"What is the fuel that keeps you going?" I remember asking a friend more than a decade ago, a girl who I immensely admired because she seemed to have it all figured out. She was probably a little startled but tried to answer anyway.
"My family and my friends.. I guess."
Looking back it seems like a weird question to have asked. I remember the feeling behind it though. Or the lack of it. It was a time when I was feeling listless and absolutely unmotivated to even wake up each day and move. It wasn't a lack of physical energy but more a lack of mental energy. Why bother to do anything at all?
The feeling eventually went away and obviously I did keep waking up. It has returned at several points during these years. A feeling of hopelessness and indifference and feeling distant from everyone and everything. I have attributed it many times to being in North America, away from sunshine, away from family and friends.
And yet that time when I asked my friend the weird question I was very much in India. Close to family, surrounded by friends and tons of sunshine.
'It's part of being human" says my husband. "Everyone feels that way sometimes." Maybe he is right. But if that's true, why do we so seldom talk of it?
Since Kuttipa's birth, although there have been periods of hopelessness, it is much less intense when it happens. As if Kuttipa has given meaning to my life. Which is true. But it's also not true. Life has no meaning except what we give to it, right? So it could in fact be anything that I could choose to live for. A cookie perhaps. A leaf. God. David Suzuki. Seinfeld. Or maybe *gasp* myself?
Calm and Still
6 years ago
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