Pls note: This draft was ready for publishing before the important events of the last two weeks. I needed to process what was happening in my country. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, please see.
When I started this blog many moons ago, I’d decided to publish an article a week. As time moved on and life moved on, I switched to publishing only when I had something worthwhile to say.
It seemed like a wonderful way to approach this self-imposed labor of love.
“I’ll do it when I feel like it” isn’t a content strategy that works anywhere else, but I liked it because at the end of the day mah blog, mah rulez.
BUT THEN, I had the bigger problem of figuring out what is really *worth saying?* What is your precious time worth, my beloved? And how will I ever know?
The last few months have been an uninspiring time for me in terms of writing, which often means that it was a SPECTACULAR time for me in terms of living. I truly had some of the funnest, nicest, most heartwarming months that I’ll forever cherish.
But I’ve missed the thrill of uploading 38 instagram stories back-to-back without an iota of shame, so you know what? Here goes. Que sera, sera. Whatever will be, will be.
There’s a restaurant directly opposite my building gate. I could walk downstairs and fling a ball over, and it would probably roll into their kitchen. In the 3 years that I’ve lived in this apartment, I’ve never eaten there.
I want to be clear that at no point did I decide against this restaurant. There was never a moment where I thought…hmm should we go to this place? Nah let’s not because of [insert reason]. It just never came up.
I think I haven’t gone for the same reason most Indians I know have never seen the Taj Mahal, while every single foreign tourist I know who’s come to India has. It’s the same reason my husband, who lived for years just off Carter Road in Bombay, almost never walked down there for a snack. And this is Carter Road we’re talking about, a whole stretch of seafront with a TON of restaurants on it, the kind of place people will sit in traffic for an hour to reach from various corners of the city. But it’s just down the road for him, he could go any time, and so he didn’t.
Whatever’s going on here, it isn’t laziness, because these aren’t lazy people. And it isn’t indifference either, because ask any of us and we’ll tell you, sincerely, that we’d love to go.
I’d love to go to this restaurant. And I will, one day.
In the 1960s, two psychologists named John Darley and Bibb Latané got interested in something called the bystander effect. You’ve probably heard about it and the name is somewhat self-explanatory, but just in case: the bystander effect is the thing that explains why a crowd of people can walk past an emergency unfolding and do nothing. They just stand by. Hence the name.
They did an interesting experiment where they had the subject sitting alone in a room answering a questionnaire, and then someone started piping smoke through the vent. The subject, upon noticing the smoke, immediately got up and reported it like, yo, there’s smoke, who’s smoking? without me?
BUT then they tried something else. They piped smoke into a room with a bunch of people, where everyone had secretly been told to do nothing except the one real subject. So what happened?
The subject would see the smoke, notice that nobody’s reacting, and would then also decide NOT get up to report it. They’d just sit there, along with everyone else, fanning the smoke out of their own face.
The reason they came up with is this: when it comes to responsibility, people divide it up like a bill. If you’re alone, the whole emergency is YOURS. But in a group of 12, only 1/12th of the emergency is yours. And guess what, 1/12th of an emergency is not an emergency any longer.
But some 80 years before this experiment, a French guy named Max did his own version of it, and I actually prefer this one.
Max had people play tug-of-war against a machine that measured exactly how hard they pulled.
One person, alone, pulled with everything they had.
Then he started adding people, and the more he added, the less hard each one pulled. Alone you’d give it your whole 100 percent. If there were 3 people vs the machine, each of them individually would slip down to 85 percent.
By eight people, each person was pulling less than half of what they had in them.
The crazy thing is that every one of them would have sworn they were pulling with all their strength. But what we’re capable of can drastically and dramatically change the moment someone else is there to back you up or pick up the slack.
People will always pull less the instant they believe another hand is on the line to help out.
Everyone treats all of this as a commentary on collective responsibility, but I think there’s more to it than that. I think you can run the whole experiment on one person alone in a room, as long as you give them enough time.
This paragraph is about time
A person with unlimited time isn’t really ONE person, they’re also a crowd. It’s you, plus a thousand future yous stretching toward the horizon.
Today’s me walks out of my gate, sees the restaurant, and then thinks about the infinite other future-me’s. They’re all capable, all less busy, and one of them will probably go there. Eventually. That’s the whole trap of forever. It works exactly like never.
Which is why I love tourists, and in Goa I meet a lot of them. Nobody is hungrier for life than someone with only four days. Four days means only four you’s are sharing the load. So you get up and go!!! You try the restaurant. You take the scenic route. You go to the beach, even when the weather’s bad. When the music plays, you dance.
I wasn’t sure whether this was procrastination actually
Procrastination is when you’re avoiding a thing you’re supposed to do. Maybe you don’t like doing it, so you do something else and feel guilty about it the whole time. You’re aware of it.
But I don’t actually avoid the restaurant. I don’t even think about the restaurant. There’s no guilt, because as far as I’m concerned I’m definitely going. One day. I just haven’t gone yet. It doesn’t feel like I’m dodging something. It feels like having something nice kept in reserve.
I think maybe certainty is the whole problem. The more sure you are that you’re going to eventually do it, the safer it becomes to keep NOT-doing it.
So, what now? I have two suggestions on how to handle this, but since I still haven’t been to the restaurant yet, take this with a fistful of salt.
How to handle positive-procrastination where you say you wanna do something but you never actually do it and you don’t know why:
Tip #1: Kill the occasion
When we were making the decision to buy an apartment near the beach, my husband in passing asked me the most egregious question.
How often are you actually gonna go to the beach? I was AGHAST. What a ludicrous insinuation.
ALL THE TIME, I said. And I decided to make that dream come true by banning the idea of “a beach day” entirely. A beach day is an event that needs nice weather, snacks, a plan, and something special. There will be a hundred ways to talk yourself out of a beach day.
What we do instead, is we wear rubber slippers and leave the house. We get into the car. Sometimes we have a bucket and spade sometimes we don’t. But we just go. On days when my daughter and I have had enough of everything and enough of each other, we go. I stare at the ocean, she picks up a few shells, and we both dig.
If I notice the sky is looking pretty, I go to the beach and I look at it. I take a picture. And I leave. That’s it. That’s how I end up at the beach almost every week and sometimes every other day.
Resist the urge to make something bigger than it needs to be. In fact sometimes, the more you shrink it, the better.
Tip #2: Recruit a witness
You can cancel on yourself a thousand times and never feel bad, because you’re the one person who always forgives you (this does not apply to everyone.)
But for most people, you’d hopefully be a little more embarrassed to do that to a friend. So if there’s something you’ve been meaning to do, and apparently want to do, but haven’t gotten around to doing, drag someone along.
Let them make it awkward and uncomfortable for you to bail. I’ve noticed this helps a lot with fitness. As much as I loathe the idea of a ‘gym buddy’ there’s a reason it’s a thing. Because accountability works. Ugh.
I’m not preaching a live every day like it’s your last type of philosophy. God, no. Living like you’re dying tomorrow is exhausting and dumb. If it was actually your last day, you’d never daydream or save money or be bored with your kids or workout.
And stuff like that is what life is mostly made of. I want to live like things end, which is different I think.
The only thing that messed up my relationship with the idea of time passing
Many, many people I love are having babies right now, so I’m around newborns again after a few years away, and it’s reminded me how much there is to love about tiny little babies!!!
They start out brand new and they do that full-body scrunch because they don’t know they’re born yet. Knees tucked up, fists by their ears, still folded into the shape of where they came from. You carry them everywhere. They’re a tiny, breathing, warm weight against your chest, and you can’t believe they’re real. Their hands are so little it’s like they’re made of soft glass.
Then one day they smile at you for the first time, your heart literally bursts. Pretty soon, they’re crawling on the floor and the whole world cracks open because now they have places to go and things to see.
The tap-tap-tap on the floor of crawling hands and knees is a sound that never leaves your brain, and neither does the pause when it stops because a quiet baby is a baby doing crimes.
Also, for people that can’t speak, they’re SO noisy it’s crazy. There’s so much laughing and squealing involved.
One day, you notice the gummy smile you’d fallen in love with suddenly has a tooth in it, and then overnight, there are four. You find out what food they like, and you also have the privilege of wearing that food on your shirt really often.
They’ve started holding onto furniture, holding onto you, holding onto dear life itself, all just to stand up and then WOW. They take their first steps. Wobbly, falling on their little bums all the time. Your once-bursting heart is now permanently in your mouth.
Somehow they’ve gotten noisier and chattier than ever, and very soon, those sounds turn into words. And one day, among those words, you’ll hear your name and nothing prepares you for the first time this person who took their first breath in front of you looks up and calls you by the thing you are to them: Mama.
There’s so much indescribable joy to be found in parenting. But the season I’m in now is very different from everything I just described.
I have an almost-four-year-old, and I’m finally getting to see glimpses of her inner world. I’m learning how she feels about me and about her friends, and about life as it happens to her.
I’m finding out what she loves doing, and what she’s good at, and what scares her, and what she thinks is funny. We laugh so much together. I’m watching how much she can love, which turns out to be an astonishing amount. Far more than I imagined could fit in a tiny little body that I used to carry around. It’s pure magic and also scary how fierce her affection can be.
I’m seeing her navigate disappointments, in life, in me, and in herself. “I don’t want to be naughty, but sometimes I am.” And we get to talk about that.
Some nights, we just hold each other’s faces in our hands and I smile at her and she smiles back, and I look at her shining eyes, and we talk about how happy we are with each other. It’s cringey and lame and also the highlight of my whole existence.
I miss having a newborn, but I don’t miss *her* as a newborn if that makes sense. I don’t actually look at her and wish she was small again. I love what we have now, because I have all those happy baby memories AND I have the present. I already know the next phase will be even more interesting.
We treat limits as the enemy. There’s never enough time, never enough left, the clock is forever running and the good stuff always goes. But there are many things that are special because they’re only here for a short time. If she’d magically stayed a baby, I would never have found out she’s funny.
Or that she’s so great at art, or how much she likes singing.
Everything I love about her right now only exists because everything I loved before made room and left.
Forever feels like the safest place to keep something, but forever will truly end up being never if you aren’t careful with it.
I’ve been writing this essay for over a week and I still haven’t tried the restaurant. I will eventually. But in the meantime, I decided to publish this essay instead of holding out for the better essay that I was never actually going to write.
Que sera, sera. Whatever will be, will be.
Leave a Reply