Yet Untitled 117 - Comfort ki toh💥☠️👊🏻#️⃣😡 or (Screw Comfort)
A short note in defence of discomfort
Dearest Yet Untitler,
I caught a myself feeling a feeling the other day, something that I needed to unpack. I found all crabby and unsettled when there was clearly no apparent reason to feel thus. I had more or less handed over a finished film, was between stages of a writing project and was boarding an international flight for a short vacation; but my mood was off. In a very Ironman-esque way, I isolated the feeling in my brain’s H.U.D and analysed it from every angle, exploding it and scrutinising its every part.
Even as I was analysing, I already knew why I felt that way.
Someone had challenged me…
…to enter new, unfamiliar territory.
This was in the context of re-writing somethingI thought I already had figured. The challenge - to push some boundaries beyond my proposed treatment - made me bristle somewhat.
In theory - I knew already that it’s such challenges that promise growth. In theory. The theory says nothing about liking being challenged. I suddenly thought about how I constantly ask my kids to challenge themselves and about the scowls I’m met with when I do, and my own flabbergasted-ness at their scowls.
Vasant: Come on kids, let’s wake up early on saturday morning and go for a mangrove clean-up.
Kids: Scowl.
Sigh. I loathe to say it, but as I boarded that flight for my vacation, scowling, I dare say I know how my kids feel when they hear my pedantic voice saying - come on, challenge yourselves!
Just when it gets comfortable, it’s time to move forward
At first glance, this is a conundrum.
I wondered - did I spend 20 years of attrition, honing myself as a writer only to afford myself a mere (relative) 10 seconds of turbulence-free, laminar flow?
Greater skill, in many ways has meant - greater comfort. Not to say that writing has become ‘easy’, but let’s just say that by now (I think) I know my way around most of the problems that writing regularly throws at me. Then, along comes the thing that I don’t know my way around and laminar flow ki 💥☠️👊🏻#️⃣😡 (emoji colloquialism meaning that everything goes to shit).
But another thing happened that helped me easy myself into the discomfort that my colleague’s challenge had thrown me into. I got another call from another colleague in which they asked me to do something equally challenging, equally way-out there in the cosmos of the unfamiliar.
Go with chaos, Vasant
I figured that if I’m getting two such invitations into the unknown in such close proximity, the world is trying to tell me something.
It’s telling me - comfort, laminar flow and cruising altitude ki 💥☠️👊🏻#️⃣😡.
I write this sentences with a bouquet of very positive and hopeful feelings in my chest - a big change from the disquiet I was feeling a few days ago after the said challenge had ruffled my feathers. I cannot tell you how fortunate I feel to have the universe send me such headwinds: conditions that I only identify as forces trying to push my airframe upwards.
I’ll end with one last thought - a comforting one. Many years ago, in my beginning as a screenwriter, at some point I must have felt the same way as I now - feeling the wind under my wings making me rise high up in the sky. I just didn't know how expansive the sky was back then, and how long and thrilling this flight could be.
I’ll leave you with an appropriate Japanese pop song called “Kaze Wo Atsumete”, which translates to “I gather the wind (under my wings)”. You may remember it from Lost in Translation, one of my favourite films.
The lyrics are transcribed in translation here.
Thanks for listening
Lots of love,
V
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