Beyond Me, Myself and Sigh

 At any one point in time, an infinitude of human experiences fold out, like an undulating silk blanket being whipped out in the skies by robotic angels, a galaxy of bright stars exploding in unison, giant infernos in themselves but so, so tiny from afar.

At any one point in time you’ll have an array of events and emotions occurring simultaneously – a worker in an ill-fitting black uniform at a salon, looking up from the calloused foot of a client who is flipping through Instagram pictures on her phone; an old man sitting at the side of his four poster bed, his wrinkled fingers resting on silken sheets, his head bent; a baby being born, slippery, crying, silencing his mother’s screams; a young woman dying at the side of a road next to a smashed car on a highway; a veteran staring at himself in the mirror, a loaded gun gleaming in front of him on the dresser; a wife staring at her snoring husband, wondering if she would be happier without him; a toddler taking his first steps; a teenager falling in love in the back row of a classroom ...

From the superstar overdosing in his hotel room to the mother waking up at 2:30 am to go peel shrimp in a damp, dank factory so that her children could eat that night, the variety of experiences erupting and fizzling every second of every hour, day after day, is mind boggling.     

Maybe it is because it hurts the brain to think like that – of life as so much more than oneself – that we so rarely do it, hardly ever going beyond our own experience and trying to assess it not in the immediate way it makes us feel but in relation to everything that exists outside of us.

It is so easy to get sucked into the mundanity of your own life.  To get wrapped up in the unending household chores, two more popping up like magic on the list just as you cross one out, the daily commute to work, the same people who are walking in the same directions appearing like a rerun of a TV show you’ve seen too much of, to keeping in touch with your friends around the globe and promising yourself you will go to the gym, to watching two hours of Netflix every night because that’s the only time you can unwind and shut off, to the need for shutting off because we are always on the go, go, go, to arranging a coffee with a colleague because everybody needs a social life –

Routine is comforting, but also insidiously draining.  And while social media would have you thinking everyone but you is forever running marathons or travelling the world or finishing their fiftieth DIY project in their bohemian home, I would wager that life for most of us is actually quite repetitive.  We do similar things day in day out, we fight about the same things with our partners and our siblings and even ourselves, forever setting the same goals and sometimes reaching them but a lot of the time falling flat, only to taking a deep breath and try again.

That, I may argue, is the tragedy and beauty of humanity, the resilience that makes us get up every morning and aim for goals that are slipping out of reach.

Every now and then we have an epiphany – it may be almost colliding with an oncoming car because we were too distracted and suddenly remembering like a forgotten secret the reality and transience of life. Oh my god, you may think, I almost died. Life is so unpredictable, I really need to be more grateful and spend less time cribbing about small things, and as you continue your walk home, you may take deeper breaths than you are used to taking, admire the dreamy pale lavender hues of a sunset as it melts across the sky, list five things you are grateful for.  But half an hour later, your world again collapses into the selfish immediacy of a moment that exists only in your mind and body – the frustration of a fallen phone and its broken screen, the irritation of a partner watching YouTube videos while you make dinner for the fourth time that week, the desperation of a child screaming and refusing to fall asleep ...

The human mind, I suppose, is built to think small, to digest experiences on a very individual level, which can in so many ways make us very ungrateful.  Thinking beyond yourself, though, is one of those goals I mentioned – you have to keep on trying.  Making a conscious effort to think once every day that life is more than what that present moment is making us feel and by virtue of that thought, stepping out of a negative place into a more wide open, neutral or maybe even beautiful space. 

Walks on sunny days, beautiful large trees with sprawling branches, an open blue sky, a talk with a good friend, a chat with a stranger outside a restaurant, a documentary or a book, a good film – all ways to remind us how very big this world is and how many different experiences are taking place all the time.  Life on social media is but such an infinitesimal slice of that – but because we are engaged with it so constantly, it seems to encompass us and make us forget that there are people all over the world who are not posting pictures of what they are going through – workers in morgues bathing bodies, plastic surgeons enlarging lips and stitching up stomachs, soldiers in trenches, children playing with marbles in neighbourhood streets, people kissing, partners fighting, beautiful, strange, painful, boring experiences –

There is a balance that people like me (from a comfortable income group who have achieved a graduate degree and are too often immersed in the current philosophy of ‘we deserve more’) – a balance between the indignant, self-righteous, slightly childish and utterly selfish belief that we deserve a perfect life, and the realisation that life is not perfect but the way we have it is much more than we give credit for.  I think the present culture does perpetuate dissatisfaction and consequently, unhappiness, just because we are always seeking more – a fulfilling job, an egalitarian marriage, brilliant and kind children, frequent trips abroad because they add to the general fulfilment of life ... while in some ways that does help – more people I know have opted for jobs that are not the stereotypical ones our elder siblings took up for lack of choice and permission, there is more travelling than house buying, a shift in the gender balance in homes, but the fear is, of course, that we forget the gratitude in the hustle of better and more, that we forget the relativity of comfort and love and companionship in a world where only the superlatives get the spotlight.  That we are so concerned with getting the best that we ruin the quite good.

So while yes, you deserve good things, you have to remember that life is imperfect and much harder than our daily routines would have us realise.  So take the time to see beyond your spilt cereal or broken ankle, overdue promotion or lousy vacation, and imagine your problems in light of the infinity of human experiences that take place.  And remember, most of life is offline.