Don’t die; read a book

MANILA, Philippines - I felt like I was dying. I was confined in a tiny little corner and my soul was withering away each day. I pined for the past and longed for my “rightful” future, the outlines of which I could see clearly as if made bold and added with multiple strokes if it were photoshop-ed, but the details were missing, the uncertainty keeping me in a confused, dazed state, as if in limbo. I felt disconnected. I was..well..unhappy.

It may well be quarter-life crisis come too late or mid-life crisis come too early, but it didn’t matter what the crisis was called. It was a crisis, full stop. And no, I didn’t turn to drugs, sex or violence (too clichéd, not to mention dramatic, and not all too fitting for a 31-year-old) nor did I throw myself onto the MRT railway tracks (too painful and morbid) nor did I wallow and sob my eyes out (although I did have my moments, which I blamed on the hormones’ monthly fluctuation); I instead turned to my two-year-old, four-tiered, multi-text/colored wooden shelf.

In that shelf were different lives and worlds and between those, adventures unimaginable, characters so completely relatable, and stories so poignant in both their truthfulness and humor. Without leaving my little corner, I traveled, within four months, across continents and time: with the Venetian adventurer Giacomo Casanova from the prisons and courtyards of 18th-century Europe; with the suburban mother Ella as she regularly shifted from her daily life in New York to encounters with the 13th century Sufi mystics, Shams and Rumi, in Persia; to all over the busy, crazy metropolitan that is London as the late-twenty-something women try to find their place and love in the city jungle; and finally to South Africa, where three generations of women live together and worry as one would according to where she is in the time of her life, their thoughts and antics so hilariously real (hats off to Yvonne Burgess for ingeniously making a point that real life situations, no matter how ‘serious,’ do include a funny side, though it often takes an outsider to see that)  it made me guffaw reading it until my sister thought I had finally lost it.

The crisis: The beginnings

I’ve never been one for chick lit (too often I found their characters mere caricatures, skeletal figures with no real believable substance; and the plots conveniently simplistic so that it becomes offensive to the reader’s intelligence), but I was looking for a quick and easy read; something light and if, God be so kind, something really funny (I was in the dumps, remember?). At the book store, I found Alexandra Potter’s books in the same row as her fellow British author, Sophie Kinsella’s (of the book-turned-movie Diaries of a Shopaholic fame), and while because of that, I had immediately regarded it with suspicion, I realized soon after reading a book of hers that she in fact belongs in a row higher, much higher than Kinsella (I will not go into details as that is off-topic).

Six books and night after night of reading about a lost young woman who feels stuck in a rut (the elements of which, usually, are: a career that does not show any signs of taking off anytime soon; a dull love life or a complete lack thereof; an insecure/uncertain future stemming from the two previously mentioned – and an abusive use of the “evil plastic”; an insipid life characterized by rotes and plains, with trips to the mall constituting the “highs”), I wondered whether Potter was talking about me (that her heroines all did yoga, loved TopShop and were vegetarians, contributed to this question). Okay, not all details fit, of course, but the description of the general predicament and the emotional temperature of the characters were bang-on.

I never egotistically thought that I had a monopoly of the “crisis”; but to have my own story written, only set in a different place, reminds me of the universality of the human experience. “Misery shared is misery halved; joy shared is joy doubled,” I read somewhere. In the end, I felt one with the rest of womanhood, and I felt hopeful (although this comes more from the wonderful formula of chick lit where true to its modern fairytale-form, in the end, everybody “lives happily ever after.”).

The struggle

Whether it was Sándor Márai talking about the struggle to be physically free (from prison and isolation) in a novel about Giacomo Casanova in Conversations in Bolzano, or Elif Shafak writing about 40-year-old-housewife Ella wanting to escape her gilded prison in the suburbs of New York in The Forty Rules of Love, the message of both these novels, while delivered differently, resonates with anybody struggling to be free. For both Casanova and Ella (although belatedly realized by the latter), to live (“I want to live so I can write!” – Casanova) is of utmost necessity and urgency (Casanova considered that the imposed “boredom and loneliness were as much a form of torture..what was the point of life if one were removed from the busy commerce of the world? Anything but solitude!). Ella, inspired by Rumi’s poetry and teachings on (divine/spiritual) love, left her old unfulfilled life, her journey to find herself taking her halfway across the world where the famous Sufi mystic lived and taught many centuries previously, and convincing Ella that “there is no such thing as early or late in life; that everything happens at the right time,” and that “beyond wildest dreams, strange things happened to people when they were ready for the unusual and the unexpected.”

Submission

Endless hours of talking with friends and every other humanly effort to live through the crisis, including yoga and meditation, in the end, made me realize one thing: sometimes, you just have to let things be. No matter how seemingly awful – like teenage pregnancy in a household already struggling to make ends meet and within a conservative South African society that outperforms God in handing out judgment, in Say a Little Mantra For Me) – the circumstances were at the time that they were happening, chances are, you’ll find reasons to laugh at yourself when you do look back.

Letting things run their natural course, I decided, was the best recourse. I was physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted, after all. But before that I had to remind myself: “Submission” – and here I quote Shams of Tabriz – “is a form of peaceful acceptance of the terms of the universe, including the things we are currently unable to change or comprehend.”