how to be lighter (it was always easy)

I may have spent a great deal of time in my head. Now I look around and everything is colored in the paint of my imagination. This is the third sentence in this essay and too early to appraise the habit, but I will claim absolution and say this isn’t my fault. There is simply, at all times, just too much that is unknown, and I cannot get behind the idea of living unknowingly. If something is out there, shy to the eyes, and elusive of reason, then I, a seeing, feeling, figure of reason, am not to be guilted for according it wholeness in my head, be the wholeness part real and part fiction. The world just makes more sense with more answers, and if I must be charged for the crime of appending reality in the imagination, then come for me only after all the thinkers and philosophers who came before me have been tried. Kill Galileo for imagining the Sun at the center of the solar system and all life as progeny of this ball of fire. Hang Newton for conjuring the imaginary hand of gravity that dropped the apple on his shoulders. Only then I might acquiesce, agree to be taken for imagining the littler things, for guessing feelings of love and hate.¹

But here, as always, I have taken the defense before even judging what I stand to gain from it. How have my illusions rewarded me, inasmuch that I continue to argue for them? I know Galileo nearly faced torture and execution at the hands of the Catholic church for his sketch of the planets. I measure out the dramatic effect as I say this, but my own experience has been a parallel to his. I speak in hyperbole in hopes that as the cymbals of the metaphor begin to settle, the substance that remains at least alludes to the truth. My imagination is big, and it holds nothing smaller than the stars and planets in Galileo’s, for it has been the fabric of the explanations that I have authored for the thoughts and feelings of those that I cross paths with. This is how I have made sense of the life around me, and what is my life if not a reaction to all the beauty and ugly that I take my place amongst. But it is a heavy task, to try and account for all that there is, to trace and extrapolate, instead of taking them as they are. Because the permutations are endless, because a remark could’ve been thrown my way in jest or in earnest, or both, unless I am able to access the truth, which cannot come from my imagination, I have to hold all the versions that I conjure as equals.

Which eventually adds up to a lot, unfortunately. This is the imperial affliction: to have at once all the answers, but no answer at all, for they are only good for crowding the passages of my mind with their discordant meanings. What do you even do, then? My usual resort is the pen, so on most days I just write all of it down. I have this black Moleskine with lined pages where all my imaginations materialize. As it happens with observations, they are noticed among that which is daily looked at, I happened to observed the length my entries. They were all short, a page or two, maybe three when it’s really bad. The lines on the pages are really tight, and the handwriting is hurried, compact. So there are indeed enough words to fill up the pages, but the pages themselves on the grand scale seemed so small. Now, here I am, sitting with my journal, looking at my stories of despair, pity, and grief, and suddenly I am dumbfounded. Everything that weighs down on me like the sentence of a condemned man sits on his shoulders — all of it fits here? The little space they take up in the material world offers no reconnaissance of the universes they occupy when in my head.

Susan Sontag writes in one of my favorite essays, “to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.” It is to turn the world into this world. (“This world”! As if there were any other.) The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.”² In the essay, Sontag was arguing against interpreting artistic works. But the old adage goes, life imitates art (or its converse, art imitates life), and so I will take Sontag’s words to apply to life as well. Then, in her words, unburdening myself comes with doing away with all the possible renders of the world in my imagination, so that my experience of this world is more immediate, more grounded. Was I left behind because of this or that? I was just left behind, and that’s that. (And so what? I’ll carry myself.) In my words, I should get out of my head, for all the versions of things that exist in there at one time, there is only one of them in the real world, and the real world is always so much lighter on the shoulders. The absence of a truth, in an uninterpreted world, does less harm than a hurtful truth in an interpreted world. It is better to go on living without ever having tasted grapes than imagining grapes that are sour.

Thus begins the journey of looking outwards; and there’s a whole world out there — the real, the only one! Even without having explained all this, it would have sufficed to only say that after a certain point, you just have to be. After you’ve labored over the immovable object long enough, you have to step in and stop the unstoppable force of your mind. Give up trying to understand everything that doesn’t ask to be understood, then with the extra time you earned, you go and drink something warm by an open window, or talk to a small animal, or listen, really listen and be there, when a friend is talking. I enjoy all of these things now. Day before yesterday, someone pointed at the moon and said “people have been there!” That is true, and there was nothing for me to do in response, other than smile in contentment. A few weeks ago, the same person asked if I wanted to go see foxes, and I said yes. I knew nothing of wild foxes on Saadiyat. We walked over to the bridge outside campus, and waited. They’re the kind with long ears, apparently, and they hear human noises from miles away. So we smoked a few cigarettes, leaning on the railing, and spoke in hushed voices. And then I saw it first: something brown, the size of a dog, darting across the sand. It was so nimble, so precise with its limbs! I pointed at it. The fox was running not in our direction, so with every exclamation that we sighed, its hindquarters were getting smaller and smaller before our eyes, until it stood before the wall that demarcates the football field. Then it hopped over, without hesitation, and it was gone. I had not seen it from up close, but it was my first time seeing a fox. This particular animal was, and probably still is, out there, on the sand, on this island, in this world. With all the concerted efforts of my mind, the wild fox could not be experienced within the pages of my journal, for wild foxes belong to a place more immediate, somewhere it’s actually really easy to look, and it’s worth doing so.

“I began to talk. I talked about summer, and about time. The pleasures of eating, the terrors of the night. About this cup we call a life. About happiness. And how good it feels, the heat of the sun between the shoulder blades.”³

1. I have never seen anyone fight this hard for the right to be delusional.

2. Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. United Kingdom, Dell, 1966.

3. Oliver, Mary. “Toad”. The Truro Bear and Other Adventures: Poems and Essays. United States, Beacon Press, 2008.