Campus life by Zuni Chopra: A brief realisation

Embrace life as it is, and as it will be – and I promise, the joy of that embrace will carry you through all the miracles and madness yet to come

The other day, I had an epiphany. A simple one; but doesn’t that only make it more powerful? I was watching a lush flock of parrots – parrots, can you believe it – flutter outside my window. They glided eagerly over to my bird feeder, a rather tattered, old thing now – but they don’t seem to mind eating from such a worn plate. Their red beaks and green feathers and soft caws all seemed to meld with the melting orange of the setting sun, and I watched it set, and I watched them eat, and I realised – this is life.

Zuni says that we all put our lives on hold, on pause, on break, and tried to survive during the lockdown.But life doesn’t come with a pause button. Life has continued (Shutterstock)

Don’t misunderstand me here – I didn’t mean this is the life, as dads might say while reclining on the sunlit balcony with an afternoon drink. I meant just life, period. These last 10 months – 10 months, can you believe it – have been no more and no less than that. Life.

So, many of us imagine that the world simply shut down one fateful day in March – that it just spluttered to a stop, paralyzed by a virus it could not learn to fight quicker than the virus learnt to destroy. So we all put our lives on hold, on pause, on break, and we tried to survive.

But here’s the thing – life doesn’t come with a pause button. If time waits for no man, it sure as hell isn’t waiting for a virus. Life has continued, time oblivious to the change in our relationship with it. And so we learnt how to live in a time where life no longer matched our definition of the word; we discovered things like baking and reusable masks, and Zoom. But for myself, I’ve always thought of this as a surreal period away from life – a time which, despite all my self-improvement and university courses and online internships, I thought of as a ‘break’. When things go back to normal, I would think. When I can go back to university. When I can do the things I was planning. When my life starts again.

But what if it never stopped?

What if this – this strange, demented, virtual, isolated wonderland – this is life?

Would it change the way you live it?

For me, no. It wouldn’t.

A blessing.

I realised, in the same breath, that all my efforts had come to something – I had no regrets. I had lived my life to the full limits of its compromised nature, I had spent the 19th year of my life in a way I would always remember fondly, and like a sprout shadowed by a gloomy cloud, I had never stopped reaching for the stars.

So this realisation did not change the way I lived my life. But it changed something else.

How I viewed it.

This here, this thing that I have, that I’m still learning to understand, that I’m still learning to love unconditionally, this is life. Perhaps it didn’t come in quite the shape I expected. But it’s here. And it’s mine. And I’m living it.

Suddenly, when you let go of the idea that what you have is not right, is not full, is not enough, it becomes fuller than ever. More joyous than ever. More peaceful than ever. The fear and sorrow still raise their heads – to remind you of what it was. But they cannot change what it is. And they certainly cannot change what it will be.

So embrace it. Embrace life as it is, and as it will be – and I promise, the joy of that embrace will carry you through all the miracles and madness yet to come.

Zuni Chopra is currently a freshman at Stanford university where she’s studying the creative arts. She has authored three books of poetry and one novel. Through this column, she chronicles her journey as an international student leaving home for the first time to study abroad.

From HT Brunch, February 14, 2021

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