Sheen had always known college would be weird. She had not budgeted for her boyfriend becoming a golden retriever during midterms.
“James,” she said, from the doorway of her own dorm room, holding a coffee she was about to lose. “Did you always have paws?”
James wagged. Enthusiastically. With his whole back half, the way they do. Then he knocked the coffee over.
Classic James.
Here is what you should know about Sheen. She was not new to her brain doing unauthorised things. Bipolar I, diagnosed at nineteen, which meant life came with extra sparkles: the hypomanic art sprees where she made four canvases in a weekend and sincerely believed she had solved colour, the depression naps that were less naps and more small scheduled deaths, and occasionally, at the worst end of the worst weeks, hallucinations.
She had seen things before. She once watched a lecture theatre wall breathe for eleven minutes.
But a large happy dog standing where her perfectly reasonable boyfriend had been? That was new.
“Right,” she said, sitting down in the coffee. “Okay. We’re doing this.”
The good boy problem
The annoying part was how little the hallucination had to work with.
Pre-dog James already had the energy. Loyal past the point of sense. Affectionate in public in a way that mortified her for six months and then became the best part of her week. Deeply invested in snacks. The kind of man who says “I brought you a thing” about one samosa and means it as an act of devotion.
Her brain had not invented a golden retriever. Her brain had simply taken off the last bit of camouflage.
“Babe,” she said, on day three. “Could you possibly not shed on my anatomy notes.”
Head tilt. Tongue out. No comprehension of any kind.
“Right. You can’t answer. Because you’re a dog.”
She said that out loud in an empty room and then laughed at herself for a full minute, which is, in its own way, a coping skill.
Therapy, and treats
“So,” her therapist said, pen moving. “You’re seeing your boyfriend as a dog.”
“A golden retriever,” Sheen said. “Specifically. Accuracy matters.”
“Noted.”
“Very loyal. Very energetic. Ten out of ten. Good boy.”
“And how does that make you feel?”
“Confused,” Sheen said. “But mostly hungry. Every time I look at him I start craving Scooby Snacks.”
They both laughed, and this is why Sheen loved that woman. She got it. She never treated Sheen like a machine with a fault, never did the thing where a professional’s face goes carefully blank while they quietly reclassify you. She let Sheen be funny about it, because Sheen being funny about it was not denial. It was ownership.
Then, when the laugh had run out:
“Can I ask you something strange?”
“Sure.”
“Out of everything your mind could have shown you. Why a dog that loves you?”
Sheen had no answer that day. She got one about six years later, and it turned out to be the answer to something much older than midterms.
Before
There was a before. There was a very long before.
A courtyard, in a dry hot country, under trees, in a life so far back that only one of them remembers it at all.
Sheen stood at the edge of it. She was not permitted inside. She had learned everything she knew by watching from the boundary, and had learned it so thoroughly that she was better than every student standing in the middle, and being better from the outside is a particular loneliness that has never been given a decent name.
James was inside, obviously. Gifted, cocksure, eighteen, with a tongue on him like a blade. He was the one who said the cutting thing. Everyone knew that about him. It was practically his function.
Laila was inside too.
Laila, who was their mutual friend, the one person who moved easily between the middle of the courtyard and its edge, who brought Sheen food and remembered her birthday and never once made her feel like a spectator. Laila was warm. Laila was funny. Laila was the reason Sheen had anybody at all.
One afternoon, one of their teachers lost his temper over nothing.
And it was Laila who leaned over to the others and said, brightly, carelessly, the way charming people say things they will never think about again:
“He must be bipolar, the way he swings from rage to calm.”
The courtyard laughed.
And Sheen, standing at the boundary, felt her jaw lock and her eyes drop, and she stared at the dust in front of her feet while the laughter went on above her head.
She heard the laugh as one sound. A single collective thing. And in that sound she placed James, because James was inside the circle, because James had the blade, because it was exactly the kind of thing James said, because she already had a story about James and the story told her where to file it.
She never looked up.
That is the entire tragedy, and it takes two thousand years to surface. In that courtyard, on that afternoon, she did not lift her eyes and check.
She filed the wound under his name and closed the drawer.
And then, some years later, when the great man who taught them saw what Sheen had built out of nothing but watching from a boundary, he asked her for her thumb.
She gave it instantly. No hesitation, none, because he asked and she revered him and reverence was what she was made of. She knelt in a forest and cut off part of her own hand and offered it up as a fee.
Then she bowed her head, and underneath the bow, where nobody could see, she made a private decision that would outlive her body: that she would forgive the man who mutilated her, and would never, not ever, forgive the boy who laughed.
She did not consider Laila for a second. Laila was her friend. Friends get exemptions.
The middle life
They came back. Neon this time. Corridors, fluorescent tubes, no trees.
Sheen was a researcher, and in that life, for the first time, she carried the diagnosis that had been used as a punchline in a courtyard two thousand years earlier. The universe does not do subtlety.
James was still James. Quick, funny, genuinely careless with other people’s interiors. Not a good man yet. Just not the specific bad man she had convicted.
She heard the joke again. Somebody in a group, something about a woman in the department having moods.
And James was standing in that group.
That was all the evidence she needed, because she had been holding the verdict for two millennia and was only ever looking for the sentencing hearing.
So she went to him. And she tried, first, properly, with everything she had, to explain that sensitivity is not a defect, that some people feel at a volume others cannot imagine, that the people who feel too much are carrying something rather than performing something.
And James laughed.
She read that laugh as contempt. It was not contempt. It was the laugh of a man in his twenties being accused of something he had not done, who has no idea what is happening, who is embarrassed and bewildered and has nothing else available to do with his face.
She could not have known. She was not looking for it. She had never once, in two lifetimes, looked directly at him and checked.
So she broke. Two thousand years came up her throat at once and she said, very quietly, in a laboratory:
“You never learned respect. And I have been waiting lifetimes to teach you.”
The silence afterwards was enormous.
She has spent a long time since telling herself that in that silence he began, finally, to understand. He did not. He was standing in a room being sentenced in a language he did not speak, by a woman he barely knew, for a crime that had not been described to him.
Being right achieved nothing, and she assumed that was because he was unteachable.
It was because she was wrong.
She went home and set her bow down and called it peace, because the only other word available was waste.
The classroom
Third life. This one.
Before Sheen ever met him, James sat in a psychology class at twenty years old, and a teacher walked in and refused to let anyone introduce themselves.
You will not tell me who you are. Your words will do it for you.
She gave them a scenario. A junior nurse has made a serious mistake. How do you speak to her.
James, arms folded, leaning back, armed to the teeth:
“I’d tell her straight. No sugarcoating. If you can’t handle this, maybe you shouldn’t be here. People need to toughen up. The world doesn’t wait for anyone.”
He was proud of that. He remembers being proud of it. He remembers believing he was the only honest person in the room.
Three others answered after him and their answers were softer and at the time he thought less of them for it. One said she would want the nurse to feel safe enough to tell the truth. One made a joke, because jokes were his armour. One said she would ask what happened, and listen, and then be clear that it was serious and also that one mistake does not define a person.
The teacher wrote four sentences on the board. His was first.
Then she said the thing that took him fifteen years to actually hear.
How a person talks is not an accident. It shows what they assume about others. If you want to know your own mindset, listen to yourself when you are tired, or angry, or frightened. The words that leak out then are your real story. And if you do not like what it says, change one sentence at a time.
She was right about him. That is worth saying plainly. James was careless and sharp and he did real damage with his mouth for years, to nurses and juniors and once to a friend who did not speak to him for eight months.
He was guilty of a great deal.
He was simply not guilty of the one thing he was serving time for.
The notebook
Sheen arrived in this life already knowing him. He arrived knowing nothing. That asymmetry is the whole story and it is not fair and it is also the only reason any of this worked.
Because she could have done it again. She had the speech ready. She had been rehearsing it for two thousand years and it was, by now, extremely good.
Instead, for reasons she could not have explained at the time, she bought a small black notebook and started writing down what he actually said.
Not to build a case. To stop carrying his words as weather and start carrying them as evidence.
Year one. She’s being dramatic.
Year one, later. Everyone’s tired. She’s not special.
Year two. I don’t know what to do when she’s like this.
She read that one four times. Because it was not cruelty. It was a confession wearing a complaint’s coat, and in the middle life she would have heard only the coat.
Year three. She isn’t being dramatic. She’s ill. Those are different things and I’ve had it wrong.
She had to put the pen down.
Year four. What does it actually feel like? You don’t have to answer.
Year five. I read something about it. Tell me if it’s rubbish.
Year six. You don’t have to be interesting today.
Year seven. I’m here. Take as long as you need.
Seven years. Seven sentences. That is the true distance between a courtyard and a kindness, and you cannot cross it in one conversation regardless of how right you are or how long you have been owed it. You cannot hand somebody a decade of growth in a single line and expect their hands to be big enough to hold it.
He changed one sentence at a time. Somebody told him to do that once, in a classroom, while he was not listening.
The dinner
Year six. A dinner. Eight people around a table, Laila among them, because Laila is in this life too and Laila is, again, Sheen’s dearest friend. Warm. Funny. Remembers birthdays. The reason Sheen has anybody at all.
Somebody mentioned a colleague changing her mind about a project twice in a week.
And Laila said, brightly, carelessly, the way charming people say things they will never think about again:
“God, she’s so bipolar about it.”
The table laughed.
And Sheen felt her jaw lock and her eyes start to drop, exactly as they had in the dust two thousand years ago, the whole ancient machinery engaging at once.
And then, for the first time in three lifetimes, she looked up.
At James.
He was not laughing.
He was sitting very still with his glass halfway to the table, and he put it down, and he said, quietly, to a room he loved and a friend he loved:
“Don’t use it like that.”
Four words. No speech. No performance. He did not look at Sheen while he said it, which is how she knew it was not for her benefit.
Laila went pink and said sorry immediately, and meant it, because Laila is not a monster. Laila is a person who says a thing at eighteen and again at thirty-four and will probably say it once more before she stops, and who apologises properly each time, and who has been holding Sheen’s hand through worse weeks than anyone at that table knows about.
The dinner moved on.
Sheen sat in it with a fork in her hand and her whole architecture coming down around her.
Because she had never seen his face. In two lifetimes she had never once lifted her eyes and looked. She had heard a laugh in a courtyard as a single sound, and had assigned a place in it to the person her own story said was capable of it.
He had never said it. Not in the courtyard. Not in the corridor. Not once, in three lives, had he ever made that joke.
He was the one who had just told a table to stop.
Her own list
She kept a second list. This one cost her more.
He is cruel.
He is careless, which lands identically and is not the same thing.
Nobody ever taught him. He was rewarded for the blade his whole childhood and then we handed him patients.
He is trying, and it is costing him something, and I have been marking him against a standard set in a courtyard he cannot remember.
I forgave the man who took my thumb in a single afternoon and I have not forgiven the boy who laughed in three lifetimes. Something in that arithmetic is broken and it is not him.
And then, in year six, at four in the morning, the one that ended the case:
It was never him. It was Laila. And I never checked, because I had already decided what he was, and my certainty was more comfortable than looking up.
That last one is the reason she is telling this story at all.
Her teacher had been right about how people speak. What nobody told her is that it works in both directions. Your words reveal what you assume about others. So does your hearing. She had a story about James, and when a wound arrived, the story told her whose name to write on it, and she wrote it, and she never audited it, for two thousand years.
Reverence has a shadow, too. She had revered so hard and so purely and for so long that she was never permitted to be angry at the man who actually hurt her. So the anger went sideways, for centuries, onto someone who happened to fit the shape.
The dog, explained
Now. Back to the retriever.
She got her answer to her therapist’s question in year six, at two in the morning, in a chair, watching James asleep sitting upright because he had refused to leave.
Out of everything her mind could have shown you, why a dog that loves you.
Because at nineteen, mid-episode, sleepless, on a dose that had quietly stopped being correct, her brain had been asked to render one fact and reached for the only image big enough to carry it.
This one comes back.
That was the fact. Not that he was gentle, because he was still learning to be. Not that he was blameless, because he was not. Just: this one comes back. Repeatedly. Without being asked. Past every available reason not to. With his whole back half wagging.
Her mind, at its least reliable, during the exact episode when everyone agreed it could not be trusted, told her the single truest thing it has ever told her about another human being. It simply chose an unusual format.
She did the responsible things too, and they matter, so she is going to list them. She rang her psychiatrist. She got the dose reviewed. She did not decide the dog was a message from the cosmos and stop treatment, because she is not an idiot and she intends to be alive at sixty.
The retriever faded. That is how it goes. What remained in the room was a man holding her hand who did not mind being compared to a dog.
Both things are true. It was a symptom. It was also completely accurate. Her brain has never once been only one thing.
The thumb
Year seven. A meeting. The man who supervised them both did what men like that do. He praised her work, then took it. Not brutally. Beautifully. A name moved on a paper, credit gently rerouted, the excision performed so gracefully that everybody present understood she ought to be grateful to have been in the room.
Sheen said nothing.
Of course she said nothing. She has never been able to say anything to a teacher, in any life, in any body. That is the flaw in her that has never healed and she can trace it exactly, to a forest and a knife and her own willing hand.
Then James said, “No.”
Into the middle of it. And then, “That’s Sheen’s work, sir. I watched her build it. I’m not comfortable with this.”
Nobody had ever done that. In three lifetimes, standing at the edge of that courtyard, nobody had ever once objected on her behalf.
It cost him a reference, a supervisor’s goodwill, and most likely a year of his career. He never mentioned it to her. She found out from somebody else, which is the only reliable way to learn that something was real.
She went home and sat on her kitchen floor with her back against the cupboard and cried the way you cry when a thing you gave up on two thousand years ago quietly arrives.
It was never about the thumb. It was about being asked to give, endlessly, by a man who never gave. The healing was never going to come as compensation. It was going to come as one person, once, giving something up for her without being asked.
He had no idea he was doing it. He was simply a man in a meeting whose reflex, under pressure, after seven years and roughly nine hundred small corrections, had finally changed from cutting to protecting.
That is all growth is. Your reflex changes. Everything before that is homework.
The quad
They are on the grass. Nice day. Other people’s frisbees in the air.
He has brought a frisbee, because he is who he is, and she has already told him she is not going to catch it, and he has already said that’s fine, he will throw it near her.
And she decides to tell him. All of it. The courtyard. The trees. The laugh. The dust in front of her feet. The thumb. The neon corridor and the sentence she waited two thousand years to deliver.
And then the last part. That it was Laila. That it was always Laila. That she never looked up.
She talks for a long time. He does not interrupt once, which is a miracle and evidence and a thing she does not take lightly.
When she finishes she watches his face, and she is nineteen again for half a second, braced.
He does not laugh.
He sits with it a while, looking out at the frisbees.
“So,” he says eventually. “You’ve been furious with me since before language.”
“Yes.”
“For something I didn’t say.”
“Yes.”
“And I’ve spent seven years fixing something I didn’t break.”
“Yes.” Her voice goes. “James, I’m so sorry.”
He thinks about that for a long moment. Then he shrugs, and says, in the most James sentence ever constructed:
“Well. I probably needed the practice.”
And she laughs, wetly, horribly, into her own hands, because it is true. He did need it. He was careless and sharp and he hurt people for years, just never her, never in the way she had booked him for. Her wrong verdict had accidentally made him into a good man, and neither of them knows what to do with that except sit on some grass and be slightly winded by it.
“Also,” he adds, still looking at the grass. “If I ever meet him again. The teacher.” A pause. “I want you to know I’m planning to be extremely rude to him.”
She lies down flat on the quad and laughs until her ribs hurt.
“You have,” she tells the sky, “the emotional range of a golden retriever.”
“I’m choosing to take that as a compliment.”
“It is one. It’s the biggest one I’ve got.”
The last thing
Nothing here is fixed. Some weeks are still heavy. Some weeks the world goes fuzzy at the edges and she has to ring somebody and adjust something and cancel things and be a person who cancels things. He still feels the blade come up his throat when he is frightened, and he catches it maybe eight times out of ten, and he is not proud of the two.
She and Laila are fine, incidentally. Better than fine. Because it turns out that once you have discovered you spent two thousand years convicting an innocent man, you become extremely reluctant to convict anybody else, and a careless sentence at a dinner table is not a life, and Laila has held her hand through weeks nobody else knows about.
Neither of them uses the word forgiveness. Forgiveness implies a transaction that closed, and this did not close. It just stopped being the loudest thing in the room.
What they have instead is stranger and better. Each of them knows the worst sentence the other has ever said, and stayed. And Sheen knows the worst sentence she ever heard, and who actually said it, and how long she got it wrong.
So here is the whole thing, if you want it in one piece.
Listen to what you say when you are tired or angry or frightened, because that is your real story.
Then, and this is the part nobody warns you about, listen to what you hear. Because your certainty about a person will do your filing for you, quietly, for decades, and it will never once ask your permission.
Look up. Check the face. It costs you a second.
Change one sentence. Then another. Give it seven years.
And then, on a Tuesday, on some grass, with a frisbee in the air and a dog that was never there, set down the bow.
Conversations feel spontaneous. Words flow, topics shift, people laugh, disagree, interrupt, connect. On the surface, it all seems natural—almost effortless.
But beneath that surface, every conversation is doing quiet work.
People aren’t just exchanging information; they’re negotiating identity, status, belonging, and trust. Every sentence carries subtle signals: *Do I agree with you? Do I challenge you? Am I above you, equal to you, or seeking your approval?* Conversations are less about words and more about positioning.
This is where something like backbiting begins—not as an intentional act of malice, but as a byproduct of how groups maintain cohesion.
When two or more people talk about someone who isn’t present, it often serves a social function. It creates alignment. By sharing an opinion—especially a critical one—people test whether they are on the same side. Agreement strengthens bonds. Disagreement risks distance.
In that sense, backbiting becomes a kind of shortcut. Instead of building connection through vulnerability or shared goals, it builds connection through a shared target.
It also allows people to say things they wouldn’t risk saying directly. Direct confrontation carries consequences—conflict, rejection, discomfort. Indirect conversation feels safer. So thoughts that remain unspoken in one setting quietly surface in another.
Over time, this pattern normalizes itself. It becomes part of conversational rhythm. A name comes up, a tone shifts, and everyone instinctively understands the rules: what can be said, how far it can go, and when to stop.
What makes this particularly complex is that not all back-channel conversation is harmful. Sometimes it’s a way of processing frustration, seeking perspective, or understanding social dynamics. But the line between processing and undermining is thin—and often crossed without awareness.
The real issue isn’t that people talk about others. It’s that these conversations subtly shape reputations in the absence of the person being discussed. Narratives form, often incomplete or biased, and once established, they tend to stick.
So how do conversations drift into backbiting?
Usually, it starts small. A casual remark. A shared irritation. A moment of humor at someone else’s expense. If it’s received well—if it earns laughter or agreement—it gets reinforced. And what was once incidental becomes habitual.
Avoiding this entirely is unrealistic. It’s deeply embedded in social behavior. But being aware of it changes how you participate.
You begin to notice when a conversation is building connection at someone else’s cost. You become more deliberate about what you contribute, what you amplify, and what you let pass.
And sometimes, the most powerful shift is subtle—choosing not to add to a narrative that someone else isn’t there to shape.
Because conversations don’t just reflect relationships.
Functioning well in a group is less about fitting in and more about understanding the invisible rules that govern how people interact.
Every group—whether it’s a workplace, a classroom, or a broader social circle—operates on a mix of spoken expectations and unspoken dynamics. People often assume that competence or good intentions are enough to be accepted, but in reality, social navigation is a skill of its own.
The first shift is recognizing that perception matters as much as contribution. You may be doing excellent work, but if it isn’t visible, communicated, or aligned with what the group values, it often goes unnoticed. Functioning well means making your efforts legible to others—speaking up when needed, sharing progress, and ensuring your presence is felt without being overbearing.
Equally important is learning the balance between assertiveness and adaptability. Groups reward those who can stand their ground without becoming rigid, and who can adjust without losing themselves entirely. This isn’t about people-pleasing; it’s about strategic flexibility—knowing when to push, when to pause, and when to let things go.
Observation is an underrated skill here. Before trying to change a system, understand it. Who holds influence? What behaviors are rewarded? What is discouraged, even if unofficially? People who navigate groups well are often those who spend time decoding these patterns before acting.
There’s also the matter of emotional economy. Not every slight deserves a reaction, and not every disagreement needs to become a conflict. Groups function more smoothly when individuals can absorb minor frictions without escalating them. At the same time, knowing which issues are worth addressing is what prevents you from becoming invisible.
Another quiet advantage is reliability. In most group settings, consistently doing what you say you will do builds more trust than occasional brilliance. People gravitate toward those who are predictable in their effort and stable in their behavior.
But perhaps the most important principle is this: don’t outsource your sense of worth to the group.
Groups are inherently unstable. Opinions shift, hierarchies change, and acceptance can be conditional. If your confidence depends entirely on external validation, you’ll constantly feel off-balance. The people who function best within groups are often those who can engage without becoming dependent.
In the end, functioning well in society isn’t about mastering one personality or strategy. It’s about awareness—of yourself, of others, and of the space in between.
There’s an uncomfortable truth most people sense but rarely articulate: many social structures don’t just tolerate bullying—they quietly organize around it.
Not always in obvious ways. Not always through overt cruelty. But through subtler dynamics: exclusion, hierarchy, signaling, and control.
At its core, bullying is not just aggression. It’s a tool. A way to establish dominance, define boundaries, and assign roles within a group. And humans, being deeply social creatures, are constantly negotiating where they stand relative to others.
From school playgrounds to corporate boardrooms, similar patterns repeat. A few individuals set the tone. Others align, not necessarily because they agree, but because alignment feels safer than resistance. Laughter becomes currency. Silence becomes complicity. And gradually, a structure forms—one where power is maintained not just by strength, but by collective participation.
Why does this happen?
Because groups need order, and hierarchy is the fastest way to create it.
Bullying, in many cases, becomes an informal sorting mechanism. It identifies who can be pushed, who resists, and who commands attention. It’s crude, often unfair, but effective in establishing social rankings quickly. And once those rankings settle, people adapt to them.
There’s also a psychological economy at play. By participating in or tolerating the marginalization of someone else, individuals signal belonging to the dominant group. It’s a trade: empathy in exchange for security.
What makes this particularly insidious is that it rarely feels like “bullying” from the inside. It feels like humor, like tradition, like “just how things are.” The language softens the reality. Teasing replaces targeting. Banter replaces belittling. Culture masks coercion.
And those at the receiving end? They’re often told to adapt, toughen up, or prove themselves worthy of inclusion—further reinforcing the structure that excluded them in the first place.
Yet, not everyone conforms.
Some people step outside these dynamics, refusing to participate or internalize the hierarchy. Interestingly, these individuals often disrupt the system—not through confrontation alone, but through non-participation. By not rewarding dominance with attention or fear, they weaken its currency.
But this path is costly. Social systems rarely reward those who refuse to play by their rules, at least not immediately.
So why do such structures persist?
Because they are stable. They replicate easily. And most importantly, they distribute discomfort unevenly—protecting the majority while concentrating harm on a few.
It’s easy to condemn bullying as an individual flaw. It’s harder to recognize it as a structural feature.
And perhaps the more uncomfortable question is not why bullies exist—but why systems so often make space for them.
Because until that is addressed, the pattern doesn’t disappear.
People often like to believe that society runs on kindness, collaboration, and mutual support. It’s a comforting idea—that if you try hard, others will notice, help you, and lift you along the way. But step outside idealism for a moment, and a different pattern emerges.
At a fundamental level, human behavior is deeply self-preserving. People prioritize their own survival, comfort, reputation, and growth—often unconsciously. Support is conditional. Attention is selective. And encouragement is frequently reserved for those already showing signs of success. It’s not always malicious; it’s simply how we’re wired.
You see it everywhere. A struggling artist is ignored until their work gains recognition. A student’s ideas are dismissed until validated by authority. A startup is ridiculed until it becomes profitable. People don’t rally behind potential—they gather around proof. And proof, unfortunately, comes late.
This creates a paradox: those who need support the most receive it the least.
So how do some people still succeed?
The answer lies in a quiet, often invisible trait—self-sustained momentum. Successful individuals tend to operate in the absence of external validation. They build, practice, fail, and repeat long before anyone is watching. They detach their effort from applause. In fact, many of them expect indifference.
Instead of waiting for encouragement, they generate their own. Instead of relying on networks, they create value that eventually attracts one. They understand a subtle truth: support is not the starting fuel; it is a byproduct of visible progress.
There’s also an element of selective blindness. Successful people often develop the ability to ignore noise—criticism, comparison, or the absence of recognition. Not because they are immune to it, but because they’ve decided it’s irrelevant to their trajectory.
Ironically, once success begins to show, the narrative flips. The same world that was indifferent starts appearing supportive. People call it “community,” “network,” or “luck.” But what they’re really seeing is delayed alignment—humans gravitating toward what already works.
This isn’t a cynical view of humanity; it’s a practical one. Self-interest isn’t inherently evil—it’s efficient. But understanding it frees you from unrealistic expectations. It teaches you not to wait.
If anything, the real edge lies in accepting that most people won’t support you early on—and building anyway.
Because in the end, success doesn’t emerge from collective belief. It emerges from sustained effort in its absence.
Tagore was out here doing Nobel-level metaphysics. I’m just a sleep-deprived neuroanesthesia resident with too many markers and not enough serotonin. So, naturally, I decided to reframe his majestic “Religion of Man” into:
The Religion of Shivani: Coffee, Cortex, and Controlled Chaos
1. Man’s Universe → Resident’s Universe
Tagore:
“Light as the radiant energy of creation started the ring-dance of atoms…”
Me:
Light as the radiant phone alarm at 5:15 a.m. starts the ring-dance of neurons in one extremely confused DrNB brain.
The planets in his story emerged from baths of fire; my days emerge from:
- Bath of OT scrubs,
- Bath of ICU monitor alarms,
- Bath of “Madam, case add ho gaya.”
Tagore’s “gigantic Inert, dumb and desolate” universe?
That’s my brain when I open a DRNB viva book after night duty.
And then life appeared as a tiny cell, facing the enormity of existence.
Same, honestly.
Just replace “cell” with “final-year resident” and “enormity of existence” with “entire neuroanesthesia syllabus, thesis, and two pending manuscripts.”
2. The Divine Unity → The Holy Fellowship WhatsApp Group
Tagore:
“The divine principle of unity has ever been that of an inner inter-relationship.”
In my world, the “inner inter-relationship” is:
Residents + Fellows + Consultants + OT list + ICU census + the unspoken rule that no one is allowed to truly go home on time. ( just kidding )
Multicellular life forms “larger cooperative units” through complex inter-relationships that maintain coordination.
We do the same:
- One cell: the nurse/posting resident.
- Another cell: the fellow arguing about BP targets.
- Third cell: neurosurgeon saying “short case hai” (known falsehood).
- Fourth cell: Shivani trying to standardize anything with an Excel sheet and trauma.
Together, we form:
A larger cooperative unit called “NANCC,” whose primary function is to defy circadian rhythm and generate publishable chaos.
My “multi-personal humanity” is the sum total of:
- Neurointervention circus,
- Neuro OT drama,
- Neuro ICU existentialism,
- And the one quiet moment at 2 a.m. when I sip hot coffee and think, “I really love this.”
That’s my “divine principle of unity.” Plus, Wi‑Fi.
3. Immortality → Papers, Paintings, and Question Banks
Tagore:
“In this ideal of unity [man] realizes the eternal in his life… It inspires in us works that are the expressions of a Universal Spirit.”
Me:
Look, I’m not sure about eternity, but I know this:
- A half-broken laptop full of drafts,
- A terrifying Google Drive of data sheets,
- A sketchbook of brains and aneurysms,
- A folder called “DRNB FINAL – PLEASE GOD” on my desktop
…are the closest I currently get to immortality.
Tagore says we touch the eternal through:
- Art,
- Science,
- Philosophy,
- Service.
In NANCC life that becomes:
- Art → me painting neurons instead of reading ICP chapters.
- Science → me pretending my Excel sheets are “robust databases” and not emotional support files.
- Philosophy → the 3 a.m. corridor walk where I question why I exist, then go back and titrate norad.
- Service → the 40 little things we do every shift that never go in a paper but quietly keep someone alive.
If I ever leave something “immortal” behind, it’ll probably be:
- A meme-laced teaching PPT,
- A scoring system with too many variables,
- And stories of “that neuroanesthesia madam who kept asking for exact BP numbers and bullied people out of writing ‘stable only’.”
4. Truth, Tables, and ICU Monitors
Tagore:
“The table… appears as a table for man through his special organ of senses and his special organ of thoughts.”
Me in ICU:
The “table” is actually the monitor.
- To relatives: a scary screen with random numbers.
- To a tired resident: “Okay-ish, I think, HR not red, BP not red, SpO₂ not red, chal raha hai.”
- To an examiner: “Kindly enumerate all parameters, their significance, and management of derangements, in less than 15 seconds while I stare into your soul.”
Tagore says science gives us one version of reality, senses give us another, both reconciled in human personality.
In my life:
- Scientific truth: ICP 22, CPP borderline, sodium 131, something must be done.
- Emotional truth: “If one more thing goes wrong, I will lie down on this floor.”
Both are valid. Only one goes in the chart.
And his line about logic being “machinery of thinking created by man”?
In my world:
Logic is the anesthesia workstation.
The “machinery of coping” is chai.
5. Reason vs Heart → Viva vs Why-I-Started
Dostoyevsky:
“Nature, the soul, love, and God, one recognizes through the heart, and not through the reason.”
Tagore:
We have senses for the physical world and “luminous imagination” for wholeness and immortality.
Me, trying to revise for DRNB:
- Reason: “You must memorize 300 pages of neurophysiology or you will perish in the viva.”
- Heart: “You love this field because of that one moment when a patient wakes up, moves all limbs, and smiles at their family.”
Reason is my exam prep, my protocols, my references, my careful ICP/CPP calculations.
Heart is:
- Sitting by a recovering patient’s bed at 2 a.m.,
- A neurosurgeon quietly saying “Good call,”
- A junior asking, “Didi, how did you know what to do?”
- The absurd joy of a neat art line, a clean extubation, a well-managed SAH.
Reason fills the answer sheet.
Heart writes the blog.
Reason gets me through the exam.
Heart is why I haven’t run away to open a small art café in the hills. Yet.
6. Relationship as Fundamental Truth → Group Photo with Dark Circles
Tagore:
“Relationship is the fundamental truth of this world of appearance.”
In my personal nonsense universe, that translates to:
- I am not just “DrNB candidate.”
- I am the sum of every senior who taught me, every colleague who covered a break, every nurse who saved me with one quiet, “Madam, dekho ye accha nahi lag raha,” every patient who trusted me without knowing my name.
My “truth” isn’t separate from them.
It’s:
- Sheen and Laila laughing about chaos.
- Penelope’s exam-topped calm eye of the storm.
- Neurointervention fellows calling my data sheets “side quests” and still filling them (badly, but love is imperfect).
- Neurosurgeons roasting my forms but turning up to help with the project anyway.
- The weird, immortal tradition of Artemis neuros and NANCC producing people who top exams while looking permanently half-dead.
If Tagore has “The Religion of Man,” I have:
The Religion of NANCC:
- Thou shalt not write “BP normal.”
- Thou shalt not plug EEG into defib.
- Thou shalt accept that “short case” is a lie.
- Thou shalt love thy coffee, thy patient, and occasionally thy colleagues.
- Thou shalt turn thy exhaustion into stories, thy data into papers, and thy burnout into questionable humor.
And somewhere in this mess — between the science and the silliness, the cerebral and the completely deranged — there is:
- A tiny sense of immortality,
- A feeling of unity,
- And the quiet knowledge:
This is my little corner of the universe.
Ridiculous. Exhausting. Beautiful.
A ring-dance of atoms, aneurysms, and absolutely unnecessary Excel columns.
Signed,
Shivani Fotedar
Neuroanesthesia, Neuro ICU, and Nonsense Theology.
(Featuring: New Fellows, Old Trauma, and a Recycled Piyush)
The Neuro Dungeon had changed.
Brad Pitt (a.k.a. Arm Pitt) was gone. Rachel had escaped. Samuel had defected to a place with actual staffing and functional machines and was now flying abroad. The aura of unhinged stupidity, however, had respectfully stayed behind.
Only one veteran remained.
Penelope.
Penelope, who had just topped the ISNACC fellowship exam, thereby single-handedly ensuring that Artemis maintained its terrifying tradition:
Last year Rachel topped ISNACC. This year Penelope did. Somewhere, examiners were whispering, “What are they feeding these people?”
Rachel 2.0: DM Edition
Rachel, now Dr Rachel “DM Neurocritical Care” Somewhere-Fancier, lived in Penelope’s WhatsApp notifications.
Daily messages included:
•“Remember to bully your juniors into reading.”
•“Please tell your new fellows not to plug EEG into defib.”
•“If anyone calls EEG ‘brain ECG’, disown them.”
Penelope would stare at her phone between cases and sigh.
“They’ve sent me children,” she muttered one day.
Laila and Sheen looked up, interested.
“New fellows?” Sheen asked.
“New era,” Penelope replied. “Same department. Less brain, more Wi-Fi.”
The New Cast of NANCC
With the old chaos exported to other institutions, the Neuro Dungeon summoned new demons.
Enter:
1.Dr. Aruna Chatterjee – ISNACC Fellow, Batch of Eternal Confidence
Speaks like UpToDate is personally sponsoring her. Starts every sentence with, “Evidence suggests…” even when asking for chai.
Looks sweet, talks soft, writes notes like M&M minutes. You will not realise you’re being audited until you cry later.
1.Dr. Ishani Verma – DrNB Neuroanesthesia & Critical Care ( just joined )
Has the lost-puppy energy of a first-year and the sleep schedule of a trauma pager.
And then there was…
1.Dr. Piyush Patel – DrNB, Alleged Reincarnation
Named Piyush. Neuroanesthesia. Same specialty. Same department. Same glasses. Only difference: this one used memes.
Everyone called him “Piyush 2.0” behind his back and “Sir” to his face, just in case the original Piyush’s soul was actually inside and marking karma-based internal assessments.
The First Morning Rounds: Welcome to the Circus
It was 8:15 a.m. in the Neuro ICU. The usual state: three ventilators alarming, one infusion pump blinking in existential crisis, Sheen looking like she’d fought the DRNB syllabus in hand-to-hand combat and lost.
Penelope stood at the foot of bed 5, tablet in hand, exam-rank aura radiating like a halo and also like a threat.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s see what we’re working with.”
Bed 5: postop aneurysm clipping.
Na: 136.
ICP: 12.
BP: 130/70.
Documentation: emotional damage.
Penelope turned to the newbies.
“Aruna, summary of the case?”
Aruna straightened her shoulders.
“Ma’am, this is a 54-year-old female, post-op ruptured ACom aneurysm clipping, day 1, stable vitals, on norad 0.05, GCS E4VtM6, pupils equal and reactive. Evidence suggests that early mobilisation—”
“Aruna,” Penelope interrupted gently, “we haven’t even extubated her yet.”
She blinked.
“Yes ma’am, but evidence suggests—”
“Evidence also suggests we should use our eyes,” Penelope replied. “Try that first.”
Meera’s Audit Aura
At the next bed, Meera handed Penelope a neatly written sheet.
“Ma’am, I made a checklist,” she said.
The top was titled:
“Common Reasons This ICU Will End Up in a Journal or a Legal Case (Provisional List)”
Items included:
•BP charted as “okay”
•ICP written as “stable”
•No one knowing actual sodium
•“Ventilator settings as per previous” (previous what? previous life?)
•GCS documented as “same as before” with no baseline
Penelope read it in silence.
“Very good,” she said. “This is both horrifying and accurate.”
Sheen, hovering near the workstation, muttered, “You guys are writing dark comedy and calling it quality improvement.”
Piyush 2.0: The Glitch in the Matrix
Later that day, Sheen walked into OT and froze.
At the head end, prepping for a neuro case, stood Piyush 2.0. Same name. Same field. Same academic seriousness in the forehead wrinkles. Except… this one was humming Bollywood songs and had a phone wallpaper that said:
“KEEP CALM AND TITRATE NORAD.”
Sheen whispered to Laila, “He looks… familiar.”
Laila whispered back, “Don’t say it. If the old Piyush sir hears it through cosmic Wi-Fi, we’re dead.”
Piyush 2.0 adjusted the ventilator and asked, “Sheen, target EtCO2 for this case?”
Sheen, DRNB-burned but not dead, replied, “Between 32 and 35, sir.”
He nodded.
“And target heart rate?”
“Emotionally or numerically?”
Piyush grinned. “See, this is why you people worry me.”
He added, “By the way, I’ve been told there was another Dr Piyush Patel before me.”
Everyone pretended to be very busy.
“Legacy is important,” he said serenely. “I am here to carry forward the name.”
Sheen’s brain: You mean respawn?
DrNB + Fellows = One Shared Brain Cell
That night, the Neuro ICU was run by:
•Meera, on call
•Ishani, on call
•Laila, post-call but still physically there because DrNB prep had blurred the line between “duty” and “self harm”
•One resident from general ICU looking like they’d been thrown into a parallel universe
At 2 a.m., alarm symphony started.
Ventilator: BEEP BEEP BEEP
Syringe pump: BEEEEEEP
Monitor: dramatic flat-ish tones for artifact
Ishani stared at the monitor like it was a zodiac chart.
“Sheen, is this… real VT or just artifact?” she asked.
She squinted. “Check the patient. If they’re talking, it’s artifact.”
Meera, while adjusting norad, asked, “What’s the urine output?”
Ishani checked the chart.
“It says ‘adequate’.”
Meera blinked slowly.
“What is adequate?” she asked.
“Uhh… adequate?” she replied.
“Sheen,” Meera said softly, “take my pen before I write something impolite in the notes.”
Aruna’s Evidence Attack
Next morning, during handover, Aruna started presenting with her usual flourish.
“Overnight, we optimised hemodynamics,” she began. “Evidence suggests that early goal-directed—”
Penelope raised an eyebrow. “What goal did you direct exactly?”
Aruna looked at the notes.
“BP 120–140,” she said quickly.
Laila added helpfully, “Documented as ‘BP: fine only.’”
Penelope sighed. “Whose fine? Yours? Mine? The patient’s? There is no universal fine.”
Meera whispered, “Writing that on a sticker,” and did exactly that:
“BP FINE ONLY = NOT A NUMBER”
She stuck it on the monitor.
Sheen’s Art Attack
Meanwhile, Sheen was coping with DRNB prep, duties, and the neurologically hazardous presence of three new trainees by returning to her old habits: painting, animation, and academic nonsense.
In her bag were:
•A neuro painting of the NANCC team as glial cells (Laila and Penelope were, of course, astrocytes-in-chief)
•A half-finished animation of an ICU monitor warning, “If you write ‘GCS same,’ I will report you”
•A notebook with DRNB topics and exactly three completed pages, one of which just said: “I HATE VIVAS”
During a mid-shift lull, Piyush 2.0 saw her doodling a brain with a coffee cup.
“Is this… creative coping?” he asked.
“It’s either this or I intubate myself,” Sheen replied.
He nodded. “Art is fine. As long as you also know CPP formula in your sleep.”
“I do know it in my sleep,” Laila said. “I don’t know it when I’m awake.”
Rachel’s Ghost Messages
Every time something ridiculous happened, Penelope’s phone buzzed as if Rachel, from her lofty DM program, could sense the stupidity in the air.
One evening:
•Ishani had written “ICP stable” with no number.
•Aruna had said “Evidence suggests…” three times in one handover.
•Meera had quietly compiled a list titled “Things That Will Give Me Migraine Before Age 35.”
Laila sent a photo to Rachel: a whiteboard reading:
“IF YOU WRITE ‘GCS SAME’, MAY YOUR COFFEE ALWAYS BE DECAF.”
Rachel replied instantly:
“Good. Fear is an excellent teaching tool. Carry on, Artemis tradition.”
Samuel, observing from afar via occasional texts, sent:
“Has anyone died yet?”
Penelope: “No.”
Samuel: “From stupidity?”
Penelope: “Almost.”
The Great On-Call Night From Hell
Inevitably, the Universe scheduled a perfect storm:
•One ruptured aneurysm
•One decompressive craniectomy
•Three ventilated patients
•One angry relative
•One infusion pump that decided to beep continuously with no actual error
•Two ISNACC fellows and one DrNB brain cell trying to multitask
At 3 a.m.:
•Aruna was quoting a paper while half-asleep: “Evidence suggests that sleep deprivation—”
•Meera was labelling lines and tubes with serial killer precision
•Ishani was asking, “If patient is intubated, do we chart ‘speech: absent’ or is that rude?”
•Sheen was trying to read for DRNB with her eyelids at 10% battery
•Piyush 2.0 walked in, looked around, and said, “Ah. Controlled chaos. Very good.”
A nurse pointed at the monitor.
“Sir, BP is 90/50.”
“Who’s on this bed?” Piyush asked.
“Meera, sir,” the nurse replied.
“I meant… the patient,” Piyush said calmly.
“Oh. Yes. Also Meera,” Sheen muttered.
They resuscitated. Adjusted fluids. Titrated norad. Fixed triggers. Stabilised ICP.
At 5 a.m., the ICU was quiet again.
Aruna leaned back and said, “Evidence suggests we will all die young.”
Meera replied, “Please write that with a reference.”
The Tradition Lives On
By the end of the month:
•Penelope was still the reigning ISNACC topper.
•Rachel had officially started DM Neurocritical Care and was sending “spot diagnosis” CTs at random hours.
•Piyush 2.0 had become a myth: half man, half déjà vu.
•Aruna had learned that not everything needed “evidence suggests” in front. Some things as she already knew just needed common sense.
•Meera had a growing folder called “Things That Should Not Be Charted but Were.”
•Ishani had finally stopped writing “stable only” and started writing actual numbers—after being spiritually beaten by Penelope’s eyebrow.
And Sheen?
She was somehow juggling DRNB prep, research drafts, watercolour scans of neurons, and a new animation of a brain yelling:
“IF YOU SAY ‘NEURO ICU IS CHILL’, MAY YOU NEVER FIND A VEIN AGAIN.”
One afternoon, as they wrapped up rounds, Penelope looked at her team.
“You know,” she said slowly, “Rachel topped last year. I topped this year. One of you will have to keep the tradition going.”
Aruna swallowed.
Meera blinked.
Ishani dissociated.
Sheen pointed at all three. “Good luck, my condolences, and may your examiners be postprandial and mildly hypoglycemic.”
The Neuro Dungeon rolled on:
New fellows, same chaos.
New Piyush, same trauma.
New batch, same ancient curse:
Artemis NANCC will always be 50% brains, 50% comedy, and 100% sleep deprivation.
And somehow, amidst the alarms, jokes, and existential dread…
(Featuring: Artemis Neuros, Unsolicited Opinions, and Zero Actual Studying)
If anyone tells you, “Beta, just focus on your DRNB prep, these are the best years of your life,” understand one thing: that person has never opened a Neuroanesthesia viva book after 12-hour duty.
At Artemis Hospital, Sheen was discovering a new kind of suffering.
Every time she opened a chapter, the book responded like a gaslighter:
“You knew this once. If you loved me, you’d remember.”
Sheen sighed, flipped a page, and did what any reasonable final-year would do in such a crisis.
She opened a new PowerPoint.
The Art of Productive Procrastination
Sheen was now an expert at Academic Avoidance With Just Enough Guilt to Call It Productive.
In one afternoon, instead of reading invasive ICP monitoring, she:
•Designed a research data sheet version 17.3 titled “FINAL_final_THIS_ONE_OK.xlsx”
•Made a watercolor wash of an aneurysm that looked suspiciously like a cosmic tomato
•Started animating a little brain that got vasospasm whenever someone wrote “BP normal” in case notes
Her logic was simple:
“If I’m not studying, I must at least be doing something that can go into my CV.”
Enter: The Neuros Men
She wandered into the Neurosciences floor “just for a five-minute break.”
Everyone knows this is how entire projects, burnout, and three new sub-studies are born.
Chapter 1: Kabir, Guardian of Guilt
Kabir found her sitting at the workstation, scrolling through guidelines with all the enthusiasm of a patient reading bowel prep instructions.
“You’re on study leave,” he said. “Why are you here?”
“I came to… focus,” Sheen replied.
Kabir looked at the coffee, the half-open Excel sheet, and the very much closed exam notes.
“On what? Regression analysis or regret analysis?”
Sheen flipped her laptop around.
“Actually, I’m refining our aneurysm coiling-hemodynamics sheet. I added more variables.”
Kabir squinted. “You added ‘time from clipping/coiling to surgeon’s first existential sigh’ as a column.”
“It could correlate with outcomes,” Sheen argued.
Kabir thought for a second.
“Fine. But if you can refine 180 columns of data fields, you can revise 18 viva topics. Consider this my RCT of your priorities.”
He handed her an old question bank.
“Do one thing,” he said. “For every SAH patient, you must answer three SAH viva questions. Prospective stress study.”
Sheen stared at the book like it had just insulted her ancestors.
Chapter 2: Rohit, Meme-Based Counselling
In the angio suite, Rohit caught Sheen hunched over her phone.
“Are you reading?” he asked.
“Yes,” Sheen said, too fast.
Rohit leaned over.
Her screen clearly showed: an animation timeline with a tiny brain character walking into an OT and fainting at “case posted as elective, turned out emergency.”
“This doesn’t look like Miller,” he said.
“It’s… visual learning,” Sheen replied defensively. “I’m making educational animations.”
Rohit nodded with mock seriousness.
“Of course. ‘Perioperative Hemodynamics in Aneurysm: A Storyboard.’ Very cutting edge.”
He sipped his coffee and added,
“Did you at least open your notes today?”
Sheen thought hard.
“I opened the app where the notes are.”
Rohit: “So, login-level preparation. Good. By exam time, you’ll reach chapter titles.”
He patted her shoulder.
“Don’t worry. If everything fails, we’ll make a meme-based viva book. First question: ‘Define brain.’ Answer: ‘Organ that stops working 3 months before any exam.’”
Chapter 3: Double Arjun, Double Advice
Sheen entered the Brain Room with her books, laptop, and face of a woman who has read the same paragraph six times without absorbing a single ion.
Arjun Singh glanced at her.
“Reading?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What topic?”
“…everything.”
He nodded with the sympathy of a man who had once suffered.
“Dekho,” Singh said, “there are two kinds of exam prep: planned and honest. Planned is your schedule. Honest is what actually happens.”
“Which one worked for you?” Sheen asked.
Singh stared into the distance.
“Neither. God worked for me. And last-minute panic.”
On the other side, Arjun Saxena put down an MRI.
“Don’t listen to him,” Saxena said. “Strategy is simple: solve past questions, make structured answers, revise them thrice, and appear calm.”
He paused.
“Did I do that? No. But I strongly recommend it.”
Sheen showed them her notebook.
Inside were:
•Half an answer on cerebral autoregulation
•A quarter of an algorithm for TBI
•And a full-page detailed drawing of a brain saying “No.”
Saxena squinted.
“This is… artistic, but the examiner won’t give internal marks for shading.”
Singh added, “Unless you draw their face and label it ‘Source of Stress.’”
Chapter 4: Deepak, Lord of Long Cases
Deepak walked in, looking like a man who had just finished a “short” 8-hour case.
“Madam, study leave?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” Sheen said, instantly guilty.
“And you’re here?”
“I thought I’d read in the department.”
Deepak laughed. “This place is a randomized trial of distraction. Did you at least finish one topic?”
“I revised half of SAH… intro,” Sheen said.
Deepak nodded thoughtfully.
“Good. Now imagine your viva examiner is like me, post-call, with five more cases lined up. Will half SAH save you?”
Sheen remained silent.
Deepak continued, “Do one thing. For every SAH you’ve ever seen here, you owe yourself one full-length, structured written answer. Background, classification, management. No skipping.”
“Sir, that will be a lot,” Sheen protested.
“Exactly,” he said. “That’s how you know it’s the right plan.”
Chapter 5: Bobby, Auditor of “Timepass”
Bobby found Sheen later in the day surrounded by:
•A sketchbook with half a craniotomy scene in watercolor
•A tablet open to an animation app
•A closed exam book acting as a very expensive paperweight
“What’s this?” he asked.
“Break time, sir,” Sheen replied.
“How long is this break?”
She checked the clock.
“Three… hours.”
Bobby smiled the dangerous consultant smile.
“Ah. That’s not a break. That’s a lifestyle.”
He picked up her sketchbook.
“Nice painting,” he said. “You know who else will do watercolor if you don’t study?”
“Who, sir?”
“You. Of your own tears, after the exam viva.”
He sat down.
“Look, do whatever you want—research, painting, animation—but one thing: for every ‘timepass’ hour, do one serious hour. Balanced hemodynamics of the soul.”
Sheen blinked.
“Sir, that sounds like a therapy line.”
“Exactly,” Bobby said. “This profession won’t give you mental health. You have to schedule it.”
“Good,” Mihir cut in. “Tell me the classification of aneurysms.”
Sheen brightened.
“Saccular, fusiform, dissecting, mycotic—”
“Wrong,” Mihir said. “Correct answer: ‘Those that rupture when you are calm, and those that rupture when you are already exhausted.’”
He settled down next to her.
“Listen. You’ll never feel prepared. Just know enough to not embarrass yourself, and speak with confidence. Aneurysms and examiners—both can smell fear.”
•Every time you finish a topic, small reward. Coffee, chocolate, one meme from Rohit.”
“Will this… work?” Sheen asked.
Vikram shrugged.
“If not, we’ll actually put electrodes. But try this first.”
Chapter 8: Farid, Quiet Quality Control
Farid eventually appeared, like a calm audit in human form.
He noticed Sheen’s table: books, laptop, paints, stylus, highlighters, one lone read page.
“How’s the studying going?” he asked.
“Slow, sir,” Sheen said. “Very slow.”
Farid nodded.
“Show me your plan.”
She handed him a crumpled paper labelled “Study Schedule (Ideal Version)” with hour-by-hour targets.
“This,” Farid said, “is like expecting perfect documentation on a Sunday evening.”
He drew a line through half of it.
“New protocol,” he said. “Fewer topics per day. But complete. Like a good operation note—short, clear, and real.”
He added, “And one more thing. Exam is like research. No one cares how dramatic the journey was. They look at your final answer.”
The Final Evening: Excel, Paint, Panic
By the end of the week, Sheen’s life looked like this:
•Morning: Read one topic, write one structured answer, question own existence.
•Midday: Enter data into the aneurysm hemodynamics sheet, curse every “BP normal” entry.
•Afternoon: Make a short animation of a brain raising its own ICP while reading past papers.
•Evening: Watercolor some cathartic chaos—angiograms turning into galaxies.
•Night: Stare at ceiling, mentally recite SAH grading systems, fall asleep halfway between Hunt-Hess and WFNS.
The neuros team watched this circus with varying reactions:
•Kabir: “At this point, your study pattern needs its own statistical model.”
•Rohit: “I’ll make memes for your exam week. Caption: ‘Patient stable, candidate not.’”
•Singh: “Just remember, in viva, start confidently. Even if your brain is on bypass.”
•Saxena: “Whatever you do, don’t say ‘as per condition’ to the examiner.”
•Deepak: “If they ask you ‘short case,’ assume it’s a lie. Prepare for long.”
•Bobby: “Think of it like OT. Preparation, execution, and then pretend it was always under control.”
•Mihir: “And never forget aneurysms. They never forget you.”
•Vikram: “If your heart rate spikes, consider it live hemodynamic monitoring practice.”
•Farid: “Read, write, revise. No shortcuts. But also, no melodrama.”
Epilogue: The Real Primary Outcome, Again
One day, months later, whether Sheen passes with flying colours, average colours, or just surviving colours, the result sheet will show only numbers. ( she doesn’t want to imagine failiure )
It will not show:
•The 3 a.m. watercolor of an aneurysm that looked like a galaxy having a bad day
•The Excel sheet that knew more BP trends than most residents
•The tiny animated brain who fainted every time someone said “viva”
•The unsolicited life coaching from 9 neurosurgeons with 19 contradictory strategies
But everyone in Artemis Neuros will know:
The real primary outcome was this:
Sheen didn’t lose her mind completely.
She just turned it into data, paintings, and slightly unhinged animations.
And somehow, between BP charts, joke variables, and skull base watercolors…
If anyone ever tells you, “Just go talk to the neurosurgeons, they’ll happily help with your research,” please understand: that person hates you.
At Artemis Hospital, Sheen found this out the hard way.
She arrived in the Neurosciences floor armed with three things:
- A research proposal,
- A laptop,
- And a tragically optimistic smile.
The old legends had moved on. No Greenberg thunder, no Olivia eyebrow of doom, no Clark-style nasal detours.
In their place stood the New Era: seven men, one department, and zero collective interest in filling forms.
These were the new recruits.
The Cast of Mildly Willing Victims
1. Dr. Kabir Menon – Fellowship, Neurointervention
Man speaks fluent statistics and mild disappointment. He calls everything “underpowered,” including his own house Wi‑Fi.
2. Dr. Rohit D’Souza – Fellowship, Neurointervention
Perpetually holding coffee, perpetually holding sarcasm. If there were a meme for it, he’d use it as a progress note.
3. Dr. Arjun Singh – Associate Consultant, Skull Base
Neat hair, neat plans, deeply messy encounters with reality. Believes every case will go “as per plan.” Reality laughs.
4. Dr. Arjun Saxena – Associate Consultant, Spine
The other Arjun. Confused 80% of the time about being the other Arjun, clinically brilliant the other 20%. No one is sure which is which.
5. Dr. Rajesh Kapoor – then fellow now Associate Consultant, Neurointervention
Lives for aneurysms and color-coded angiograms. Has more clip types memorised than relatives’ phone numbers.
6. Dr. Farid Khan – Associate Consultant, Calm Overlord
The only one who looks like he reads full guidelines and actually remembers them. Legendary for killing chaos with one silent stare.
7. Dr. Deepak Sinha – Consultant, Neurosurgery
Walks like a consultant, documents like a resident. Famous for starting with, “This will be a short case,” right before a 9-hour operative epic.
8. Dr. Bobby Singh – Associate Consultant, Neurosurgery
Smiles like it’s Sunday, operates like it’s war. Has two modes: “Chill, ho jayega” and “Who filled this pre-op like this?”—no in-between.
And ofcourse our dear neurology associate consultants , Dr Vikram and Dr Mihir
And into this circus walked Sheen.
Chapter 1: Sheen vs. The Angio Bunker
Sheen started in Neurointervention.
Kabir and Rohit were in the angio suite, staring at a monitor like it owed them money.
“Hi, I’m Sheen,” she said, clutching her proposal. “I’m here with a research idea.”
Mistake number one: saying this out loud.
Kabir blinked. “Prospective or retrospective?”
Sheen smiled. “Prospective.”
Rohit choked on his coffee.
“Prospective?” Rohit repeated, like Sheen had just proposed awake neurosurgery without anesthesia. “On this floor? With these people? While we are alive?”
Sheen nodded enthusiastically. “I want to study hemodynamics and outcomes in aneurysm coiling and thrombectomy—BP trends, HR variability, contrast load…”
Kabir squinted. “So… my future: 80% of my life in Excel?”
He took the printed protocol, flipped through it, and said,
“Where’s the section where I go home on time? This is incomplete.”
Rohit peered over his shoulder. “Bro, this is cute. Look, she’s made a sample size calculation like we control bed occupancy.”
Sheen tried again.
“It’ll be simple. Just standardised BP targets, some extra documentation, a data sheet—”
“Standardised?” Rohit said. “Nothing here is standardised except delayed breakfast.”
Kabir sighed, but his eyes had that dangerous “ooh, data” sparkle.
“Fine. Show me your data sheet,” he said, like a villain in Act 2.
Sheen opened her laptop.
The spreadsheet had multiple tabs: demographics, procedural variables, intra-op vitals, complications, follow-up.
Rohit whistled. “That’s not a data sheet. That’s a side quest.”
Kabir leaned closer. “You’ve put in time stamps for BP readings?”
“Yes!” Sheen said proudly.
Kabir shook his head. “Excellent. Now all I have to do is perform complex neurovascular procedures while also acting like a human Holter monitor who knows Excel shortcuts.”
Rohit clapped Sheen on the shoulder.
“Add one more column: ‘Number of times fellow regretted career choices per case.’ Binary outcome. Always 1.”
And yet, somewhere between complaining and caffeine, both fellows agreed to join.
Condition 1 (Kabir): “You do the data cleaning.”
Condition 2 (Rohit): “I get meme rights for every complication.”
Chapter 2: Double Arjun, Double Trouble
Neurosurgery Brain Room. The sacred battleground.
Inside, the Arjuns were arguing over who was “the original.”
“I joined first,” said Arjun Singh.
“My MCh is older,” said Arjun Saxena.
“Your hairline is older,” Singh retorted.
Sheen entered like a woman entering a lion enclosure with a salad.
“Good morning, sirs. I’m Sheen. I’ve come with a research project.”
Both Arjuns froze.
Arjun Singh: “Is it on skull base?”
Arjun Saxena: “Is it on spine?”
Sheen: “It’s… on everything.”
They recoiled.
She opened the laptop again.
“I want to combine data from neurointervention and neurosurgery—aneurysm clipping, coiling, TNTS, decompressions—track BP targets, outcomes, complications—”
Arjun Singh held up a hand.
“One second. You want us to document… more than we already do?”
Sheen: “Just a few extra variables—”
Arjun Saxena laughed the defeated laugh of a man who has seen 37 pre-ops and 14 postponements in one day.
“Tell me, Sheen,” Saxena said. “If I spend this time filling your form, who will see my OPD of 64 lumbar radiculopathy patients asking if yoga can fix slipped discs?”
“I’ll make it as short as possible,” Sheen promised.
Singh peered at the sheet.
“This has more columns than my ward has beds.”
Saxena added, “And more follow-up than my last relationship.”
Just then, Dr Deepak Sinha walked past the open door, heard the word “research,” and visibly flinched.
“Sheen, right?” he asked, stepping in. “Is this one of those studies where I have to remember BP, sodium, fluids, urine output, and also my own sanity?”
“Yes, sir,” Sheen said cautiously.
Deepak sighed. “Fine. Add one more variable: ‘Number of times consultant said this will be a short case and lied.’ That’s your real predictor of outcome.”
From the corner, Dr Bobby Singh looked up from his pile of consents.
“Will this form finally stop people writing ‘BP normal’?” he asked. “Because if it does, I’m in. Otherwise, I’m only half in.”
Sheen, sensing an opening, replied, “We will actually define ‘normal,’ sir.”
Bobby smiled. “Accha. Then I’ll even fill it between two craniotomies. But if anyone writes ‘as per condition,’ I’m sending them to you.”
But then Sheen mentioned the magic words.
“We can present this at a major conference.”
Both Arjuns went quiet.
“Conference?” Singh asked.
“Abroad?” Saxena added.
“If the data is good,” Sheen said.
Singh sighed. “Okay, I’m listening.”
Saxena: “Me too. As long as I’m not labeled ‘Arjun 2’ in your paper.”
Deepak added, “And I better not be ‘etc.’ in the author list.”
Sheen reassured them:
“In the manuscript, you can be ‘Dr. A. Singh’ and ‘Dr. A. Saxena,’ and ‘Dr. D. Sinha’ and ‘Dr. B. Singh.’ Equal confusion for everyone.”
Chapter 3: Mihir the Clip Collector
Dr. Mihir Patel walked in carrying what looked like a small tackle box.
Inside were aneurysm clips. Many, many clips.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Sheen is starting a study,” Singh said. “On BP and outcomes and emotional damage.”
Mihir sat down, interested.
“Will it involve aneurysms?” he asked.
“Many,” Sheen replied.
Mihir leaned forward. “Continue.”
Sheen explained the vascular component:
Clip vs coil, pre-op BP, intra-op swings, rebleeds, vasospasm, follow-up.
Mihir nodded slowly, processing.
“So you’re telling me… I get to do what I already do, and then you turn it into a graph that proves I was right?”
“If the results say so,” Sheen said.
Mihir smiled dangerously.
“I will recruit every aneurysm in Gurgaon.”
Then he saw the CRF.
“Why is there no column for TYPE OF CLIP?” he demanded.
Sheen blinked. “I thought—”
“You thought wrong,” Mihir said. “We need Yasargil classification, length, angulation, and clip attitude.”
“Clip… attitude?” Sheen echoed.
“Yes. Angry clip, tired clip, overconfident clip. It affects outcome.”
From the doorway, Deepak murmured, “Also ‘budget clip’ when store doesn’t have what you actually want. Please add that.”
Sheen opened a new column. Sometimes, resistance is futile.
Chapter 4: Vikram Wants Electrodes in Everything
Dr. Vikram Iyer strolled into the Brain Room like a man who wanted to modulate someone’s thalamus for fun.
He heard “research” and immediately pulled up a chair.
“What’s the topic?” he asked.
“BP, neuro outcomes,” Sheen began.
“Boring,” Vikram said. “Where are the electrodes?”
Sheen hesitated. “Uh… it’s more hemodynamics-based—”
“We can add a sub-arm,” Vikram said. “DBS patients, peri-op BP, stimulation parameters. See? Now there are electrodes.”
“Okay, we can include functional cases,” Sheen conceded.
Vikram’s eyes lit up.
“Also, psychological variables.”
Arjun Singh groaned. “We don’t have time to treat their brains, and now you want to treat their childhood?”
Vikram continued unfazed. “Think about it. We can correlate BP spikes with surgeon shouting, drilling time, and the moment the scrub nurse says ‘Sir, that tray is not available.’”
Sheen paused.
“That… is actually interesting.”
Vikram leaned back, satisfied.
“If this paper doesn’t change practice, it will at least explain why everyone here needs therapy.”
Bobby, flipping through MRIs, added dryly, “Add one more: ‘BP when patient’s relative asks if we can do surgery after their cousin’s wedding.’ That’s your real peak.”
Chapter 5: Farid, Lord of Quiet Approval
Finally, Dr. Farid Khan arrived.
The room fell automatically quieter, as if someone turned down the chaos volume.
“What’s this meeting?” Farid asked, sitting down.
“Research,” Singh said. “Complicated research. With forms.”
“Conference potential,” Saxena added quickly.
Farid looked at Sheen. “Explain.”
Sheen gave the short version this time:
“One combined neurointervention + neurosurgery study on hemodynamics and outcomes. If we pull it off, it’ll be big.”
Farid thought for a moment.
“Who will do the data entry?” he asked.
Sheen: “Mostly me.”
“Who will chase follow-up?”
“Also me.”
“Who will get blamed if something goes wrong?”
“…me?”
Farid nodded. “I support this project.”
The room collectively exhaled.
Farid added, “I’ll help with the protocol and ethics. But no one is calling me at midnight to ask how to fill column G.”
Kabir (from the doorway): “Too late, I already planned that.”
Deepak raised a hand. “And please, in the ethics form, don’t write ‘minimal extra work for surgeons.’ That’s the biggest lie of all.”
Chapter 6: The First Day of Data Collection (aka: Chaos in 4D)
On Day 1 of actual data collection, Sheen realised three things:
1. Surgeons answer “BP okay?” with “Haan haan, normal hai,” which is not a number.
2. No logbook ever has all the fields filled.
3. Neurointervention fellows speak in half-sentences during cases.
In the angio suite:
Sheen: “Kabir, I need systolic BP every five minutes.”
Kabir: “Bro, I need three hands, one more nurse, and a separate brain. Pick one.”
Rohit: “Relax. Just write: ‘BP: stressed but coping.’”
In OT 1:
Sheen: “Arjun sir, target BP?”
Singh: “Low-ish but not too low.”
Sheen: “That’s… not a number.”
Singh: “Write ‘as per intra-op condition.’”
In OT 2:
Sheen: “Saxena sir, was there any significant intra-op BP fluctuation?”
Saxena: “There was a fluctuation in my faith in the human race, does that count?”
In OT 3:
Sheen: “Mihir sir, did you use single or multiple clips?”
Mihir: “Yes.”
Sheen: “…Yes to which?”
Mihir: “Yes to ‘stop asking me while I’m closing.’”
In OT 4:
Sheen: “Vikram sir, any intra-op issues?”
Vikram: “Patient fine. Team needs DBS.”
In OT 5:
Sheen: “Deepak sir, can I note exact BP targets from your notes?”
Deepak: “Sure. If you find them. Even I’m trying to decode what I wrote at 3 a.m.”
In OT 6:
Sheen: “Bobby sir, was BP stable?”
Bobby: “Stable-ish. Write ‘borderline, but everyone pretended it was fine so we could finish.’ That’s reality.”
By evening, Sheen’s spreadsheet looked like a war diary:
- “BP: probably okay, surgeon said ‘chalega’”
- “Anesthesia says ‘stable only,’ unclear”
- “Fellow too busy panicking, data missing”
- “Consultant handwriting illegible, assuming BP existed”
***
Chapter 7: The Debrief and the Betrayal of Excel
A week later, Sheen called a “progress meeting.”
Translation: “Please come so I can show you how much chaos you’ve created.”
She projected the Excel file on the Brain Room screen.
- And one entry in Rohit’s handwriting: “BP: emotionally elevated.”
Kabir adjusted his glasses.
“This is… messy,” he said, sounding half-horrified, half-impressed. “We might actually get something out of this.”
Saxena pointed at a row. “Why does this say ‘Surgeon shouting: 9/10’?”
Vikram grinned. “That’s my subjective scale. We needed secondary outcomes.”
Mihir traced a column.
“Look. In my aneurysm cases, once BP stabilises, outcomes are consistently better.”
Singh shrugged. “Once the drilling stops, everyone’s BP stabilises. Including mine.”
Deepak pointed to another row. “Who wrote ‘BP: normal for this hospital’? I want that person in my OPD. That confidence is therapeutic.”
Bobby leaned forward. “And here—someone actually entered exact numbers. Who was this unicorn?”
Sheen quietly raised her hand.
Farid watched silently, then finally spoke.
“You realise,” he said, “if we actually standardise this, this could be a good paper.”
Rohit nodded. “Title: ‘Artemis Neuros: We Tried To Be Serious And Somehow Got a p-Value.’”
Kabir added, “Subheading: ‘A prospective observational study of BP, brains, and burnout.’”
Deepak suggested, “Third line: ‘Featuring consultants who promised short cases.’”
Bobby: “And residents who finally learned that ‘BP normal’ is not a measurable outcome.”
Sheen just sat there, exhausted but weirdly proud.
Somewhere in that Excel jungle of half-answers and full chaos, a real project was taking shape.
***
Epilogue: The Real Primary Outcome
By the time the protocol was refined, ethics forms submitted, and the seventh version of the data sheet created, the neuros team had quietly changed.
Kabir started actually reading recorded BPs instead of just instinctively frowning at them.
Rohit began writing semi-real numbers instead of “BP: yikes.”
Singh and Saxena stopped fighting over who was “original Arjun” and united over more important things, like avoiding extra paperwork.
Mihir grudgingly accepted that “clip attitude” was not an official variable.
Vikram made peace with the fact that he could not implant electrodes in everyone, only some people.
Farid caught juniors writing “BP normal” and calmly asked, “Define normal,” which traumatized them into accuracy.
Deepak reluctantly started mentioning actual targets in his orders, because “for research” somehow felt scarier than mortality audits.
Bobby began circling vague notes in red and saying, “Think of Sheen’s data sheet before you write this,” which was worse than any M&M.
And Sheen?
She walked the corridors with a half-broken laptop, a half-sane brain, and a fully committed dataset.
One day, when this monstrous, hilarious, wildly imperfect project finally becomes a paper, the results section will talk about numbers, outcomes, and significance.
Because I read for the same reason I write — to fathom my life and deepen my living — looking back on a year of lifehas always beenlooking back on years of reading. Here are the books I read this year and the previous that clarified and magnified my life, that will stay with me for the rest of it.
THANKS
Here we are, living these lives bright and perishable as a poppy, hard and shimmering as obsidian. We know that they are entirely improbable, that we bless that bright improbability with each flash of gratitude for it all, that if we pay attention closely and generously enough we are always repaid in gladness, that it is the handle of the door to the world. And yet over and over we choose to live in the cage of complaint, too preoccupied with how the will of life betrayed our wishes, the wanting monster always growling in the other corner of the cage.
Imagine parting the bars and stepping out. Imagine waking up with a rush of gladness at everything we were never promised but got anyway — trees and music, clouds and consciousness, the cobalt eye of the scallop, the golden fan of the gingko, the alabaster chandelier of the ghost pipe.
In our age of competitive prostration, this is a headstand hard to hold for long. But it is trainable. It is possible to become strong enough to be tender, it is.
Artist and poet Rachel Hébert offers a bright patch of training ground in The Book of Thanks: A Catalogue of Gratitudes — one of the most miraculous books I have ever encountered, trembling with tenacious tenderness for the bewilderment of being alive.
Radiating from the pages is an invitation, extended in paintings and poems, to open “the sunlit fort of your attention” and let the world rush in, in all its minute and majestic loveliness: stalactites and Spanish moss, spiderwebs and skylights, snow and the call of the snowy owl, the heart’s capacity for “an urgent, flashing, interrupting kind of love.”
What emerges is prayerful (“more cellos, touch, and rain, please”) and singing with praise (“roots gripping, canyon carved, spine woven of baleen a thousand years old”) — a manual for how to live in gratitude (“what is working wants your praise”) and a theological statement (“there is nothing you must do to belong”).
She writes:
What do we say to longing?
If you have sat in the chill of early morning bleakness
and watched as the deep blue sighed and blushed, touched
by the warm curve of dawn and pinker than pink then
apricot soft and spreading its glow, you know. You know.
WILLARD GIBBS: THE WHOLE IS SIMPLER THAN ITS PARTS
A mind is a strange place, strange and solitary — the only place where, with all our passions of reason and all our calculations of emotion, we render reality what it is; the only place where truth is won or lost, where beauty means anything, where mathematics, God, and the color of your mother’s eyes exist. That out of such solitude and such strangeness one mind can touch another, touch a constellation of others, touch the spirit of its time and the soul of the future — this is the great miracle that makes the loneliness bearable and life more alive.
“Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future,” Muriel Rukeyser begins her book-length prose poem about the creative spirit, anchored in the life and legacy of the forgotten scientist whom Einstein considered the greatest mind America ever produced. Willard Gibbs: The Whole Is Simpler than Its Parts — the inaugural title in Marginalian Editions — is a benediction of science, democracy, and the imagination, disguised as a biography of a lonely forgotten genius who shaped the modern world: “a phantom of science to haunt inventors who did not know his name, to overreach dimension touching history and touching art”; a mind that unraveled the mysteries of matter by following “the imperative in his loneliness, the creative loneliness of the impelled spirit.”
Rukeyser writes:
All the crafts of subtlety, all the effort, all the loneliness and death, the thin and blazing threads of reason, the spill of blessing, the passion behind these silences — all the invention turns to one end: the fertilizing of the moment, so that there may be more life.
THE GRAMMAR OF FANTASY
I was eight when I first grasped the power of storytelling. One night, my mother presented me with a book titled Telephone Tales, published the year she was born. Night after night, page after page, it cast an enchantment, but it was one particular story that kept me up. “The Air Vendor” was a cautionary fable about a man who devised a way to bottle and sell air, until everyone on Earth had no choice but to become his customer in order to keep breathing.
I read “The Air Vendor” over and over, delighting in the shimmering sentences, shuddering at the logical progression I sensed between the reality I was living in and this fantastical world of breath for sale. I knew nothing about politics, but I could tell that someone with a deep heart and a sensitive mind was trying to warn us about something menacing, to invigorate our imagination so that we may envision and enact a different course. I knew nothing about the author, except that he had died just a few years before I was born and that his name was Gianni Rodari (October 23, 1920–April 14, 1980).
Gianni Rodari in his classroom
I now know that he was born on the shores of an Italian mountain lake in the wake of the First World War and that he was eight himself when his father, a baker, died suddenly. There is no record of what happened, only that the young boy took solace in solitude and music. He sang in the church choir, mastered a small orchestra of instruments, and dreamt of becoming a professional musician.
But then he discovered Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Dostoyevsky and Novalis (“books written with the passion, chaos, and satisfaction that are a hundred times more fruitful for one’s studies than a hundred years of school,” he would later recount); discovered Dadaism and Futurism, the German Romantics and the French Surrealists; discovered the symphonic power of ideas and imaginative literature, the way language can liberate and words can empower.
Although he never stopped playing his violin, he became a professional storyteller instead, his work touching generations in a living testament to his American contemporary Maurice Sendak’s insight that great stories have “the shape of music.”
Having worked as an elementary school teacher since he was only a teenager, having watched his country’s spirit shatter under the fist of fascism, Rodari yearned for a way to unite his passions for philosophy, teaching, and justice. And so he started writing stories, songs, and poems for children, insisting over and over, in subtle and sensitive ways, on the human capacity for independent and imaginative thinking.
One early spring in his early forties, he was invited to conduct a week of workshops on storytelling for about fifty kindergarten, elementary, and high school teachers — a week he would later remember as one of the happiest of his life. Tasked with distilling everything he knew about what makes a great story based on his fifteen years of teaching and writing for children, he suddenly remembered a notebook he had kept many years earlier under the title Notes on the Fantastic, sparked by a sentence he had read in a book by Novalis:
If there were a theory of the fantastic such as there is in the case of logic, then we would be able to discover the art of invention.
Storytelling, Rodari realized, was a system for organizing thought into imagination, the way grammar is a system for organizing words into ideas.
Within a year, he had distilled what he presented at the workshop into a dazzling, deeply original book he titled The Grammar of Fantasy (public library), only now available in English with enchanting illustrations by Matthew Forsythe.
Examining the structure of folk tales and the function of fairy tales, drawing on Tolstoy and Hegel, on the Brothers Grimm and Scientific American, Rodari explores the inner workings of the imagination and its relationship to logic, the way it bridges the real and the ideal through fantasy, the way it makes our lives not only livable but worth living.
Noting that he is making no “attempt to establish a fully fledged ‘theory of the fantastic,’ with rules ready to be taught and studied in schools like geometry,” that he is not seeking “a complete theory of the imagination and invention,” Rodari offers:
I hope that this small volume will prove useful to all those who believe it is necessary for the imagination to have a place in education, who have faith in the creativity of children, and who know the liberating value of the word. “All possible uses of words for all people” — this seems to me a good motto, with a nice democratic sound. Not because everyone is an artist, but because no one is a slave.
IS A RIVER ALIVE?
“Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river,” Borges wrote in his timeless “refutation” of time. “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Nietzsche wrote a century earlier in his directive on how to find yourself. But rivers are not just metaphors for life — they are its substance and sinew. They vein this rocky planet into a living world, a world whose mind is nerved and axoned with rivers. The planetary consciousness we call civilization bloomed on their banks and went on slaking its thirst for life with their waters in baptisms and funeral pyres, turbines and trade routes. Rivers were the lever by which the planetary thought process we call evolution lifted life itself out of the oceans to wing and paw and hoof the Earth, to forest it and flower it, to make it lush with minds and music.
Art by Icinori from Thank You, Everything
A river, then, may be considered a life form itself, its aliveness not a calculation of the life it shores up but a kind of moral calculus drawn from the rights and responsibilities that grant an entity the dignity of personhood.
This view, readily reflected in many native traditions, is entirely absent from the Western canon, absent from our legislature and our imagination. It is what Robert Macfarlanechampions with passion and rigor in Is a River Alive? (public library) — a portal of a book, lucid and luminous, hinged on something particular and urgent (the rights of nature movement) but (because this is Robert Macfarlane) opening into the deepest recesses of the existential and the timeless: the measure and meaning of being alive.
Extending an invitation to “imagine water otherwise” — and what is imagination itself if not the art of otherwise — he writes:
For those who, like me, have been largely raised on rationalism, to imagine that a river is alive in a way that exceeds the sum of the lives it contains is difficult, counter-intuitive work. It requires unlearning, a process much harder than learning. We might say that the fate of rivers under rationalism has been to become one-dimensional water.
With an eye to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s vivifying notion of a “grammar of animacy,” he adds:
A good grammar of animacy can still re-enchant existence. To imagine that a river is alive causes water to glitter differently. New possibilities of encounter emerge — and loneliness retreats a step or two. You find yourself falling in love outward, to use Robinson Jeffers’s beautiful phrase.
RAISING HARE
Narrow the aperture of your attention enough to take in any one thing fully, and it becomes a portal to everything. Anneal that attention enough so that you see whatever and whoever is before you free from expectation, unfiltered through your fantasies or needs, and it becomes love. Come to see anything or anyone this clearly — a falcon, or a mountain, or a patch of moss — and you will find yourself loving the world more deeply.
One winter day, walking through the placid English countryside while on pandemic-forced sabbatical from her roiling job as a foreign policy political advisor in London, Chloe Dalton stopped mid-stride at the sight of a small still creature haloed by the sunlight — a baby hare no bigger than her palm, right there in the middle of the path, about to change the course of her life, though she did not yet know it. In her moving memoir Raising Hare (public library), she recounts that catalytic encounter:
The path I took was a short, unpaved track leading along the edge of a cornfield and emerging into a narrow country lane flanked with tall hedges overflowing with bramble and snowberry. The track, formed of two strips of hard-packed earth, was solid enough for a car to pass but pocked with potholes and puddles. I crested the skyline, deep in my thoughts, and began to walk down the slight slope towards the lane, when I was brought up short by a tiny creature facing me on the grass strip running down the track’s centre. I stopped abruptly. Leveret. The word surfaced in my mind, even though I had never seen a young hare before.
The animal, no longer than the width of my palm, lay on its stomach with its eyes open and its short, silky ears held tightly against its back. Its fur was dark brown, thick and choppy, and grew in delicate curls along its spine. Long, pale guard hairs and whiskers stood out from its body and glowed in the weak sun, creating a corona of light around its rump and muzzle. Set against the bare earth and dry grass it was hard to tell where its fur ended and the ground began. It blended into the dead winter landscape so completely that, but for the rapid rise and fall of its flanks, I would have mistaken it for a stone. Its forepaws were pressed tightly together, fringed in fur the colour of bone and overlapping as if for comfort. Its jet-black eyes were encircled with a thick, uneven band of creamy fur. High on its forehead was a distinct white mark that stood out like a minute dribble of paint. It did not stir as I came into view, but studied the ground in front of it, unmoving. Leveret.
Art by Jackie Morris from The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane
Unlike rabbits, so populous and docile that we have tamed them into pets and children’s book characters, hares are rare and furtive to begin with — wild creatures glimpsed only out of the corner of the eye as they vanish into the thicket of their secret lives. Dalton had never seen a leveret before. She didn’t know what to do — if she left it there, stranded and helpless as any newborn, it would be vulnerable to becoming prey or roadkill; if she touched it to move it into the tall grass, its mother, if alive at all, might not find it or might reject it, as wild animals are apt to do when the smell of their young has been tainted.
One of life’s great cruelties is that quick decisions we make at a certain hour on a certain day, decisions we could have and would have made otherwise on a different day in a different state of mind, end up shaping the years and decades ahead, shaping our very self. One of life’s great mercies is that we never realize this at the crossing point of seemingly inconsequential choices — or else we would be paralyzed to take even the littlest step on the path of our becoming.
Unable to reason her way out of the paradox, Dalton follows her own animal instinct and carefully swaddles the leveret in dry grass to avoid touching it, then tucks it into her coat, thinking she was taking it home for the night. She ends up raising it, and in a sense being raised by it toward her full humanity — shaken awake from the trance of workaholism, freed from the conditionings and compulsions we mistake for needs, resensitized to the wonder of life. She chronicles the experience — one rife with biological, ecological, and existential revelations — with the tenderness of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s account of his three weeks cohabitating with a bunny, the respectful observational rigor of Thoreau’s overnight fosterage of a little owl, and the searching intellect of Helen Macdonald’s life with a goshawk.
THE WANTING MONSTER
Wanting is the menacing margin of error between desire and need. It is the blade that vivisects your serenity, the hammer that shatters your wholeness — to want anything is to deem your life incomplete without it. It is a perpetual motion machine that keeps you restlessly spinning around the still point of enough. “Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson lamented in a love letter a century before Kurt Vonnegut, in his shortest and most poignant poem, located the secret of happiness in the sense of enough. Wanting is a story of scarcity writing itself on the scroll of the mind, masquerading as an equation read from the blackboard of reality. That story is the history of the world. But it need not be its future, or yours.
An epoch after John J. Plenty and Fiddler Dan — John Ciardi’s magnificent 1963 spell against the cult of more — author Martine Murray and artist Anna Read, living parallel lives close to nature in rural Australia, offer a mighty new counter-myth in The Wanting Monster (public library) — an almost unbearably wonderful modern fable about who we would be and what this world would be like if we finally arrived, exhausted and relieved, at the still point of enough. Having always felt that great children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise, speaking great truth in the language of tenderness, I hold this one among my all-time favorites.
The story begins in a town so tranquil and content that no one notices the Wanting Monster, who stands sulking on the edge of the scene, part ghost out of a Norse myth, part Sendakian Wild Thing.
And so the Wanting Monster stomps over to the next village, “bellowing and crashing about as monsters do,” but still the magpie keeps singing, the bees keep laboring at the flowers, and the children keep playing in the square. The Wanting Monster redoubles the growling and the howling, but not even Billie Ray, “the littlest child of the village,” pays heed.
This inflicts no small identity crisis:
What good was a monster if it couldn’t raise any trouble? If it couldn’t even raise the eyebrow of a small, curly-headed child? The Wanting Monster had its head in shame.
But then it comes upon Mr. Banks, napping serenely by the stream. With that “terrible compulsion” that turns the insecure monstrous, the Wanting Monster moans its siren growl of want into the sleeping man’s ear.
Mr. Banks began to wriggle. His heart began to jiggle.
A little note of misery sounded in his mind.
What could possibly be wrong?
It was a perfect day for a snooze by the stream. But now he wanted something else, something more.
ALPHA & OMEGA
“Have faith,” someone I loved said to me, holding my face in her hands — the face of a lifelong atheist. And suddenly, there in the lacuna between love and reason, in the warmth between her palms, I found myself reckoning with the meaning of faith — this ancient need for something to keep us from breaking the possible on the curb of the known, to keep the heart from breaking on the cold hard floor of a world that has always mistaken the limits of the imagination for the limits of reality. And I thought of Jane Ellen Harrison (September 9, 1850–April 15, 1928) — the classicist who brought Ancient Greece to the modern world, who declared herself a “deeply religious atheist” and devoted her life to excavating the roots of the religious impulse from the clay of the psyche, teaching us that it is not who or what we pray to but what we pray for that reveals and redeems our lives; that what we pray for, not on our knees but in our choices and the stories we tell about them, conjures up the world we yearn to live in and it is our yearning that we act upon to make the world. Every choice we make in our political and personal lives is a prayer. All change is prayerful action toward a different kind of world — an act of faith toward the future and an act of heresy toward the status quo.
Altarpiece by Hilma af Klint, 1907.
“To be a heretic today is almost a human obligation,” Jane Ellen Harrison declared from the peak of her thoroughly heretical life in one of the superb essays collected in Alpha & Omega (public library). She loved a woman a generation younger than her, loved a world millennia older than hers, loved ideas epochs ahead of her time. Virginia Woolf was taken by “her superb high thinking agnostic ways.” In the nascent evolutionary theory, which Harrison she insisted every thinking person should read, she saw a lens on the human soul and its constellation in societies, saw “how the whole of animal life sets towards the making of the individual, and yet how the individual never is, never can be, complete,” saw how science and spirituality both reach for that “invisible prepotent force on which and through which we can possibly act, with which we are in some way connected.” She believed in the power of collective consciousness and equally in “the value of each individual manifestation of life,” and above all in the merging of the two in “the strange new joy, and even ecstasy, that comes of human sympathy.”
She cherished the “inward and abiding patience” of science, its “gentleness” in understanding the true timescales of change, how long it takes to uproot an invasive untruth from the garden of culture. Religion she regarded as a “necessary step in the evolution of human thought,” but she detested its dogmas — its “net of illusive clarity cast over life and its realities,” the way its doctrines “distract attention from that divinity which is ourselves.” She sought to understand the need for it: “Man,” she wrote when we were all men, “feels and acts, and out of his feeling and action, projected into his confused thinking, he develops a god.” Her god was not our maker but our making, not a pacifier for the lonely confusion of being a self but a clarifying force for the cosmos of connection between us and everything that is — that recognition of universal consciousness she believed not only is “the new religion for which the world wait” but “already is, if unconsciously, our religion.” She insisted that in order to attain “real freedom and full individual life, life based on sympathy and mutual interdependence,” we must place this recognition at the center of our institutions. “Repression, vengeance, disunion, are the keynotes of our old disastrous system,” she warned in the first year of the world’s first global war, urging us to take “a step, and a big one, out of the prison of self.”
Because she recognized that faith is an adaptation of the self, she was especially fascinated by experiences of religious conversion, by all mystical experiences, fascinated by how they tend to come just after moments of profound personal crisis or heartbreak, when “some shattering blow has been dealt to a man’s personality, to his affection or ambition.” Here was a cathartic unselfing, a submergence of the self into the oneness — in conversion, “the individual spirit is socialized.” She saw science as another instrument of unselfing, the way “it holds immediate personal reaction in suspense” to reveal a larger reality — “the whole, the unbounded whole,” to which religion is a reaction: In our inability to hold “the real mystery of the universe, the force behind things, before which we all bow,” we create “various and shifting” eikon — Greek for image, figure, or likeness, origin of the English icon. This “attempted expression of the unknown in terms of the known” is our self-expatriation from the mystery we live with, the mystery we are.
She drew on St. Paul and Darwin, on Whitman and Tagore, guarding religion from theology and defining it simply as “that commerce with the unseen and unknown” that is the natural consequence of our imagination and our capacity for free thought. Theology, she thought, is a metastasis of our unease with the unknown, of our need to create a referent for it in the known — something to make us feel “relieved, comforted, reassured, at home” — and bow to it, calling it God. But such gods, she cautioned, are “a moving away from religion . . . a rationalizing into the known, not a relation of faith to the unknown.” It was faith she was interested in — the psychology of it, the source of it, the different meanings and manifestations of it to different people at different times across different cultures. The questions at the heart of faith — what we believe in, what we pray for, how we ritualize our beliefs in opinions and actions — became her lens for understanding nearly every aspect of human culture and society.
But although she lamented living through an “anti-rational age” in which reason seemed to have “suffered a certain eclipse,” Jane Ellen Harrison never ceased believing that love is superior to reason, further along the evolutionary axis of human development. Pulsating beneath all of her writing is the quiet, unfaltering conviction that change is the work of time and love, that religion and politics are just symptoms of the ferment that roils deep inside the philosophical and poetic superstructure of human life, that time is the richest subject of philosophy, that the poet’s job is to love people and show them “the bigness, the beauty, of their lives,” that science should resist the push toward specialization and break down the artificial boundaries between disciplines that keep us from seeing the full picture of reality. Out of her life and her work, out of her politics and her passions, arises her simple animating ethos: “By contacts we are saved.”
And so, having made a life in scholarship, she returned over and over to love — the supreme unselfing, the great cathedral of the mystery to which all science and all religion are an incomplete response, the light looking out from the face between the palms that we may call faith. “Learning severs us from all but a few — love reunites us,” she wrote. “Such is the mystery of life.”
The day after Jane Ellen Harrison died at age seventy-seven — an unseasonable spring day of “bitter windy rain” — Virginia Woolf took a break from working on Orlando — her four-century love letter to Vita Sackville-West, the great love of her own life — and went for a walk in the cemetery, where she ran into the poet and novelist Hope Mirrlees, Jane’s partner, “the colour of dirty brown paper,” distraught and “half sleep” with grief.
Hope Mirrlees and Jane Ellen Harrison
Virginia recounted her encounter with the broken Hope:
We kissed by Cromwell’s daughter’s grave, where Shelley used to walk, for Jane’s death. She lay dead outside the graveyard in that back room where we saw her lately raised on her pillows, like a very old person, whom life has tossed up, & left; exalted, satisfied, exhausted.
Virginia got to the funeral just as the service was ending. The clergyman was reading “some of the lovelier, more rational parts of the Bible,” but she felt unmoved.
As usual, the obstacle of not believing dulled & bothered me. Who is ‘God’ & what the Grace of Christ? & what did they mean to Jane?
Outside, “a bird sang most opportunely; with a gay indifference, & if one liked, hope, that Jane would have enjoyed.”
Later, Hope later received a note of condolence from Virginia, containing a single line. “It was more comforting than all my other letters put together,” she told a friend half a lifetime later. It read:
But remember what you have had.
OLIVER SACKS: LETTERS
“I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure,” the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks(July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) wrote in the wake of his terminal diagnosis as he contemplated what makes life worth living, having devoted his own life of visionary lunacy to shedding light on what makes a person, how we find ourselves and lose ourselves in the convoluted corridors of the mind.
His singular spirit, the quiet passion of his devotion to the human project, and his uncommon insight into the life of the mind come alive in his posthumously published Letters (public library), revealing in a new way — in that singular way that only the contact point between one consciousness and another can reveal — his views on the self, the creative process, music, the relationship between art and science, the nature of love, and much more.
LOVE LETTER TO A GARDEN
You may or may not find the meaning of life while pacing a flower bed, but each time you plunge your bare hands into the hummus of the Earth and run your fingers through the roots of something that hungers for the sun, you are resisting the dying of the light and saying “yes” to life.
Gardening may or may not make you a great writer, but it will lavish you with metaphors, those fulcrums of meaning without which all writing — all thinking — would be merely catalog copy for a still life.
You may or may not be able to stop a war by planting a garden, but each time you kneel to press a seed into the ground and bow to look at the ants kissing a peony abloom, you are calling ceasefire on the war within; you are learning to tend to fragility, to cultivate a quiet stubborn resilience, to surrender to forces larger than your will; you are learning to trust time, which is our best means of trusting life. “The gardener,” Derek Jarman wrote in his profound journal of gardening his way through grief, “digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end… the Amen beyond the prayer.”
This is why Debbie Millman begins her tenderly illustrated Love Letter to a Garden (public library) at the very beginning, at that first atom of time chipped from the rib of eternity — the singularity that seeded everything.
A seed, she observes, is a kind of singularity — a tiny beginning compacting an entire existence. And so, in consonance with the great naturalist John Muir’s observation that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” it becomes impossible to contemplate this one thing without contemplating the nature and meaning of existence itself.
BREAD OF ANGELS
Every visionary, every person of greatness and originality, is a resounding yes to life — to the truth of their own experience, to the demanding restlessness of the creative spirit, to the beauty and brutality and sheer bewilderment of being alive — a yes made of unfaltering nos: no to the way things are commonly done, no to the standard models of what is possible and permissible for a person, no to the banality of approval, no to every Faustian bargain of so-called success offering prestige at the price of authenticity.
One night after a long day shift as a waitress, a young mother tucked her sickly daughter into bed and handed her one of the few precious remnants of her own childhood — a 19th-century book of illustrated poems for boys and girls titled Silver Pennies.
You must have a silver penny to get into Fairyland. But silver pennies are hard to find.
It seemed like a clear instruction, the price of what she yearned for: “entrance into the mystical world.” In that way children have of touching the elemental truth of things, she intuited the two things needed for entry: “the heart to pierce other dimensions, the eyes to observe without judgment.”
She couldn’t have known it then, but this may be the purest definition of what it takes to be an artist; she couldn’t have known that she would spend the rest of her life not finding silver pennies but making them — for others to find, for her own salvation, for paying the price of her nos in living the enchanted yes of being an artist.
In her moving memoir Bread of Angels (public library), she traces the trajectory of a life stubbornly defiant of the odds — the odds of bodily survival, with a “Proustian childhood” punctuated by tuberculosis, scarlet fever, measles, mumps, chicken pox, and the A/H2N2 virus; the odds of success: born into a poor family, her father, unable to afford a car, walking two miles to take the bus for his night shift; the odds of spiritual survival, with losses so harrowing to read about it is hard to imagine living with, from the death of her childhood best friend at twelve to a season of being marked by an incomprehensible cascade of losses: her artistic soul mate is taken by AIDS, her husband falls ill and dies at the hospital where their children were born, and in the wake of all that grief her beloved brother is slain by a stroke while wrapping a Christmas present for his daughter. What saves her again and again is her reverence for the magic and mystery of life. Pulsating beneath it all is “love, the ineffable miracle” — that delicate art of holding on and letting go, our training ground for trusting time.
MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME
Evolution invented REM sleep, that ministry of dreams, to give us a safe way of practicing the possible into the real. The dreams of the night clarify our lives. The dreams of the day complicate them, charge them with the battery of fear and desire, quiver them with the urgency of our mortality and the fervor of our lust for life. To dream is to dare traversing the roiling ocean between what is and what could be on a ramshackle raft of determination and luck. The price we pay for dreaming is the possibility of drowning; the price we pay for not dreaming is the surety of coasting through life in a stupor of autopilot, landlocked in the givens of our time, place, and culture. The dreamer, then, is the only one fully awake to life — that bright technology of the possible the universe invented to prevail over the probable amid the cold austerity of eternal night.
But what may be even harder than getting what you dream of is knowing what to dream of, annealing your imagination and your desires enough to trust that your dreams are your own — not the second-hand dreams of your parents, not your heroes’ costumes of achievement, not your culture’s templates of success. “No one can acquire for another — not one,” Walt Whitman reckoned with how to own your life, “not one can grow for another — not one,” while two hundred miles north Thoreau was reckoning with the nature of success, concluding: “If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal — that is your success.”
They are nothing less than patron saints of the human spirit, those who protect our dreams from the false gods of success. Arundhati Roy is one such modern patron saint, and she takes up the complicated question of success in her exquisite memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me (public library) — what success means and looks like in the deepest sense, how its shallow metrics can turn a person into “a cold silver figurine with a cold silver heart,” why “making friends with defeat” is “the very opposite of accepting it” and so-called failure might actually be worth striving for. Along the way, and inevitably — because “success” is simply what we call the airbrushing of our yearning for self-actualization, for happiness, for living into and up to our gifts — she explores the interlaced complexities of family, culture, creativity, love, and forgiveness.
ALPHABET IN MOTION
It is astonishing enough that we invented language, this vessel of thought that shapes what it contains, that we lifted it to our lips to sip the world and tell each other what we taste, what it is like to be alive in this particular sensorium. But then we passed it from our lips to our hands and gave it form so we can hear it with our eyes and see with our minds, making shapes for sounds and meaning from the shapes.
We take it for granted now, this makeshift miracle permeating every substrate of our lives, and go on tasking these tiny concrete things with conveying our most immense and abstract ideas. We forget how young this technology of thought is, younger than Earth’s largest living organism, and yet it tells a richer story of who we are than any archeological artifact, touches more of what makes us human than the fossil record. Our letters carry the history of our species and of our world, their shapes shaped by a conversation between the creativity of our imagination and the constraints of our creaturely reality, from the rotational geometry of the human wrist to the chemistry of the first paints into which the first brushes were dipped.
Kelli Anderson, maker of material magic, brings that layered history to life in Alphabet in Motion: How Letters Get Their Shape — a large-format two-volume marvel, many years and myriad prototypes in the making, full of paper pulleys and accordion delights that illustrate the biography of each letter.
Through a kaleidoscope of disciplines, from art and design to anthropology and history, Kelli shines a dazzling light on how we went from ink to lead to pixel, drawing on everything from Plato’s Cratylus to an 1882 textbook on the workings of the Jacquard loom to (which sparked the concept of the first computer code in the fertile mind of the the young Ada Lovelace) to the punch card revolution and its hidden history of women working under pseudonyms to conjure up the digital universe.
The best measure of serenity may be our distance from the self — getting far enough to dim the glare of ego and quiet the din of the mind, with all its ruminations and antagonisms, in order to see the world more clearly, in order to hear more clearly our own inner voice, the voice that only ever speak of love.
It is difficult to achieve this in society, where the wanting monster is always roaring and the tyranny of should reigns supreme.
We need silence.
We need solitude.
The great paradox of our time is that the more they seem like a luxury in a world of war and want, the more of a necessity they become to the survival of our souls.
Pico Iyer, that untiring steward of the human soul, liberates the possibility imprisoned in the paradox with his slender and splendid book Aflame: Learning from Silence (public library) — a reckoning with the meaning of life drawn from his time spent in a Benedictine monastery on a journey toward inner stillness and silence, along which his path crosses those of those of fellow travelers in search of unselfing: a 100-year-old Japanese monk and a young Peruvian woman with a love of Wittgenstein (who worked as a gardener in a monastery himself), the Dalai Lama and Leonard Cohen, a middle-aged corporate refugee “red-cheeked and glowing with life” and a white-haired French-Canadian widow with a spirit that “keeps shining, like a candle in the fog.”
He paints the portal through which he enters what is both an enchantment and an annealing of reality:
The road looks milky in the moonlight. The globe feels rounded as I’ve never seen it elsewhere. Stars stream down as if shaken from a tumbler. Somewhere, a dog is barking. Taillights disappear around the turns twelve miles to the south. Strange, how rich it feels to be cleansed of all chatter. That argument I was conducting with myself on the drive up, that deadline next week, the worries about my sweetheart in Japan: gone, all gone. It’s not a feeling but a knowing; in the emptiness I can be filled by everything around me.
To contact that emptiness is to realize that we spend our lives trying to find ourselves, only to discover that the self is precisely what stands between us and being fully alive, what severs our consanguinity with star and stone, with mycelium and mourning dove. This is why an “occasion for unselfing,” in Iris Murdoch’s lovely term, is no small gift — one only ever conferred upon us not by seeking and striving but, in Jeanette Winterson’s lovely term, “active surrender.” We may come to it (in art, in music, in nature), or it may come to us (in cataclysm, in love, in death). Iyer comes to it in the silence of the monastery — which is “not like that of a deep forest or mountaintop” but “active and thrumming, almost palpable” — and it comes to him redoubled:
Why am I exultant to find myself in the silence of this Catholic monastery? Maybe because there’s no “I” to get in the way of the exultancy. Only the brightness of the blue above and below. That red-tailed hawk circling, the bees busy in the lavender. It’s as if a lens cap has come off and once the self is gone, the world can come flooding in, in all its wild immediacy.
[…]
Such a simple revolution: Yesterday I thought myself at the center of the world. Now the world seems to sit at the center of me.
I know of no better medicine for the spirit than a daily creative practice , and I know of no better field guide to embarking on one and sticking with it, no better floatation device for the ocean of self-doubt that regularly engulfs all creative work, than The Book of Alchemy (public library) by Suleika Jaouad, whose very life is a testament to art as the alchemy of suffering into strength, into connection, into meaning.
Pulsating beneath this gentle guided tour of your own creative potential is the assurance that fear is a signpost toward the right direction, consonant with David Bowie’s advice to “go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.” Suleika writes:
Trust and find ways to delight in the mystery of how things unfold, even if it’s not what you had planned, even if it’s far from ideal, and to believe that facing the thing you fear brings you exactly what you need.
At the center of it all is the creative power of keeping a journal, to which some of humanity’s most beloved artists and writers have attested: Virginia Woolf did it “to loosen the ligaments” of her formal writing; Anaïs Nin did it “to capture the living moments”; Thoreau did it to know how “the imaginary hero” of his own life “lived day to day”; Susan Sontag did it as a way of feeling “emotionally and spiritually independent.” Drawing in her own experience of extended illness, on that terrible loneliness of standing perched on the precipice of life while everyone else goes on living, Suleika reflects on how “journaling allows you to alchemize isolation into creative solitude” and writes:
If you’re in conversation with the self, you can be in conversation with the world.
[…]
Journaling as a process is utterly alchemizing, with practical applications in every area of one’s life and work. The journal is like a chrysalis: the container of your goopiest, most unformed self. It’s a rare space, in this age of hypercurated personas, where you can share your most unedited thoughts, where you can sort through the raw material of your life. Day by day, page by page, you uncover the answers that are already inside of you, and you begin to transform. And yet, at the same time that it offers transcendence, there’s nothing more humble than the journal.
In the remainder of The Book of Alchemy, she invites a dazzling spectrum of minds — poets, philosophers, novelists, artists, comedians, entrepreneurs, musicians, and various other revolutionaries of the commonplace — to each share a creative prompt, ranging from a blessing to a letter to George Saunders’s magnificent four-stage action/reaction prompt “designed to disrupt your idea of who you are, and give you, perhaps, a slightly more generous vision of your capabilities.”
