When I was young, my mom told I should start running before I buy new running shoes. Something that she didn't always do. That way, you get in a rhythm with it before you make that kind of investment. That way you are committed before diving all the way in.
For work, I borrowed a video camera from the university. Before I left I had been toying with the idea of buying a nice camera to take photos with, having taken a photography camp in high school and being taken with whatever cameras I could get my hands on. But, not having due experience or time to learn before coming to India, I decided to see if I could just rent one from the library. They gave me 3 options of cameras, and under the advisement of a friend (and shamefully not a lot of research on my own), I opted for a smaller Cannon with video and photo capabilities.
It's a nice camera and it takes pretty videos, but the photo taking is difficult because the trigger is on the touch screen, and it's pretty slow switching between viewing and capturing moments, so I've had mixed feelings about its functionality. Last week my boss mentioned that she had another camera I could try out, and after playing around on it for a day, I was rather smitten. But the second day I had it, we went to an event and the group photos - the most important ones - were really blurry because my manual focusing skills were not practiced enough. And then today, as I was carting around the bag with the different lenses, one fell out and dropped on the floor and rolled. I froze, hoping that it hadn't broken. It didn't, but the moment got me thinking more about the space between want and need.
I think was my mom was saying is "don't want what you don't need." Or maybe it's more about proper indulgence - to know the difference between want and need so that you don't get weighed down with desires while you're figuring out what you need. That is, I wasn't at the point today where I needed different lenses. If it had just been me tooling around at my leisure with a camera in hand, I probably could have spent months understanding just one lens. But because of the access to and desire for more and more, I took up another before knowing how much space to make for it.
I think this want/need divide is seen within social status as well - in the way that axioms can wrap around a multitude of spheres. I wished I could have the camera for myself, as something I had to assert my status as a capable photographer - a capable person.
Last week I went to the jazz club with a friend of mine and he introduced me to a couple of his friends. They were jovial and had glitter on their eyelids and asked me what I did. My nature comes back to me and despite my 6 year old self's 2-year long resolution to not be shy, I realize that I am shy and can get weighed down with the little details in life. So in those moments I can sometimes resort to a form of humility - shoe gazing and down playing my livelihood. It's rather confusing as to why this happens. Or rather, it's a confusing happening that tugs on a number of heart strings. On one hand, I feel supremely proud of the person I am becoming - the skills that I'm developing to be able to support the NGO, the work that they do, how much love I've put into my music and how much I've been taking the time and risk to share it with people I don't even know and hell even just making it through a day with a smile to is enough bring on the pride. But on the other hand, there is so much that I haven't done that I dream about or want to happen. There's a lot that I envision for myself and for the world, and it's in these discrepancies between dreams and reality - between what I want to be true, and what needs to be told - that I can trip and fall into self-depreciation.
So here I am on one side - wanting this camera, wanting to sell my work, wanting to have the fancy running shoes to call myself a runner. Yet, on the other side I keep dropping lenses, sleeping in instead of working, walking instead of running. It gets me thinking - if you work in an office, it's rather clear to see when you're on and when you're off. If you're at your computer on Facebook, you're doing a bad job - you're being a bad employee. You can weigh how many times you're on distracting tasks instead of productive ones and quantify your quality. If, of course, all day you do nothing but focus on the task at hand, but then go home and scroll Facebook for hours, as long as you wake up fresh and peppy for the next work day, it doesn't make you a bad employee.
But as a person, when do we get time to turn off? And as an artist or freelancer, what sort of clock are we on? There's been a sort of comfort I've had in going to a 9 to 5 - a sense of accomplishment by the end of the day - because there is an end of the day. But the ups and downs of personally driven and timed projects are due to the freedom afforded. Freedom of growth, of hibernation, of success, of failure. I wonder how much of a toll it takes to always be calculating your worth like that. At the same time, I wonder how much of a toll it takes to only be calculating your worth based on somebody else's algorithm.
I suppose that's the choice that some of us are facing. And then some of us humans have no choices at all. They work where they can when they can because otherwise their families will not eat, will not be safe. They work and toil because of something that super-cedes their moment to moment, or maybe something that fuels that bridge. They work because of survival. Tangible questions of survival for themselves and the ones they love.
But all on the spectrum of choice to no choice are not so far away from one another. And consciously or not, we share with each other. We share space and product and sometimes (though not often enough) we share love and food and time. We share our children and our parents. We share our cities and our streets.
Yesterday I was heading to meet friends in a rickshaw and there was a boy selling things to people in cars - usually people sell balloons or dish towels or snacks. But he was holding books - one of which was Paulo Cohelo's "The Alchemist," that I had just recently read. He came up to my car to ask if I wanted one and I tried to ask him if he reads these books - he couldn't have been more than 8 or 9. I realized that there was no way he was interested in talking with me about this, and likely my Hindi was choppy enough to be incoherent anyway. He asked me to buy a book and traffic started moving and I said no and we drove off.
Last time we spoke, my brother told me to be safe and before I do things think to myself "is this a stupid white girl thing to do?" and if the answer is yes don't do it. Part of me feels like that could have loosely fit in that category, because as we drove off I thought about the implications of talking to him with no intention of purchasing a book. Of taking his time unnecessarily. If that's rude or cruel or inappropriate. Because most of what I see are people averting their eyes from things they don't want and people they don't want to talk to and I understand that it's a totally necessary communication technique for efficiency especially in big cities with so many people doing and needing different things, but then I wonder where we have a chance to humanize each other.
My cousin talks about how much better New York City was when you could see a beggar and business mogul sitting next to each other on the subway. Clean and efficient public transportation for all is such an ideal way to reinforce humanization - both because of potentials for commute-induced connection, but also for getting everyone out to see different perspectives. To see how people live differently and the same, to see what ways we bring love and light into our homes and communities.
So, for all of the social creature in me, I want running shoes to show off to my friends and to give me mad hops like Jordan and to hit a home run and make everyone cheer. For all of the bleeding heart in me, I just want to wear my old sneakers to shreds running every day feeling the rubber smear on the pavement and the soles of my feet getting closer and closer to the ground for every soul who can't afford the time or money to run. So I stand with the question of what I do and lose my voice between eloquence and honesty, prose and prostration.
For work, I borrowed a video camera from the university. Before I left I had been toying with the idea of buying a nice camera to take photos with, having taken a photography camp in high school and being taken with whatever cameras I could get my hands on. But, not having due experience or time to learn before coming to India, I decided to see if I could just rent one from the library. They gave me 3 options of cameras, and under the advisement of a friend (and shamefully not a lot of research on my own), I opted for a smaller Cannon with video and photo capabilities.
It's a nice camera and it takes pretty videos, but the photo taking is difficult because the trigger is on the touch screen, and it's pretty slow switching between viewing and capturing moments, so I've had mixed feelings about its functionality. Last week my boss mentioned that she had another camera I could try out, and after playing around on it for a day, I was rather smitten. But the second day I had it, we went to an event and the group photos - the most important ones - were really blurry because my manual focusing skills were not practiced enough. And then today, as I was carting around the bag with the different lenses, one fell out and dropped on the floor and rolled. I froze, hoping that it hadn't broken. It didn't, but the moment got me thinking more about the space between want and need.
I think was my mom was saying is "don't want what you don't need." Or maybe it's more about proper indulgence - to know the difference between want and need so that you don't get weighed down with desires while you're figuring out what you need. That is, I wasn't at the point today where I needed different lenses. If it had just been me tooling around at my leisure with a camera in hand, I probably could have spent months understanding just one lens. But because of the access to and desire for more and more, I took up another before knowing how much space to make for it.
I think this want/need divide is seen within social status as well - in the way that axioms can wrap around a multitude of spheres. I wished I could have the camera for myself, as something I had to assert my status as a capable photographer - a capable person.
Last week I went to the jazz club with a friend of mine and he introduced me to a couple of his friends. They were jovial and had glitter on their eyelids and asked me what I did. My nature comes back to me and despite my 6 year old self's 2-year long resolution to not be shy, I realize that I am shy and can get weighed down with the little details in life. So in those moments I can sometimes resort to a form of humility - shoe gazing and down playing my livelihood. It's rather confusing as to why this happens. Or rather, it's a confusing happening that tugs on a number of heart strings. On one hand, I feel supremely proud of the person I am becoming - the skills that I'm developing to be able to support the NGO, the work that they do, how much love I've put into my music and how much I've been taking the time and risk to share it with people I don't even know and hell even just making it through a day with a smile to is enough bring on the pride. But on the other hand, there is so much that I haven't done that I dream about or want to happen. There's a lot that I envision for myself and for the world, and it's in these discrepancies between dreams and reality - between what I want to be true, and what needs to be told - that I can trip and fall into self-depreciation.
So here I am on one side - wanting this camera, wanting to sell my work, wanting to have the fancy running shoes to call myself a runner. Yet, on the other side I keep dropping lenses, sleeping in instead of working, walking instead of running. It gets me thinking - if you work in an office, it's rather clear to see when you're on and when you're off. If you're at your computer on Facebook, you're doing a bad job - you're being a bad employee. You can weigh how many times you're on distracting tasks instead of productive ones and quantify your quality. If, of course, all day you do nothing but focus on the task at hand, but then go home and scroll Facebook for hours, as long as you wake up fresh and peppy for the next work day, it doesn't make you a bad employee.
But as a person, when do we get time to turn off? And as an artist or freelancer, what sort of clock are we on? There's been a sort of comfort I've had in going to a 9 to 5 - a sense of accomplishment by the end of the day - because there is an end of the day. But the ups and downs of personally driven and timed projects are due to the freedom afforded. Freedom of growth, of hibernation, of success, of failure. I wonder how much of a toll it takes to always be calculating your worth like that. At the same time, I wonder how much of a toll it takes to only be calculating your worth based on somebody else's algorithm.
I suppose that's the choice that some of us are facing. And then some of us humans have no choices at all. They work where they can when they can because otherwise their families will not eat, will not be safe. They work and toil because of something that super-cedes their moment to moment, or maybe something that fuels that bridge. They work because of survival. Tangible questions of survival for themselves and the ones they love.
But all on the spectrum of choice to no choice are not so far away from one another. And consciously or not, we share with each other. We share space and product and sometimes (though not often enough) we share love and food and time. We share our children and our parents. We share our cities and our streets.
Yesterday I was heading to meet friends in a rickshaw and there was a boy selling things to people in cars - usually people sell balloons or dish towels or snacks. But he was holding books - one of which was Paulo Cohelo's "The Alchemist," that I had just recently read. He came up to my car to ask if I wanted one and I tried to ask him if he reads these books - he couldn't have been more than 8 or 9. I realized that there was no way he was interested in talking with me about this, and likely my Hindi was choppy enough to be incoherent anyway. He asked me to buy a book and traffic started moving and I said no and we drove off.
Last time we spoke, my brother told me to be safe and before I do things think to myself "is this a stupid white girl thing to do?" and if the answer is yes don't do it. Part of me feels like that could have loosely fit in that category, because as we drove off I thought about the implications of talking to him with no intention of purchasing a book. Of taking his time unnecessarily. If that's rude or cruel or inappropriate. Because most of what I see are people averting their eyes from things they don't want and people they don't want to talk to and I understand that it's a totally necessary communication technique for efficiency especially in big cities with so many people doing and needing different things, but then I wonder where we have a chance to humanize each other.
My cousin talks about how much better New York City was when you could see a beggar and business mogul sitting next to each other on the subway. Clean and efficient public transportation for all is such an ideal way to reinforce humanization - both because of potentials for commute-induced connection, but also for getting everyone out to see different perspectives. To see how people live differently and the same, to see what ways we bring love and light into our homes and communities.
So, for all of the social creature in me, I want running shoes to show off to my friends and to give me mad hops like Jordan and to hit a home run and make everyone cheer. For all of the bleeding heart in me, I just want to wear my old sneakers to shreds running every day feeling the rubber smear on the pavement and the soles of my feet getting closer and closer to the ground for every soul who can't afford the time or money to run. So I stand with the question of what I do and lose my voice between eloquence and honesty, prose and prostration.
Because ultimately I'm not sure what I'm doing when I'm just doing, and I'm not sure why I'm doing when I'm just doing. But this little question of livelihood seems to make something tick and make something click for people so it's looking like I've got to figure out a game plan here...
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| Taken June 24 2017 |
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