Achieving Happiness

I am so grateful the movement is here to explain the world to me — to clarify why things are the way things are, why there is such inequality and  why it is not necessary to grieve over the anguish and suffering of billions because there are answers and means and ways to puncture holes in the seeming hopelessness in the lives of these same billions. What the world means is narrated to me by the movement.

I often think of myself as a fraud. It’s been more than a decade since I became tibak — when I was 17 and a college junior. Since then I have learned so much, seen and experienced so many things that have influenced me and the way I see the world, but they way I view myself is essentially, at the core of it all, unchanged.

It’s hard to reconcile the quiet I want for me and mine, the solitude I am comfortable with with the demands of a life in the movement. As that line from Adrienne Rich’s poem goes (The Roofwalkers) "A life I didn’t choose/chose me…" I have the most simple of demands for myself– a quiet corner where I can think and write and create; a patch of sun and warmth underneath the shade of some generous tree; the luxury of listening to the music my father taught me to love; the leisure of learning about things I would probably never see with my own eyes: the deepest reaches of oceans, the contents of the Louvre, the journey of Emperor penguins through the arctic.

But the again I comfronted by the harshness of life in this society I was born in. The way workers kill themselves laboring 12 hours straight in return for wages never ever commensurate to their efforts, much less equal to the share they  deserve as creators of the wealth. The way the urban poor — the street vendors, mendicants are sometimes forced to forego their dignity just so they won’t have to forego their family’s meager meals.

A grandmother in a tattered shift dress, too big for her, yellowed with age and weather lays down a plastic rice sack on the grimy pavement. Carefully, with arthritic fingers she pulls out wizened vegetables from a basket: a bunch of carrots, a head of lettuce, a sprinkling of red chillies, a small, hard pumpkin. It is starting to rain. She has no umbrella. She looks up at the sky and mutters a prayer to the gods that the rain stops so she doesn’t have to move her make-shift market space. Her browned and lined face is tired, her hair dull and gray. The vegetables look sad. Who would buy them? What nutrients could they possibly contain? The garden from which they have been harvested must have been a lonely patch of earth, but it is now what will give this old woman the means to buy food.

A young father barely 30 but looks 40 carries his tiny daughter in his arms. He is in a hurry. The soles of his rubber shoes have all but disappeared. A frayed backpack that has its zippers unravelling because of the contents that will not be contained is strapped to his back. He lines up at the counter, pulls out out his wallet. Counts out a few bills, many coins. The little girl cries, her father shushes her gently. He takes out a prescription, smooths it out from its crumpledness almost-torn state. The drugstore attendant doesn’t take immediate notice.  When she does, it is to say the money counted out is not enough. It can buy only four tablets of the needed 12. 

I am compelled to write. I have no other means by which I can express this pain I feel, this sudden falling from within. I cannot continually grieve for others because it will consume me, and I have to keep myself intact. It is probably in my genetic make-up to be so emotional (the way my husband frequently, regretfully points out), but this propensity is further…influenced and encouraged by the Sight the movement has given me and others like me. The gift of seeing people and their suffering, the gift to see beyond this towards a future where economics and politics will not be the cause of pain, but will be concepts that will be studied, bearing blueprints that will result in genuine development for the majority, true societal evolution and cultural maturity.

How does one run away from awareness and knowledge? It would be akin to attempting to escape one’s shadow.

I have other problems: my television is on the blink; there’s a flood in the bathroom as the roof leaks when it rains; I am angry with author Peter Carey yet again for writing a novel that will never give its charcters rest and happiness.

Outside my door, the world waits, and it’s sometimes hard to see the beauty in it for all the suffering. The lies of this goverment and the…evil..system it represents. Would that I could speak and write of the world only in the most neutral and impersonal, objective and cold scientific/economic terms! How does one describe a massacre of farmworkers using words that do not cut and maim the heart of the writer, or that of the reader of these same words? What images devoid of feeling can one utilize to analyze the impact of tax measures, budget cuts for social services,military operations, community demolitions, political repression on people’s lives?

A life I didn’t choose chose me.

It is Saturday night, and my heart is restless.There is no 100% comfort in anything, even in the embrace of the people I love most and who love me best. Always, always one remembers the world, and is reminded in little and big ways that justice is still something to work for, struggle towards.

The movement is my dictionary.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 13th, 2005 at 7:17 am and is filed under Hammersmash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.