An autumn day

I have been sitting by the large window of the cafe which is inside the bookstore and taking some notes since this mornings. I am putting my thoughts in order, and preparing a schedule to work on the projects that I have always loved to do, but I was scared to do them. Living a genuine life is one of the most difficult things in the world at first, since you have no other choice but to face your inner demons and fears and lack of trust in yourself. I am floating somewhere in the limbo, trying to let go of my fears and actively be more courageous towards my life. So the postponed projects are listed and outlined to some degree and I will start working on the first one as of today.

A new perspective in life doesn't come across very often or easy. It often appears after a long period of disappointment with the old views. For me, there comes a period of being in a purgatory. After a while, a new perspective forms and thing become more clear.

A major issue that I have been dealing with for a long time is my past. My past has formed my personality, well, not in a healthy way for most parts. I have been living a life of reaction to the past events, which most were painful in the first 25 years of my life. My personality was formed in reaction to traumas and breakdowns in me, my family and loved ones and still today, parts of me are remains and ruins of this past. Fear has been one of the major recurring themes and drivers of my childhood and the fact that I couldn't make sense of what was going on around me.

There are several parts of me that are made of reactions to the little me that was hurt when I was a child, and the promise that I made to myself that " I won't let this happen to me again". The problem is, when the number of this promises and rules increases, you find yourself constrained, living a life of reaction to your past. But you didn't have a choice to create something that you liked as a child. Maybe a child is not able to do that, but I can revisit my self and parts of my past now and build new possibilities.

My past had brought me to the point that I wouldn't see new possibilities in my future and I was feeling trapped in my current way of life, job, etc. Let's say that you put several walls around your essence and make a protective box for yourself. Every time a whole in the box appears, you create more patches and boundary conditions. Then soon you feel trapped, and there is absolutely no exit.

Opening the way to the possibilities is not easy. What I have found is that I cannot be in peace with my past if I don't tell my stories. Our past disappears gradually. Even when we try to remember bits and pieces that remind us of our stories, we find less and less of them in the physical world. Every time that I go back home to my parents in Iran, I realize that everything has so much changed that I cannot identify with what I see any more. The revolution, war, and political violence and the loss of my loved ones were too painful for everyone in my family to keep in mind. Even the physical traces of them, maybe certain books or objects are not there any more. Even the society has not much memory of what happened to us before.

I have many stories to tell. The stories of the people that are not living among us anymore. I carry their memory inside, like a fragile preserved flower that is fading day by day. I know that the traces of them will die with me, if their stories are not on the paper. I would like to give them and their stories a chance to live in the physical world one more time. I could then let go of parts of my past and fully find my own way of life, a life not haunted by my childhood.

It is every parent's nightmare to walk into your little toddler's classroom and see your son being handled roughly and tapped (almost slapped) on the face. That was what I saw when I walked into my son's daycare yesterday. I wanted to surprise him by showing up early. I picked him up and we left, so disturbed with not much word spoken. I couldn't sleep the whole last night and the image I saw kept repeating over and over in my head a million times. Before putting my son in this daycare, I looked at 15 different daycares very carefully, and finally convinced myself on the current one. Since the principal teacher's arm broke a month ago and she had to take a leave, I felt that my son is not as comfortable as he was before, and he is crying when I go to pick him up. But I wasn't sure why
I walked into the director's office this morning and for the first time, talked about the whole issue openly and calmly. I told them what happened, and the fact that it wasn't acceptable at all for us, and I asked them to transition Demian to the older kid's classroom which they did.

In many circumstances in my life, I've been voiceless. I would see bothering things, would be disturbed and unsettled, but I wouldn't talk or object. I always was projecting this "nice" image of me which was totally non-confrontational and was ready to swallow whatever disgusting ***** that would come up and try to deal with it indirectly by avoiding the situation altogether. Not anymore. My resolution has been to stand up and speak up. I have not done that for such a long time that I almost forgot how to be a courageous person.

I got this issue solved. I'm not sure for how long this has been going on and what psychological impacts it may have had on my son. I'm hoping that he is resilient and he is not affected permanently. Then, I remember a memory from my childhood, the last time I remember I stood up and defended my sister at school. It felt like yesterday.

So, I am in forth grade in elementary school and my sister also goes to the preschool at the same school. Every afternoon that we come back home, my sister seems to be disturbed until one day after we ask her persistently to open up, she tells us that her teacher is putting her under pressure and threatens her sometimes. My mom is upset, but she is not sure what to do and as a nine year old, I know that my mom would probably not confront the matter easily and she is waiting for more stuff to happen in order to confront the issue and take action. So the next morning, I am holding my sister's hand, we go to the other kindergarten teacher which is an affectionate lady and I ask her if from now on, my sister can be a part of her class instead of the other one, She looks at me and agrees. I even found her a seat on the bench and table before I left the classroom. I told my sister: if anyone objected to you on this issue of classroom or any other issue, tell them that I did it, so they can call for me. I will talk to them.

That was one of the last times I felt empowered in my childhood. I was in charge. I could change the circumstances and felt empowered. Most of the times since then, I have been in the business of fleeing and not confronting the issues. This time around, I felt the urge of being true to myself and confront my issues and not to scape. I feel that the powerful little eight year old is back.

A Halloween Picture

He is posing as the scarecrow of the wizard of Oz

ps: Thanks for your comment for the pervious post. I just came back from a 3 day long intensive workshop and read your comment. Would love to continue the discussion, since it matters to me.

The Alps

One of the frequent events on the way of one’s life is disillusionment form our old believes. We construct mental models of how certain things are, and what to expect of them, while the truth may unfold in a very different way. I’ve had my own share of these kinds of mirages rather frequently in my own experience of life. One of them is associated with the profession that I have chosen and its reality.

A long time ago, around the time that I was an undergraduate student, I started to think that academic job is a very suitable one for me, and I knew that I wanted to pursue a higher degree. when time passed by, I started believing in the idea more and more. As an introverted person, I knew that I am not good in presenting myself well in the context of an engineering or consulting firm, since my introversion and sparse talking would eventually stop my growth in these places. I started to believe that academia is a place for true research and exploration and the pushing frontier of the sciences. The idealized form of this thought was formed in my mind sometime when I was in Iran. After coming to the U.S more than ten years ago for graduate studies, I still kept the thought alive. I would see some signs contrary to my mental model, but I hold on to the old thoughts. Four years ago after graduation, I started my job as an academic.

My time is divided between long hours of sitting in administrative meetings, a never ending effort of writing various academic proposals, traveling which is always in a rush for presenting something and heading back right after that, and teaching and grading. What was truly lacking was the research and scholarly work, which was my only reason for heading to academia. In its current form in academia, you don’t have the time to do the research yourself, we are providers of fund for students to do the research. my disillusionment and discontentment started shortly after.

My father in-law has been an academic person in Chemistry for almost 40 years in Iran. The other day, he shared a beautiful example of his own understanding of the dilemma, which I ought to share.

He said, imagine all your life you wanted so desperately and passionately to travel to Alps and see the magnificent mountains, so you got a job as a cook’s helper or dishwasher in a wagon of a train that travels though the Alps for several days. You are trapped in a service car, with a small hole on one side, with a view of the mountains. Every now and then, you find sometime between toiling at work and washing dishes, to go to the hole on the wall and watch the mountains. After a couple of minutes, the next order arrives in the kitchen and off you go to work! He said, this has been my life. Toiling in the kitchen, for the hope of a glimpse of the wonder and magnificence of what science and knowledge had to offer. Every now and then, I could watch the scene from that hole of crack in the wall, but I never had the opportunity to be the passenger. I never had the opportunity to even get out the train in the next stop and ponder. I was always so busy working. Don’t live like me, he said. Be a passenger instead.

I realized that I’ve also been working in that kitchen for the past four years for a hope of occasional glimpse of the Alps. I need to rethink my future direction of my life. I think we shouldn’t forget for what purpose we are spending our vital energy source in our life.

Turning point

This morning, despite the heavy rain and deep grey clouds, I feel that after a long time, I have the energy and the enthusiasm to pick up my old projects that have been on hold for a long time. It happened to me this morning, after almost two years of fatigue and lack of energy to create.

I tried to analyze my condition and find the reason for this shift, since I believe that if I don't have enough understanding of what is happening to me, then I won't be able to improve my life in the future, repeat or understand the experience. According to my personal experience, I think our lives are a collection of all experience that we have since our early childhood. all positive, negative, and neutral experience are accumulated in us over our lifetime. Some fade away as time passes by and partially disappear, while the others (for example certain traumas) don't lose their taste and color and stay with us for a long time. This sum, this accumulation of all neutral, positive, and negative experience with all their relative weights determine (most of the time) how we feel and how much energy do we have.

In my case, I had a very difficult two years. Not being satisfied with my job, difficult pregnancy and a traumatic C-section, stress of moving to a new home shortly after, and not being able to sleep well for the past 16 months:), have left me with lack of energy for a long time. At the same time, the positive experience of Demian growing up has been a source of positive energy, but I had still so much fatigue to compensate for. After two months of leave from my job, this morning I felt that I have passed the turning point, I have moved from the negative energy domain to the positive side of the curve. Then, I started thinking about all my postponed projects, the unwritten short stories that I have the plots in my notebook, and the non-fiction book that I have the outline of the chapters. They are waiting for me to visit them again.

Vignettes of life

children grow up and learn with a fascinating rate. There are recurring periods of continuous growth and every now and then, there is a huge jump in the way they learn.
Before last week, Demian was using several single word to communicate. Since 3-4 days a go, he has been making sentences all of a sudden (not very frequently though) and tells me some word that I haven't taught him deliberately. He probably picked them up when we were taking.
It is very interesting that he know that he can only talk to us in Farsi, while he talks to other people in English. Yesterday I heard him talking to a lady in coffee shop, telling her "yes, please!"

On the meaning of life, Will Durant -2

This book is so far one of the best ones that I have read in past several years, and I have to warn you, despite the thin look, it takes a long time to read it. I realized that sometimes I have stopped on a page for an hour and reflecting on the content. Some times it happens that I need a walk to think about the paragraph that I read and reflect on it. It is deep, touches your inner person, and makes you look at the problem from different glasses.
Will Durant was an agnostic scholar with a systemic mind and I have admired him since I was exposed to his Story of Civilization years ago. As a system's thinker, he organizes the book into two parts: Problem definition, and a collection of answers to the problem. Finally he states his own opinion on what could possibly be the meaning of life from his own perspective.

He breaks down the problem definition into several parts which provide various perspectives on the question. These divisions are:
1- The letter he wrote, problem definition from Will's point of view
2 -The problem and religion
3- The problem and science
4- The problem and history
5- The problem and Utopias
6- Suicide of the Intellect
As a writer and philosopher, he puts the questions in beautiful words. I will try to write some quotations from his books every now and then.

1- The letter

...Astronomers have told us that human affairs constitute but a moment in the trajectory of a star; geologist have told us that civilization is but a precarious interlude between ice ages; biologists have told us that all life is but war, a struggle for existence among individuals, groups, nations, alliances, and species; historians have told us that " progress" is a delusion, whose glory end in inevitable decay; psychologists have told us that the will and the self are the helpless instruments of heredity and environment, and once the incorruptible soul is but a transient incandescence of the brain...

Will goes on in this letter to present the problem of meaning from the other points of view such as religion, industrial revolution, etc. In other part, he writes:

...the greatest mistake in human history was the discovery of "truth." It has not made us free, except from delusions that comforted us and restraints that comforted us. It has not made us happy, for truth is not beautiful, and didn't deserved to be so passionately chased...

He continues to put the problem in perspective and then asks the recipients to write back to him and tell him where they find meaning, consolation and happiness and where in the last resort their treasure lies.

Personally I see lots of similarity between our current times and Will Durant's time (1930), however with a difference. His time was the golden age of science and modernism, science was providing explanations and answers to several of humanity's questions. At that time, we thought that science (vs. religion and as a replacement for religion) can also provide us with answers to our existential questions. When I was a younger person, I also thought with enough search in science and enough progress, we will eventually reach at the answer for the ultimate questions. That, was my major motivation for pursuing science and immersing myself in the boundless beauty of the science. But in the process of growing older, I realize that I haven't found a satisfying answer for my existential questions either. we are in the age of disillusionment from science; old religions are becoming stronger and new age faiths are flourishing. We keep ourselves extremely over-worked, and the technology at our service has made us its slave. We keep flipping channels late at night in front of TV to carry our half-dead brain and body alive to the next day. The architecture and structure of our current society that we live in, is not giving us any chance and time to think and pursue our vital questions.

(To be continued...)