Musings of a (Relatively) Stable Mind
“Remember when you wanted what you currently have?”
Omen
Having sat staring at a blank screen for hours trying to get this post (read: supposed rant about my first Scottish Christmas and New Year) out, eventually it was one of those random quotes that jump out at you while lazily scrolling through your social media that spurred me on.
What I currently have. A question of more magnitude than one would think. When did I want this? How much? For how long? How much did I wait?
I know the answers to all those questions. The most poignant answer is, however, to the question (and the searing memory) of there being a point when I had absolutely lost hope of getting to where I am now. And that is why this article turned out way different from what it had started out as.
Pretty pictures and glimpses of fireworks abound – all one has to do is google “Edinburgh Hogmanay” to get the idea that I won’t really have anything new to add to – but if this is about memory-making and nostalgia, external epochs aren’t enough. Yes, it was breathtakingly beautiful, the city and celebrations were sights to behold; some of my biggest takeaways, however, were my response to and the understanding of the vibrancy and the mood of Hogmanay.
Indianising Christmas!
In India, there are no grand, large-scale event-based celebrations. The peak of the New Year is the countdown to the midnight of 1st of January. We don’t even get a holiday on the 1st, so one can imagine how snug and simple the all-round vibe is while ushering in the new year. My Edinburgh New Year (I mean Hogmanay, apologies fellow Scots!) experience gave me the other side of all the grandiosity – celebrating both the close and the beginning.
This year too, the celebrations were focused as much on closing the Year of the Young People as on the onset of a new one. A youth project called #scotart involved young people choosing symbols to represent the 14 regions of Scotland and making them into wicker sculptures to trailblaze the Edinburgh Hogmanay Torchlight Procession on the 31st of December that was celebrated as the Finale of the Year of the Young People – which was one of the most stunning and (oxymoronically) calming sights I have witnessed.
Over the course of the past couple of years, I have often felt weighed down by the idea of transience of the connections and attachments I make. The very commonplace nebulae of fears and apprehensions that come with the prospect of leaving. Being a student in Glasgow brought with it a feeling of assimilation, community, and creative stimulation in ways I had struggled to find during my undergraduate course in India. I learned to celebrate my individuality rather than being afraid of it, to be comfortable in my own skin in a way that my undergraduate years didn’t really provide a space for. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my friends and my course there; but my university experiences and network in Glasgow just gave me a sense of personal strength and exploration that I hadn’t really found before.
There is a point to this apparent-digression; and it all comes back to the quote I started with. While standing there in the midst of the torchlight procession, eyes glazing over the blazing (see what I did there?) torches, I tried to tune my internal cogwheels with the balance Edinburgh’s Hogmanay spirit was trying to strike – looking backwards and forwards, with equal amounts of pride, of achievement, and hope. It is a really slight shift in perception, but can make a whole world of difference. Drawing a year-long trajectory to where I was last Hogmanay to where I was standing; I was exactly where I had wanted to be, exactly what I had lamented the possibility of not getting. I was back in Scotland, somewhere I felt at home and peace within myself, and I was at the very job I had been hoping for at that very point in time a year ago, while being equal parts plagued with the fear, the veritable despondence of not getting it.
At the dawn of 2018, I was walking into a very bleak yonder while holding on to my ebbing dregs of self-confidence; at the dawn of 2019, I was standing exactly where I had hoped and wanted to stand that time . And it was there, in the lit-up streets of Edinburgh and the muted music of the various concerts in the centre that I hadn’t got tickets to, that my nihilism went away.
Yes, I still have battles to fight, some ongoing, some new, but daunting nonetheless. But I have a newfound appreciation of the decibel-heavy Hogmanay mood now – it has helped drown out some of those battlecries, and make them look just a little bit more conquerable.
(Because of course the sights and the city inspired some internal rants, here’s a prose poem I penned while upholding the cliché of a zoned out writer scribbling in the middle of an overcrowded café while chugging down over-priced caffeine. And of course, with a bit of nihilism mixed in.)
Thoughts on (not) letting go (v.2018/19)
Rues and woes like ankle-chains// Yes, it’s the new year and all that but the dark isn’t temporal, neither are thoughts and memories and pain and love and fear. I can’t be a different person the minute the clock announces the seismic midnight. The (re)constructive force of time is great, I agree – healer and hurler in equal measure – but my mental cogs don’t submit to it// The twelve-month expanse that lies uncharted is another well-disguised continuum. I seek the comfort of seeing the new year as a schism of new-and-old, past-and-future, progress-and-regress. Clarity has never been my forte though, the shift from “8” to “9” a close dyadic interplay// New beginnings, blank pages, fresh starts are too clean-cut; my broken mesh of thoughts has too many ridges from bits chipped off to not bleed a little with every scrape. Blood-specks and unclaspable ankle-chains aren’t the only things I carry across the proverbial threshold though// There’s one promise that time does uphold. The chains clang and tug as reminders of movement; a comforting weight for when my feet are too slow and chafed to register their motion// At occasional/frequent stand-stills, I glance back over my shoulder, the trail of red dots like measuring tape// The staccato of new year cheer and optimism makes sense when I see how far I stand from some of the larger specks.
