A Dark Bubble
Automat by Edward Hopper (1927)
The kettle’s whistling sound interrupted my search for a cinnamon stick. I moved to put the grinded coffee in the cup and added a pinch of cinnamon powder to it. I did not look for the cinnamon stick anymore. I felt like taking a picture of my coffee, but then the kettle’s alert made me quite like a magpie. I picked up the smoking cup at once. Coffee was brewed like as if it once wished to become an exquisitely scented candle. Our dining hall smelled like a posh café. But it smelled more like ‘a long wait’.
In the last few days, I kind of settled down with some ‘friendship duties’. My days were filled with some responsibilities that somehow did not come calmly. The details were pretty clumsy. My friend’s declining relationship with her parents showed us (her friends) a never-seen-before dimness. Every time, I could just nod and listen to her goals and the opposite mindset of her parents. I could only give her a few bonus points that how valuable her thoughts were and to set some solid reasons to convince her parents. She somehow blocked herself into the fear of losing her passion for music. I could see my childhood friend was drowning into a depressive mode. Eventually, it took almost a week to come to a negotiable point from both sides. On one evening at our place, ‘their one-to-one conversation’ thankfully sorted out almost all the major issues on a good note. The weeklong hustle threw a heavy result on everybody. On their side, it all sorted, but still a question mark still holds some of the expressions. On my side, I was mentally exhausted to see the puzzling state of my friend’s life, and then I realised the list of my pending works dooming me in secret. I feared losing my work commitments like a half-baked cake would feel when it was pierced every few minutes in the hope of getting fully baked!
I needed a highly structured routine to come back to normal timing. I placed the brewed coffee on my desk. I opened my laptop to go on with the listing. And I checked my planner to adjust the dates with the third string works. After some hours, I managed to cover some official work but still it continued to put me in the state of tagging myself as an ‘unmanageable’. I put my hand on my eyes and started touching them softly. Suddenly, I heard a chirping sound. A bird was perking on my tinted glass window. It was poking its feathers. It couldn’t see me. It opened its wings and then slowly moved from one flower pot to another like nobody ever watched its cheerful personal time. It had no fear of getting trapped. It had no fear of losing time.
Fear of losing something or someone –it’s a deep issue, even if we tag them separately as personal fear or professional fear. Fear creates a bubble of haziness where a light of hope can’t even pass on. When I think about my friends’ side, I know she and her parents, they all had ‘fear’ that pushed them to become inconsiderable. In the end, my friend agreed to continue her education and her parents accepted her urge to go for shows. But still, we could see that they all kept one thing as a ‘guarantee’ to respect others. It still showed a bubble of fear that kept them in the state of conditioning.
In my case, I had the fear of losing the work commitment. I feared that people would think of me as irresponsible. I became hard on myself without clarifying my state. I feared. My friend feared. Her parents feared. But we all in those states forgot one thing. ‘Fear’ was taking down the reason to be happy—the reason to be in the moment. Fear is a suffocating state that prompts sharp enmity with the best possible results. It pushes us to think only about the worst. But best and worst –these two extremities cannot justify the chosen path. We may see a few ups and downs, even if we can see some downfalls, but we should also have faith in ourselves that we can take out the positive side that will shine as a guiding force. It’s true that fear does not go away with one forceful blow. We will be fearful in many situations but that can’t be the big full stop to live by our wishes. As Jaclyn Moriarty says, “…you’ve got to keep your own spirits up, for there’s no one else will do that for you!” It’s a precious takeaway. Just like the bird, it might have thought not to be in the human place; probably it might have thought of getting hurt. Then it sat on the window for some mere moments, but stayed there with the courage to feel the power of now. The bird showed the power of Ina*. It reminded us to take moments out of that dark bubble. We hope to burst it one day and set fear free.
(*In Sanskrit, Ina (इन).—a. means determined or anything that is powerful.)