great Good’ Nichiren Daishonin writes:
When Bodhisattva Superior Practices emerged from the earth, did he not emerge dancing?
In the Buddhist canon, a Bodhisatva called Bodhisatva Superior Practices was said to have ‘emerged from the earth’, overjoyed that he has a chance to live and practice in the burning saha world. His bring-it-on joy that caused him to dance as he emerge was his firm conviction that he too was going to find enlightenment in the same way as the Buddha because he too had chosen this world of suffering as his place of mission.
To fight my Apocalypse Anxiety, I keep moving. Dancing.Even if I cannot feel Bodhisatva Superior Practice’s spontaneous joy first, I can at least start dancing and make my way towards it, one step forward at a time.
Here are some of the forward anti-Apocalypse steps that this kind of ‘dance-thinking’ has afforded me in the recent past -
Switching to a Bamboo Toothbrush
Hearing actor and environment activist Dia Mirza do the math about the impact that an auditorium full of people could make if they switched from plastic to bamboo toothbrushes had a dramatic impact on me. Just thinking about how it would result in one less HUGE pile of plastic in landfills and water bodies made me change the very next day.
Beach cleanup
We were in Goa in March, and saw a more plastic than ever spewing out of the ocean. At first it was deflating. Then, my kids and I decided to pick up even few bottles and other plastic trash on every visit and place it in a pile far enough from the water so the tide won’t simply pull it all back in.
Not falling
Dancing is moving, dancing is balance. I’ve learned a few tricks from a few masters to keep myself from falling.
From Austin Kleon, I learn to stop looking at the news after it gets dark outside, and to never never check my phone first thing in the morning. He maintains that looking at the news is much better done in the harsh light of day. I see sense in this.
From Jihii Jolly’s Substack I learn about better practices for news consumption. There’s much I’ve learned from her which is hard to summarise, but her newsletter is definitely worth a read. Here’s one I particularly enjoyed.
You and I have Global Hands
Polish Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman complained in the early 2000s that TV gives us ‘global eyes’ but not ‘global hands’ i.e we see everything that’s wrong with the world but can’t really do anything about it, multiplying out sense of helplessness.
I think this argument has turned today. The internet gives us reach and avenues to remain active in our engagement with the world now more than ever. Perhaps there are so many ways now to engage with the world that this too becomes a reason for paralysis.
I like to come back to what Nichiren says - it’s the slow but sure rot in our hearts that is to blame for the rot of the world. For me, dearest Yet Untitler, our ongoing weekly conversation is one of my ways to mitigate this. Actively.
Thank you for dancing! Lots of love and see you next week.
Do write back. I’d love to hear from you!
❤️