Splash No. 262 - Twenty-Six
Twenty-Six
Tomorrow is my 26th birthday. Every year tends to bring mixed feelings towards my birthday — the excitement of having a day be special mixed with the remembrance of the passing of time. Yet, leading up to my birthday this year, I’ve been feeling rather indifferent. Yes, it’s my birthday, but it doesn’t feel bad or good or like much of anything at all. Unlike twenty-five, twenty-six is no milestone, and therefore doesn’t make me feel like I’ve suddenly become “old.” However, it doesn’t feel like it confers anything new to my life.
Yet, my own feeling of indifference has led to more mixed emotions. Recently, I’ve noticed that I’ve been observing more indifference in general, as I try to pay attention to people around me. It seems like indifference is the safest way to move through life in many cases — a protective layer when things are confusing or overwhelming. Our default state is to be indifferent to the world, as we walk through cities surrounded by people, as we buy our groceries, as we take the bus. Even when we interact with people we love and care about, we often stay in our default mode, only occasionally breaking through the indifference to acknowledge another being.
I can’t stop thinking of what Elie Wiesel said, “the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.” In my eyes, the cure to indifference is attention. With attention, any situation can incur an emotional response. Attention brings awe to the city, happiness for the diversity in the grocery store, gratitude for the bus driver. In its highest form, attention is love!
With my indifference to my birthday, I’m afraid that I’m neglecting my ability to acknowledge the specialness of a day, that I’m neglecting my ability to acknowledge myself, and therefore struggling to love myself in a way that I deserve. I am a being that has lived on this planet for twenty-six years. Through the grace of the people in my life, the ones who came before, and the many others whose work and innovations keep the world running, I’ve survived for this long, I’ve built a successful career, I’ve found and lost love, I’ve discovered friends who have come and gone and some that have stayed, and I’ve experienced an incredible range of human emotion. And it would be a damn shame to feel indifferent about any of that.
Tomorrow is my birthday, and I want to pay so much attention that anything can make me cry. I’d like to fall in love with the world like never before and be awestruck by the beauty of the incessant San Francisco fog, and the lateness of the bus, and the terribleness of the catered food at work, and the hunger of my stomach, and the tiredness of my eyes. Tomorrow is my birthday, and I want to be anything but indifferent. At least for one day.
Drops of the Week
ALBUM - Alchemy by Disclosure - new Disclosure is always a good thing
POEM - "A Habitable Grief" by Eavan Boland - "This is what language is: a habitable grief."
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As always,
Nikhil