On a Roll
Kunal Mehra
August 2020
It’s a beautiful August morning. The sky is clear blue and the Steller’s jays are picking at the acorns, taking in the warmth of the summer sun. I work from home these days and I’m on a pre-work morning walk in my neighborhood.
A man is walking towards me. He’s about half a block away, has two unleashed dogs – a golden retriever and a black Labrador – and isn’t wearing a mask, neither of which I’m happy about. I consider crossing the road and moving to the other side, or maybe just walking in the middle of the road. As I look back and check the road, a couple of cyclists are coming towards me. Only one of them is masked. I wonder if I should get in the road and risk being close to the cyclists. Maybe I should hurry up and cross over to the other side? But I can’t run fast as my right knee doesn’t like it.
Three months ago, I hurt my right knee, bumping into a rod in the garage. I thought it’d heal in a few days at most. Fast-forward to now and I’m still grappling with almost-daily achiness.
I freeze on the sidewalk, unable to decide. The guy’s getting closer to me – as if it’s August 2019 – and then suddenly, one of his dogs lunges at me. I shout that I don’t like dogs jumping on me. “Sorry…they’re really friendly,” he says as he tries to rein him in. While I’m trying to cover my knee, the second dog also decides to join in the fun and pulls the mask off my face. I’m not sure what planet I’m on. The guy apologizes and walks away, the other dog still chewing on my mask.
Besides worrying about the knee being hurt, I wonder if I’m overreacting when it comes to taking coronavirus precautions. I remember the now-famous story of a fifteen-year-old girl in India who biked fourteen-hundred miles, during the pandemic, to bring her sick dad home from another village. Millions of people around the world are still working – they often don’t have a choice – and are likely doing ok, so who am I to panic about coming within six feet of an unmasked irresponsible dog owner (especially outdoors)?
But it’s all a roll of the dice – you just need the wrong sequence of events at the wrong time. I think we’re all wiggling around on a spectrum of coronavirus anxiety: there are those who don’t leave home for months and there are those who go bar-hopping every weekend.
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Growing up, I was the easygoing, whatever-will-happen-will-happen kinda guy. I found it hard to empathize with anxious people. So, I guess karma had to come back to me – at-least for a while – and rained a few anxious drops on my parade.
It started in September 2016, two months before the election. My wife and I were on a road-trip through the southwest when we encountered multiple instances of people reminding my brown self that I didn’t belong in their country – a guy yelling at me in a Safeway parking lot in Colorado: ‘it’s because of people like you that our country is getting trashed!’ and then tailgating us for a while; a bunch of white teenagers in Arizona, shouting ‘fuck you’ at me, as they roared by in a pickup truck while we were in the middle of a crosswalk; a guy shouting ‘fuck off’ at me, out of the blue, while I was on a walk in my Portland, Oregon neighborhood.
Relatively speaking, these were minor racist incidents, but that was the beginning of my date with anxiety. I’m sensitive to verbal aggression and if I don’t immediately process trauma, it builds up and gets stuck in various parts of my body.
Over the course of the past four years (and especially this year), my subconscious mind, building upon the memory of those incidents from the trip, started misinterpreting even the mildest of triggers as dangerous and my body manifested those danger signals as pain: my left knee would hurt if someone screamed at me; my neck would get sore if I thought about an upcoming potentially-challenging argument with an acquaintance; sometimes, just the sight of a pickup truck made me anxious, likely because of what happened in Arizona.
I want to believe that not every person who likes the president (I don’t like to use his name, so I refer to him as the PUN: Psychopathic Unstable Nincompoop; no PUN was intended to be born) is dangerous or racist. But anxiety doesn’t work rationally. It’s all about worrying about the future, while you’re in the present, based on what happened in the past.
So, here I am, in August 2020, worrying about catching coronavirus from an unmasked person on the sidewalk, or the anxiety-inducing MAGA virus from the PUN’s supporters. My right knee hurts from bumping into the rod and the anxiety around that keeps sustaining the pain (constantly being in a when-will-this-get-better mode is not good for overall well-being: it lowers the body’s ability to heal and prolongs the pain, keeping the cycle going); my left knee hurts from racism-induced anxiety every time I see a truck with a MAGA sign or when someone raises their voice by half a decibel (even if it’s on a zoom call with a meditation teacher). Fun times.
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I recently read an article about meditation where the teacher talked about how we should think of time in terms of distinct units, with each unit corresponding to a breath taken in and a breath let out. Instead of thinking of our lives as moving through time, imagine time moving through us, breath by breath.
I pictured my existence as a roll of film, with each inhale imprinting upon each frame the thoughts and state of my mind at that moment. Anxiety, joy, fear, disgust, loathing, indifference, empathy, boredom – whatever was coursing through my mind at that moment got a chance to make an imprint before the exhale came out, moving the roll ahead by one frame, readying it for the next inhale.
And thus it moved, breath after breath, decade after decade, the roll of film moving forward, making itself available to whatever I wanted to imprint upon its being.
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September
The maple leaves are blushing, turning pink and red from the top down. Joggers are wearing sweatshirts. A couple of weeks ago, the leaves were green, and the joggers were shirtless. Autumn’s around the corner.
I look up at the blue skies and the cedar trees basking in the sunshine. I realize how much I miss going for hikes. Prior to the pandemic, I used to go on almost-daily post-work weekday hikes in an urban forest on the way home from work and weekend hikes in the wilderness. Now, I’ve probably been on four hikes in the past five months. Instead, I mostly walk around the neighborhood.
For lunchtime walks in the city park near my home, I usually do five rounds around the park’s perimeter. Yesterday, I saw a guy sleeping under a tree with a blanket draped over him and a bunch of empty soda bottles near him. The park is next to a busy street but he seemed unfazed by the noise. On my second round, he had turned and was now sleeping sideways. I checked my wallet for cash: I had three dollars. I considered calling out to him but wasn’t sure if it was worth waking him up for just three bucks. Plus, I didn’t want to get close to him. I wished there was a way to maybe PayPal it to him. I was delusional. On my roll, guilt, empathy and sadness overwrote anxiety on the third circle around the park.
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Tuesdays are especially busy. My wife goes to the local farm share in the evening to pick up our weekly allotment of fresh veggies, followed by a pickup at the grocery store. Once home, everything has to follow the protocol: at-least twenty-four hours of sitting in the garage. All perishables go through the two-level process: sanitizing with a disinfectant wipe, followed by a generous rinse in the kitchen sink. Sometimes, I screw up and place the yogurt in the fridge without disinfecting it. I then remove every item that it touched and sanitize them all, one by one. Our fridge is relatively small and it’s already crammed with last week’s stuff. I swear as I try to make room for the new items.
Yes, I know: I buy groceries from local co-ops, I grumble about how full our fridge is, I work from home with flexible hours, I have Amazon Prime, I fret about how I’ll use my remaining vacation days, I spend hours making pear leather from the pears in our backyard while a Hispanic woman and her ten-year-old daughter drive by every home in our neighborhood on recycling-pickup days, picking out glass and aluminum cans that she’ll then redeem for a dime apiece. Guilt and sadness are taking up a lot of frames on the roll.
On a recent walk, I came across a friend and her husband. We chatted about the usual stuff: How’re you coping these days? How’s family? She asked about my work and I mentioned how my team (I work as a computer engineer) has been allowed to work from home for the rest of the year. She stopped walking and looked at me with wide-open eyes: Really? Turns out that because she’s a massage therapist, she had to close her business for the past couple of months and, once authorized by the state to reopen, was trying to figure out how to do that without risking getting sued by clients who might catch an infection in her office. I immediately regretted mentioning my flexible work-from-home policy and diverted the conversation to the weather.
Privilege often likes to go on solo road trips. Sometimes it travels in fancy Porsches and other times it’s behind a tired worn-out shopping cart filled with recyclable soda cans being pushed around by a homeless person. I’m not saying that it shouldn’t enjoy those trips. I just think that it should have some company; there should be a HEAP: Humility, Empathy, Action (to address disparities) and Privilege. All four should get a chance to be in the driver’s seat and make decisions. I’m embarrassed to say that for me, sometimes, action just sits there quietly, without raising its voice.
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My parents live in a busy neighborhood in a relatively small town in India. My dad, who has Alzheimer’s, has been going on daily evening walks around their home for decades, something that has nourished him mentally and physically. Now, with coronavirus, it’s been over six months since my parents have stepped out of their home. My dad paces around in the living room, but he misses his familiar evening routine. Sometimes, when I talk to him, he still thinks he’s going out on his evening walks.
When I think of my mom taking care of my dad, I wish I had just a tiny fraction of the patience that she has. Every time groceries get delivered to their home, she places it in a quarantined room and every time, my dad goes in there and starts to bring it into the kitchen to sort it. She reminds him to not touch it, takes him into the bathroom, makes him sanitize his hands and then tries to distract him with other tasks. It sticks for about twenty seconds before he’s back again in the kitchen with the groceries. I don’t know how long this goes on, but just thinking about her taking care of his physical and mental wellbeing and doing her household chores (which include handwashing clothes, cooking three meals a day, mopping the floor, dealing with refrigerators that stop working, water pipes that start leaking, toilets that stop flushing and feral cats that break through windows in the middle of the night and enter their home), worries me.
Pre-Covid, things were different. They had a maid come every day to help with basic home cleaning and cooking. They tutored neighborhood kids six days a week (something that kept my dad mentally busy and happy) and went for daily evening walks. Mom still helped dad with his Alzheimer’s, but she wasn’t exhausted by the laborious household tasks.
She recently sent me a message – at 3am her time – that she was feeling sad and drained. ‘I just want to be with myself’, she said. I replied saying it was normal to feel tired: ‘you’re doing so much mom; anyone would feel the way you do’. I didn’t get a reply. I hoped it was because she went back to sleep.
Later next day, she cried while on the phone. She said she had been shouting at my dad since the past few weeks (she seldom does that, but these days, I can imagine what might be pushing her) and that he just stands there quietly, not sure what’s going on or what to do. Of course, she feels guilty and sad about it later, worrying that she’s hurting him and he’s just not able to express what he’s feeling: sadness that he can’t help her in ways that he used to, and embarrassment at his ‘memory problem’ (as he calls it). I reminded her that Alzheimer’s + coronavirus anxiety + social isolation for six months is unchartered territory and that she was doing an amazing job at it all.
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I’m forty-five minutes into in a phone meeting at work. I’m standing at the computer desk, my right knee pleading for the meeting to finish so I can lie down. I make a suggestion about changing a process that hasn’t been working well. I’ve barely finished speaking and my left knee starts hurting as I wonder if someone might have an objection to my suggestion.
The meeting ends and I go straight to the yoga mat. I close my eyes and place my hands over my knees. The pain in the left knee is getting to a point where I’m not sure what ‘normal’ is anymore. Do I need to get used to having it hurt every time I think of saying something that has a 0.005% chance of annoying someone? Four years, six therapists, three medications, three meditation apps, two online courses about coping with anxiety, four Facebook groups that focus on the mind-body connection and an embarrassing amount of time spent consulting Dr. Google. What else should I be doing?
For the right knee, I’ve had physical therapy sessions and seen an orthopedic doctor, whose callous diagnosis of “oh, it’s nerve pain…you know how that is…it can take forever…” didn’t help much.
My knees and my mind ask how long this will go on and what will fix it. ‘I don’t know, my dears,’ I say silently. ‘I wish it was like tracking a package: you’d know exactly when and how relief will be delivered.’
It’s past five pm now. I’m physically and mentally exhausted, so I decide to do something simple and vital: have a beer in the backyard.
It’s warm outside. The lilac leaves sway in the evening breeze. I put Pink Floyd on Pandora and sing out loud: ‘Breathe, breathe in the air, don’t be afraid to care’. Oh no, I’m not afraid to care. Soon, I’m comfortably numb and lose track of time.
Maybe it’s the beer, but I realize that obsessing about the pain is only making things worse. My refusal to accept change – from my knees being great to being hurt – and blaming myself for being clumsy, isn’t helping either. What’s probably best for the right knee is to get out there and do some safe hiking. Demonstrating to myself that the knee is strong would contribute towards its healing. So, I thought, why not go out into the forest?
And then I remembered that pandemic thing. How would I do that on narrow trails with not much room left to move aside for non-maskers? Since I was coming up with crazy ideas, why not go on a road trip to Utah (a place whose wilderness I love and whose open spaces provide lots of room for socially-distanced hikes)? ‘Hold on though’, the left knee said. ‘Isn’t that MAGA-land? What makes you think I’ll be safe there?’ Well, damn.
I make a post in a Facebook hiking group: “Is it safe for a person of color to go hiking in Utah these days?” I get mostly helpful replies affirming that it is safe, but one person posts: “I don’t understand what kind of barriers you ‘people of color’ face in the outdoors...I’ve never seen anyone being harassed over their ethnicity...fricking get over it!”.
I put my phone away and have another sip of the beer. Later that night, I dream that I’m backpacking in the slot canyons of Utah and sleeping under the stars, listening to the coyotes howling. The next morning, I know that we need to go to Utah.
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Nightmares during these times involve me standing in a long line inside a crowded theater waiting to talk to the ticket guy, asking if they would reinstate an expired twenty-five-dollar gift card that I had forgotten to use. The line is so long that people ahead of me are sitting on the floor, checking their phones and eating popcorn. Of course, no one’s wearing masks.
Happy dreams are about things that were, in pre-pandemic days, seemingly mundane: Making an impromptu visit to the hardware store to buy a sprinkler. Marveling at the minimalist simplicity of the two white lines that demarcate a parking space in the parking lot of the grocery store to which I haven’t been in six months. Waiting in a conference room for a colleague to join a meeting.
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The air outside has an eerie yellowish tinge to it. The visibility is less than fifty feet. I briefly open a window before shutting it: it’s too smoky. For a moment I think it’s November 4th: The PUN has won and it’s the apocalypse. But no, it’s the wildfires. Oregon has been hit hard with unprecedented fires that have burned over a million acres across the state. Gut-wrenching photos of homes being burnt down and people scrambling to evacuate, picking up whatever’s precious to them – from cats to passports to wedding photos – abound the internet. A thirteen-year-old boy was found in his dad’s car, his dog draped over him and his grandmother next to him in the passenger’s seat – all dead.
I think of people sprawled out in makeshift evacuation shelters in parking lots of churches, hanging on to whatever precious threads of life they managed to bring with them – how do you decide, in a few minutes, what’s more precious: your mother who’s hobbling because of her recent leg surgery and can’t walk fast enough, or your teenage son? – all huddled together in what might be a coronavirus-overloaded zone.
We are lucky (so far) that our town hasn’t been given evacuation orders. We are lucky that we have the option to stay indoors in a safe home in a safe neighborhood. I haven’t stepped out of my home for the past nine days and I’m on the edge. All I want is to go outside and relax in the backyard without having to worry about red eyes and sore throats. A sliver of blue sky would be akin to winning the lottery.
Prior to the wildfires, standing in line at the grocery store, complaining silently about how much unnecessary crap the person ahead of me was buying, seemed like a heavenly gift. Prior to the pandemic, making films and backpacking in Utah were my dreams. If I ever get to be, say, ninety, all I might want is to watch Ozu’s Tokyo Story (for perhaps the ninetieth time), without having to shit in my pants three times.
Talking to friends, they seem frustrated, anxious and about to tip over because of having to stay indoors during this ‘real’ quarantine. We’re aching to get outside, while people living in tents in parking lots after having to evacuate their burning homes, are aching to get inside.
We all have our pains and they aren’t invalidated when we encounter someone suffering more than us, but I hope that situations like these make us think and act from a more grounded perspective.
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It’s my neighbor’s birthday. I buy him a six-pack of IPA, sanitize it and place it on the fence. We talk about how the crickets are mating like crazy in these late-summer days. Speaking of crazy, we inevitably talk about the election. I worry about November 3rd: couldn’t it hurry up and just be done with, either way? My gut feeling is that the PUN will win. Or at-least, he’ll continue to occupy the white house, regardless of the election’s outcome. Orange (haired PUN) might be the new normal.
Maybe the election results would be like the virus: for up to two weeks after the election, you wouldn’t know if the PUN virus will continue to infect the country for the next four years. Mail-in ballot fraud? Yes. Tweets asserting he’s still the president? Of course.
I miss Obama. Heck, I miss George ‘nucular’ Bush.
My mind reverts to all the terrible things he’ll do once he’s reelected. And then I pause: ‘ground yourself’, I say silently. ‘Things have been worse before. Look at the big picture. Remember what Carl Sagan said about looking at that pale blue dot? Think of the immensity of the universe and the relative scale of what’s happening right now.’ But for some reason, all I could think of was PUN golfing and tweeting on that pale blue dot, fucking up everything on this planet that he could get his PUNy sleazy hands on.
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October
We’ve rented a Dodge Durango that’s loaded with nine days’ worth of food and camping gear. We’re on our way to Utah. I’m anxious about having to drive through and spend time in two red states, three weeks before the election. Buckle up, anxious mind; this too shall pass.
After twelve hours of driving, we reached our first campground near St. George. It was around seven pm. The campsite was about a quarter mile in. It was dark and we were tired and since there was no one else parked at the trailhead, we decided to sleep on the trail, next to the parking lot.
We were woken up next morning at around seven. “Morning. Your sheriff here. We need to talk.”
Shit. Red state. White Cop. Brown male in tent (thankfully, with white wife). My wife said hello and apologized. He asked if we had a permit to camp (we did). He took our drivers licenses, was gone for a few minutes before coming back and reminding us not to sleep on the trail again. Point taken, profuse apologies made and tent moved to the campsite. He didn’t have a mask on. That was our first night in Utah.
The rest of the days felt like I had just put down an eighty-pound bag of stones that I had been carrying with me these past months. Never underestimate the healing power of sleeping under starry skies, besides canyon walls that are two-hundred feet tall and silence that hangs over you like the clouds of the pacific northwest in winter.
We hiked each of those six days, with the longest day being twelve miles. I loved wandering amongst the slot canyons and watching clouds drifting through the arches. By the fifth night, a warm bed, restrooms, showers, computers, elections, viruses, politics, pain and anxiety all seemed foreign and new. I lost track of how often my knees and my mind thanked me for doing this. Yes, they did hurt some days, but beauty, solitude and wonder were taking up so much space on the roll that there wasn’t enough room to worry about other things. Instead, they created room on the roll for me to start learning to accept things – knee pain and anxiety included – as they are, instead of fighting them. Acceptance didn’t mean inaction; it just meant coming to peace with what was going on, prior to taking action (as opposed to resisting and fighting what was coming up, before reacting). As Rumi said, “welcome and entertain all visitors…because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.” It’s not easy, but it’s vital.
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It’s drizzling on a cold windy day and I’m on a lunchtime walk around the hood. I have a meeting later in the day where our company executives will share info and have a Q&A session regarding upcoming changes to retirement plans. I’m thinking about what questions I should ask, when I see a guy wearing a yellow poncho riding a bike that’s loaded with bags full of glass and aluminum cans. His face is wet and his eyebrows grimaced as he bikes into the headwind. When I reach home, I have a strong urge to skip the meeting. I donate money (which, gratefully, is matched by my company) to an organization that supports people experiencing homelessness. I allow guilt, sadness, empathy to take as much space as they need on the roll, before dialing into the meeting.
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Of late, my dad has been experiencing trembling in his hands. My neurologist cousin asked mom to send him a video of dad’s hands so he could check for Parkinson’s. She forwarded me a video of dad pouring water from one glass into another, his left arm trembling so much he could barely hold the glass. Because of his Alzheimer’s, he doesn’t remember why he’s doing this; he just quietly does what mom asks him to. Once he’s finished pouring the water, he looks blankly at the screen, confused and unsure what to do next.
Sadness and nostalgia filled up multiple frames after I watched that video. Those were the same arms, that, forty years ago, held me tight and close to his heart, when he stood in front of a table as we all celebrated my second birthday, surrounded by my uncles, aunts and grandparents, with cake frosting smeared over my face.
I wondered about the millions of frames that have floated past since then. Where did those decades go? When I was with my family, why did I not realize that this is it? This is now and this is forever. Moments as simple as our family sitting down for dinner – each person in their designated chair, dad passing the food around the table, fingers noisily slurping food into our mouths – haunt me now, solely because they were so ordinary and yet so irreplaceable.
Memories like these, coupled with zoom calls replacing in-person visits, make me regret that I took family time for granted. Prior to the pandemic, I used to call my parents about once a week, being caught up in the regular day-to-day business of living, thinking that I’d call them over the weekend for sure, but often didn’t. Now, we talk thrice a week. Why did I get so caught up in life that I forgot what life was about?
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I’m watching a video of a sixty-five-year-old woman in an ICU in Arizona. She was a teacher and moved there from Mexico over three decades ago. They said that she took all the precautions, but still got the coronavirus. She’s intubated and has been bedridden for several days. Everyone – the nurses, doctors, her family – knows it’s time for her to go. She’s sedated, her eyes closed, her mouth wide open. Her family calls her on zoom. Her son cries: ‘thank you mama, for dedicating your whole life to us’. I don’t know if she heard him. A nurse unplugs the ventilator while holding her hand. Her chest freezes. It’s her last breath. On the zoom call, her son grieves: ‘Rest in peace. Te Amo, mama.’
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New York Times’ website has a coronavirus chart that displays numbers and graphs: states where cases are highest per-capita and the fourteen-day percentage change in new cases and new deaths. It sounds eerily like tracking the Dow-Jones industrial averages: it’s all about cold numbers. Hidden underneath the numbers though, is the reality of a story, a life, a web of other intertwined lives connected to this one, a person who was clinging to their life down to their last failing breath. What sort of statistics capture the trauma of not being able to hold the hands of a loved one, to not cry beside them and instead have to bid them farewell via a computer screen?
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Yesterday evening, there was a power outage due to gusty winds. My wife was camping at the coast, so I was home alone. I warmed up carrot soup, chicken and rice on a camping stove in the dark garage, ate dinner in silence and then sat down on the couch, facing the living room picture window. And I stared at the yellowish maple leaves swaying in the dusky autumn evening. Except for the howling wind, it was quiet.
I placed my hand over my heart, felt it circulating blood throughout my body, felt the sanctity and the vitality of my beloved lungs, felt the beauty and uncertainty of our lives.
I don’t think it’s solely the fear of dying that’s causing coronavirus-related anxiety amongst so many of us. Perhaps, it’s a resuscitation of the love of living, paired with the realization that life is fragile and beautiful, like the wings of a blue clipper butterfly; that it is complicated and messy, like tangled up earbuds.
Every time we see the effects of coronavirus (like boarded-up restaurants that went out of business, people saying their final goodbyes to their families over video calls, images of people being intubated, cases of depression going up due to social isolation), we realize that the things we had taken for granted, what we assumed was ‘normal’ or ‘expected’ – being able to breathe with ease, physically interacting with family and friends, having a meal in a restaurant, hugging a loved one, buying groceries without going through a pre- and post- precautionary checklist – are now challenging and staring blankly at us: did you really think you could take us for granted? Did you mistakenly assume that a privilege was a right?
For me, one of the hardest things to understand and accept about the knee pain was the fact that knees could hurt so much. I had always assumed they’d just work without problems. Two years ago, I fractured my toe when I bumped into the edge of a futon frame. It took two months to heal, but I never thought that a hurt toe would make it so hard to walk.
Apparently, I didn’t learn my lesson then. Now it makes me wonder what else I’m taking for granted, what else I’m thinking is a right, when it really is a privilege that I should be grateful for.
Do I start with the hair on my arms, my eyelashes, kidneys, fingernails, knuckles, skin, lips, esophageal tract, ankles, elbows, blood…where do I stop? Or do I start more top-down, with the quintessential things like a job, a home, food in the fridge, healthcare, family, love? Or maybe I begin with the hummingbirds that nourish my soul on a summer afternoon as they hover over a water sprinkler or the timeless and towering slot canyons of Utah or the towering majesty of the over-thousand-year-old Redwoods or the simple act of ocean waves rolling towards and away from the shore, just like the ups and downs in our lives?
It's raining crazy on my film roll: exhaustion, confusion, relief, peace, worry, joy.
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Going through the photos on my phone, I come across one of my grandparents. It’s from about fifteen years ago and they’re sitting in the living room, staring at something in front of them. I don’t know what they’re looking at, but it brings tears to my eyes. I miss my grandmother. In my wallet, I carry a photo of her hugging my eight-year-old self. Her arms are clutching me tightly, refusing to let me go, as we’re laughing out loud.
And here I am today, thirty-four years later, writing about her on a computer. I turn around, expecting her to still be beside me, like she was in the photo; but she’s gone: the chair that she was sitting on is empty. When did that happen? I last saw her in 2003. Since then, instead of visiting her in India, I chose to spend my vacations traveling to Europe and taking road trips to New Mexico. ‘There would always be next year’, I told myself. I finally booked a trip to India for a November 2009 visit. A month prior to my arrival, mom called and said grandma had died, followed shortly by grandpa.
We get the dying virus the moment we come into the world. We know about it all our lives, but we just hope it stays dormant for as long as it possibly can, while we go about our lives trying to vaccinate ourselves with deadlines and deliverables and all the other stuff we call ‘living’ and mostly forgetting about its presence, ignoring the preciousness, fragility, uncertainty and potential of what we’re gifted. We’re here for a limited time with no warranty, but often live our lives as if we can claim a refund any time.
Like the coronavirus that’s asymptomatic for up to two weeks, perhaps our existence might also be asymptomatic – the chair might suddenly become empty one day, without any notice, bringing our dreams, our potentials, our true purposes to an abrupt halt.
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On today’s walk around the park, I see a pigeon lying dead on the ground. It’s upside down, looking up at the sky with its vacant eyes, as if it was just lost in a daydream and would leap up and start flying any second. I don’t know if it was poisoned or taken down by a dog or was just done with its time on earth. Its wings still looked fresh. Perhaps, a few breaths ago, it was sailing carelessly along with the afternoon breeze, unaware of what lay ahead. I wonder what went through its mind as it reached its last frame, as its tiny heart took one last gorgeous breath before pausing. Did it plead for more time on trees, safer nests, more food, or did it whisper ‘thank you’ (in pigeon-speak, of course) and stop, or did it just drop down onto the earth with nary a feeling? I have no idea. What I do know is that I cried on the way home.
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November
The clouds clear for a couple of minutes and sunshine streams down onto the park and all its beings, as if someone opened the floodgates of a dam. I stop walking, close my eyes and look up at the sky. The sunshine – the same one I was swearing at in August for being so hot – is now a healing balm, reminding me of our time in Utah, which, even though it was a couple of weeks ago, might as well have been from October 1920.
I squat down and have a sip of water. My feet and knees feel achy and squatting usually helps. I’m atop a field of damp grass. The worry cycle starts: I’m exhausted. What do I need to try next to heal? Why am I so clumsy that I had to bump into that rod in the garage? How much longer will this go on? The charade continues until I happen to look down closer and see an earthworm doing slow twists and turns around a blade of grass. I know not what it’s doing or why, but I ask: do you ever worry about being stomped on? Would you live your life differently if you had the ability to worry? Or are you just living your life right here, right now, curled next to your green lover?
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I’m hiking through a wetland preserve and come across an empty nest tucked into the corner of a viewing shelter overlooking the wetlands. Each twig of the nest is curled perfectly to mesh with the one next to it, forming a safe crib for the little baby bird. I think of the steadfast devotion with which the parent built the nest. Maybe it knew that the nest could be taken down by a storm or a hawk or a strong gust of wind; maybe it didn’t. Either way, it did what it needed to do and moved on.
So much of our lives are manipulated by the ropes of uncertainty – when will the coronavirus vaccine be available? Will it be safe? How long do we need to do this quarantining thing? How long do I need to keep dealing with my knee pain and anxiety? Would Biden win? When will the smoke from the wildfires clear up? – that we forget that sometimes the act of doing something (and doing it because it’s holy and vital) is separate from and more important than holding on to our expectations of how and when we’d like things to turn out.
Maybe, when uncertainty knocks on our door, instead of slamming the door shut and running away, we need to invite her into the backyard for a beer. She’ll remind us that she’s been with us almost our entire lives. Maybe we need to accept what we can control, let go of that which we can’t, do our job and then move on, just like the parent bird did: mask up, wash your hands, stay six feet apart. Do your part to strengthen and soothe your mind and body and let them do their job at healing you, on their own schedule, sans Dr. Google and sans expectations. Get people registered to vote. Donate to your favorite environmental non-profits (while recognizing what a privilege it is to be ‘stuck’ indoors during the wildfires).
And if you see two unmasked teenagers park their bikes next to you (on a trail that prohibits bikes) and start taking selfies, run like you’ve never before. With your mask on, of course.
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November 3rd, 5pm PST
I’m on an evening walk, obsessively checking my phone. Florida seems to be leaning towards the PUN, as does Georgia. Things don’t look good for Biden. I didn’t sleep well that night.
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November 4th 7.30am PST
I check the vote count and it still doesn’t look good. I ask my manager if we can cancel our weekly Wednesday meeting. I’m too anxious to be coherent. He kindly obliges and also reminds me that my company gives free access to the Headspace app, something I might find useful during these times.
The next three days are mostly a wave of emotional ups and downs. I’m roasting squash and beets in the oven and have both the upper and lower ovens turned on. The stovetop displays the temperature for each of them. The lower one says 150. The upper one says 170. As the ovens are warming, the numbers keep rising. In my dazed state of mind, I think that’s the electoral count being reported, with Biden being the one on the top. I feel a huge sense of relief. A 20-vote lead is great; Biden could win. I’m crazy.
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November 7th, 11am PST
The AP has called the election for Biden. I feel the same sort of relief as when we started hiking in Utah: that bag of stones was finally put down. My knees say a silent ‘thank you’.
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In March, I walked under canopies of trees overflowing with a commotion of pink cherry blossoms. Now, the sidewalks under those same trees are dotted with squashed purple plums. So much has transpired since those flowers ripened into fruit.
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On summer evenings, I’d often check the weather forecast and if there was sunshine predicted for the next several days, I’d skip the backyard sun-soaking session and, sitting on the couch, scroll through Facebook instead. Now, in the middle of cold autumn, I regret my choice. ‘It’ll be sunny tomorrow’, I used to tell myself in summer. But when did summer transition to autumn? Sure, there’s the autumn equinox, but when exactly (if at all) did I notice that the days were getting shorter? Like seasons, we also have our own versions of equinoxes and solstices – birthdays, first jobs, first homes, anniversaries – but the bulk of our lives are lived outside of those events. And, like seasons, we seldom notice that our lives are getting shorter too, day by day, year by year, decade by decade.
What would I do differently if I paid closer attention to that hourglass of my life and realized how much of my sand is already below me and that I have no idea how much is remaining up there? Caught in the business of ‘living’, am I trying to shove away the fact that there will come a time when our lives will return back to the earth, our blood – which travels twelve thousand miles each day – will stop flowing, our diaphragms will never contract and our lungs will never expand again, our inhales and our exhales, like lovers passing the baton of life back and forth across the windpipe, will finally drop that baton one moment?
And, with that hourglass being drained on every breath, how am I living my life today? Do I have an honest and radiant answer to Mary Oliver’s “tell me what it is you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” question, or am I just bumbling through life, hoping there will always be more frames on the roll to figure things out, more sunny days to sit in the backyard, more years to postpone a visit to grandma? This moment – with its knee pain, fear of coronavirus, anxiety, quarantine challenges, racism – is it. And it’s up to me to decide if I want to live my life with this moment – not despite it, but with it – and do the things that need to be done, instead of postponing it, when ‘everything will be fine’.
Why does it take over a million people dying unexpectedly from the coronavirus for me to realize this?
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Warm sunny days are an oddity in November, but today is one of them. I bring the recliner into the backyard and cover myself with a wool blanket. The blueberry bushes have a few reddish leaves hanging off them; the pear tree is forlorn and solemn, silently bearing witness to November.
A pickup truck roars by in the neighborhood and my left leg hurts for a few seconds.
A light breeze swirls the few remaining lilac leaves as they cling to their branches. The leaves nod as if answering a question asked by the wind, in a language that was deliberately kept secret from me.
I feel left out and envious: why couldn’t the wind include me in that conversation? Then I remember that the air was doing a bit of favor to me all these years: I’ve had free lifetime membership to the Air Club for the past forty-two years, nine months and counting. Point taken, air.
A goldfinch rushes towards my neighbor’s bird feeder and starts pecking at the sunflower seeds. I feel a little less anxious. The anxiety might probably return, but in this moment, I’m content.
I shake my legs. My right knee feels a little achy. I wander into familiar frustration-land before stopping myself.
I remember that there’s a silent river that flows through us, all our lives, regardless of whether we notice it or not. It’s called Are-you-grateful-for-all-that-you-have? It’s a river that we seldom dip our toes in, let alone swim in.
There’s work to be done on many levels, but right now, it’s time for me to step into that river and walk in, at-least knee-deep. As a bonus, downstream along the river, a boat called resilience is anchored. And intuitively, I know that once I’m sailing along the river in that boat, it will hold me through my ups and downs. The longer I’m in the river, the stronger I will get.
I linger in the river, the water rushing past and through my body, greeting my soul. I remind myself that the rewind and forward buttons are just for display; I’m not supposed to use them, tempting as it sounds. Inhale, imprint, exhale, imprint, move on. By the time I’ve started thinking about what just got imprinted or fantasizing or worrying about what will get imprinted later, the roll’s already moved on to the next frame. And sans the rewind and forward buttons, this precious inhale, immersed in this graceful river is all I’ve got right now. This precious exhale, immersed in this graceful river is all I’ve got right now.
Kunal Mehra
Kunal Mehra is an engineer and a multimedia artist whose photography and writing has been published by The Sun Magazine, Portland Japanese Garden and Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon. He grew up in India and has been living in Portland, Oregon since 2002. He likes hiking, filmmaking and spending time in deserts. He’s pictured here with his grandmother, circa 1986. @KunalMehraPhoto