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4 months ago
6
Dear—
It is past 5 in the evening. I’m sitting at the window, although there’s only my own reflection in the window of the building opposite to look at. The sky is grey and light and it is hot outside. Silent, mostly. There was a kid calling out down below; I suppose by the time I finish writing this there will be more of them laughing and screaming. I’m glad that they have evenings cool enough to play outside. How long until it’s only cool when it’s dark? When an entire generation will know of summer as the time when everyone sleeps during the day, when their minds will think of nocturnal adventures—moonlit grass and post-dinner ice-creams—rather than sunny playgrounds and afternoon card games? Summer will no longer be yellow.
Every time the weekend comes around, when I have two unstructured days at my disposal, I start thinking about all the things I haven’t done and want to do. All the things I have to do that I wish I could stop doing, and all the things I’m doing even though there’s no need for me to do them.
There is so much. Every time I sit down, I could write a list with something new added to it. Here’s what it looks like right now:
- Write blog posts about all topics that I’ve learned about in the first year of my Master’s program
- Write a children’s book/textbook
- Read all the children’s book in our university library
- Write letters to or about every thing I love in this world—music, books, birdsong, theatre, walks with my mother—without telling myself that I’d be imitating John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed
- Write a love letter to the work of one of my favourite YouTubers
- Write atmospheric sketches/a webnovel of sorts inspired by JazzHop playlist thumbnail art
- Write a collection of essays called Contradictions
- Write a collection of essays called Articulations
- Start a blog to review children’s books in 100 words
- Read more fantasy books and write essays about them
- Print my blog posts and make a book out of them
- Adopt a school and make it a model
- Write stories/sketches of the things I wish I could do/alternate lives I want to live
And that’s just the last two days.
Three things keep bothering me:
- The urge to tie loose ends but also knowing that most knots would be a waste of time and that I could leave them untied
- A helplessness from not having enough time to do all the things I want to do in a day—every day I must choose only a few things
- Knowing and repeatedly forgetting that systems are artificial, a form of exerting control over life—which is full of randomness (and here goes my mind thinking that I must read that book on “how randomness rules our lives” I’ve seen in the library several times) and that life is never a neat narrative; it is just a series of anecdotes, what they called kisse instead of kahaniyan (stories) in Gullak.
And this embarrassing truth: Instead of making time to write about the things I could be writing, I should be writing those things directly. So instead of writing those love letters or blog posts, I’m here putting this down because I figured people would like to see these messy thoughts. Maybe they have felt similarly; I know I’ve found it relieving to read something that articulates the mess in my head, so I’m hoping an overthinker out there, or someone who’s not doing the things they want to do (most of us) even when they can do it (not many of us), will read this and feel relieved but also get moving.
Like I shall do right now, having said what I came here to say, the rest tucked away for someday else. I will go practice the guitar, which I haven’t touched in weeks.
Here’s a discovery I’ve made, a helpful question I ask myself when I feel helpless about all the things I want to do and not having enough time to do any of them and knowing that it would be impossible to do all of those things anyway: What do I want to do the most right now?
And then I go do that, as much as possible. I wrote this because that’s what I felt like doing a while ago. Now, I will take your leave. My guitar is waiting.
