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Campus life by Zuni Chopra: The evasion of emptiness
With the ongoing pandemic and series of lockdowns and waves, there’s an emptiness you may feel. Is being self-aware key to getting out of your funk?
When I was younger, I would measure the worth of days by how much they contained, as if they were bags of chips I took to the movies. How much did I get done that day? That was the central marker of whether I could say the day was good or bad or empty. This emptiness would bother me more than work done badly; the emptiness of procrastination by a unique kind of paralysis, a feeling of being trapped in the moment like the drop of water from a dripping sink.
It seems that, with a worldwide pandemic, this emptiness has spread like noxious fog over the city, over the world. The unbroken blanket of grey clouds envelops us all in an odd chill, and we spend the days staring at little people in little boxes on little screens. I wish I could say that after a year, the new normal has set in comfortably. But it has set in like a rotting cavity, and the walls breathe with a confined contentment that we cannot give up.
I used to rage over my laziness. Over my unproductivity. I considered the emptiness self-induced, a product of a flaw that had to be plucked out like a splinter. The pandemic, however, has forced me to examine this emptiness closely, for there is no blustering noise of life to take away from its presence. And I have decided, after several careful steps of evaluation, that it is not laziness at all, because it carries something that laziness never could. Laziness is not self-aware. It stretches out sanguinely as a sea lion in the sun of its unproductivity. The emptiness, however, hurts fundamentally because it languishes and laments in the suffocation of its own making. It knows what it is, and it renders us powerless to escape from it.
This distinguishing rigidity, its unbroken state, is what, ironically, led me away from it. There is a difference, I have now been taught, between doing and being. But the difference in their nature does not correlate to a difference in their worth. There is a difference, too, between emptiness and being, between quiet misery and comfort in quiet. A day filled with being is a valuable thing, rare and fragile, gentle in its warmth. A day filled with emptiness is a day that is cemented by this emptiness, that is committed to the failure of commitment, that smarts with every tick of the second hand on the clock. So here, then, are a few tricks I have learned to slip out of emptiness in days of doing and to find days of being that the emptiness may otherwise infect:
1.Float, do not run. Move with a surety and grace from one state to another, and move with the speed that befits the urgency of your destination – not with the same urgency no matter what.
2.Emptiness festers in shut-in rooms. Leave the door open.
3.Recognize the early signs of petrification: the endless scrolling, the headache, the tired eyes. Work to break yourself from this calcified state however you can; a glass of a cold beverage, a hug from a pet, a board game with a family member.
4.If you cannot bring yourself to the doing, then do not let yourself fester away trying. Accept the emotional state that is, and put it to the best use it can be put to (including a state of being).
5.Trust that you will find the balance between being and doing inherently. Do not fault yourself for leaning into either.
6.Learn to distinguish the volatile swoop of happiness from the quiet resonance of contentment.
7.Make each day unique. It may be uniquely bad, but it should not blend into those around it like a smudged painting. Unique does not mean spectacular; it does not even mean memorable. It just means, in one small way, different.
In the ways that matter, I believe this contentment will find us if we learn how to call for it. If we learn how to forgive ourselves for the days that are not what we wanted them to be. If we learn the inherent power within ourselves to craft the days as we have always wished.
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, June 20, 2021
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