Yet Untitled Lite 010 - “Forget your Perfect Offering, Vasant”

There is a crack in everything, but not everything is broken

Greetings Dearest YU-er

Welcome back! I hope you are well.

Yes, I missed my Friday publishing deadline, for the first time. It was a toss up between sending you something undercooked and serving up a proper pasta al dente. It was painful, but a well wisher once told me - “more than anything, be known for quality, Vasant”. I’m sticking to that, so heeeeeerrreeess YUL 010! I hope you enjoy it

Can anything be perfect?

Last week, I attempted to run the second 15K race of my life. I had checked every box - clocked the miles, eaten the right food, got adequate sleep, stored up enough water. I ran, I finished, and I crossed the finish line looking happy! Look!

In a world full of imperfect things, this outcome felt like a little parenthesis of perfection. It was a big one for me. Thirty one years ago, I had collapsed on my first run in boarding school, unable to breathe, embarrassed at my physical ineptitude in front of a grandstand of boisterous jocks. For the next 31 years, I challenged my physical limits and hence I crossed the finish line of my humble 15k in year 42 of my life with that big smile, because it took 31 years for me to come this far.

A warm fuzzy feeling continued into the rest of the day. We had lunch at a favourite restaurant and the food tasted even better because of the run. Even the occasional, debilitating headache I get when I exert above a certain threshold didn’t come. I felt like I was floating atop the notes of Duran Duran’s “Perfect Day” through lunch all the way to dinner and finally to bed…

…until the next day when I woke with a sharp pain a little above my heel. This happened just when I was starting to believe that I had crossed over into a new stage my life as a runner, perhaps even as a person - a version of myself who had left that wheezing little eleven year boarding school kid behind.

When the pain came, a deluge of feelings cascaded over me - all connected to that feeling of ineptitude from when I had collapsed while in school. Abstract feelings, they were: about being broken as I had always suspected I was.

Needless to say, my perfect feeling was suddenly shat upon 💩. And it didn’t stop there.

Experiencing this torrent of rain on my parade had a sudden domino effect on the way I saw the world. Suddenly, all of life looked like it was delivering on its promises under par! Everything felt inept. An eagerly awaited work project was going ahead but way under budget. Was it worth it? We were leaving for a much awaited holiday but the days suddenly felt less. Was it worth it?

The Man comes around

Before more thoughts like these could run away with my head, The Man came around to tell me a thing or two about perfection:

In “Anthem”, Leonard Cohen urges us to Forget our Perfect Offering. He goes one to say that there is a crack, a CRACK, in everything.

That’s where the light gets in, he says.

While Bob Dylan settles at Everything is Broken, Cohen makes a point that speaks much louder to me.

After a bit of reflecting (as I’m wont to do around this newsletter), it seems that the ‘perfection’ I was seeking from my run was coming though unscathed - some sort of antithesis to the trauma of physical failure in boarding school. Things didn’t entirely turn out that way. My body protested after being put through such an ordeal, and I sulked about this for a day (read about my History of Sulking in YU 018 below).

Yet Untitled 018 - The Incredible Sulk

I often use unresolved feelings as a starting point to my weekly instalments of YU, and this unresolved feeling was as juicy as they get. A little way into looking at it with compassion (and some amount of amusement) here’s where I arrived:

There was no denying that I had experienced satisfaction, triumph and joy during my run. The quantum of each was multiplied by the fact that I had crossed a frontier - to be able to run this distance feeling as good as I did, even with the few minor setbacks. I had my doubts when I started the run, but there was a moment during the event when I knew that I’d finish the race. It coincided with the breaking dawn and it was just amazing.

I’ll take this, cracks and all. Cracks are fine. After all, I started running because I thought there was a crack in me.

Forget your perfect offering, Vasant. All you’re ever going to get are things with cracks in the them. Even this broken world of yours is full of so much beauty and worth fighting for. Little boy, lying wheezing and embarrassed on the hard ground 31 years ago - don’t despair. You will have your day.

I draw a long breath and and reach for an ice pack and apply it to my heel.

Thank you for listening. And thank you Raje for the photos!

Did this instalment evoke some old version of yourself to you as it did for me? I certainly hope it did. Do treat that kid with kindness, and tell me about him or her in the comments below

Tell me. I’d love to know.