A very simple sentence from the book ‘When things fall Apart’ by Pema Chödrön. And as I read these words so many moments come flashing back. I am one of those people who often look at someone and wonder how they do it. In my early twenties, after a night of partying, I would lie in bed at 10:00 am and wonder how people had children, because they would then not have the luxury of lolling around like me. Later when I had my own son and was putting in 20 hour days taking care of the infant, helped by maids, my mother and husband, I would wonder how people in the West, who did not have access to maids and obliging parents, did it. As my son was growing up, and I was struggling with a complicated schedule of drops and pick-ups, coordinated with my husband, I would look at my newly divorced friends and wonder how they did it – the single parenting. It was exhausting enough to manage my single child with shared responsibility and it seemed impossible to me to think of going at it alone.
I would think of my single friends who lived alone and wonder how that was possible. I wondered if they were scared sometimes, of snakes and dogs and ghosts and noises in the night, how did they go to parties, whom did they discuss their choice of shoes with. Sometimes when we were on our way to or from a party, I would look at an ambulance passing by and think of those inside, the stress and fear. Of course as I grew older I sat inside several ambulances myself, so I know how ‘they’ did it. I am a single mother now and as I sat down for dinner on my son’s 18th birthday I became firmly the ‘they’.
In my work life too, I resisted ‘growing up’ for a long time as I couldn’t imagine being responsible for others, being a mentor, making decisions on behalf of people and facing them when those decisions didn’t work. I would think how do people go to the same office and spend the whole day there doing the same things, focusing on minute details all the time.
‘Nothing is what we thought. I can say that with great confidence. Emptiness is not what we thought. Neither is mindfulness or fear. Compassion – not what we thought. Love. Courage. These are code words for things we don’t know in our minds, but any of us could experience them.’
And that is perhaps the crux of it. It is impossible to live always in a cocoon of safety, comfort and warmth. Life tosses us around and whether these myriad experiences come sooner or later, they surely will come. Besides cocoons can become prisons and after a point we will want to break out and feel the wind.
Nothing is what we thought also applies to so many good things – the sound of the guitar in my home at all hours, my straggly balcony garden, the cake without sugar that turns out perfectly, the brush strokes that fall into place, the story that seemingly writes itself.
And so it goes on, I now accept that I can’t know what will come next. There is a sense of shakiness; the ground beneath my feet has turned to wind. I fly sometimes, but mostly I hop on stones on the way, jumping to the next one knowing it’s all only for the moment. It still surprises me – what a lot can be done in this temporary space of the moment. The infinitesimal moment which I took so much for granted now has the potential to expand, to become important, to have value, gravitas.
I have always thought in terms of the dual – happy/sad, order/chaos, creation/destruction and so many more. Like most people, I’ve always tried to move towards the more positive (positive/negative – another one). Of course duality exists, but the thing is everything exists together and it’s really impossible to separate. Just when we bring order into something, make neat boxes and compartmentalize, we realize there is a leak somewhere and things get skewed, everything runs into the other. There are laws that govern the universe outside (though we are still trying to understand them).
The universe within is still a mess with vast areas of unknown landscapes and we try our best to classify, compartmentalize, concretize, correct, control, comprehend, collate and coordinate this interior world.
In another chapter Pema Chodron says – Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is things don’t really get solved. They come together, they fall apart, they come together again and they fall apart again. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.
When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test of each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize.
Chödrön, P. (2017). When things fall apart: Heart advice for difficult times. London: Thorsons Classics.
naga nandini 
Very well said Nandini and very true too!!
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