What's Happening, Brother?

The Second Coming, Excerpt

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

…

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity

-William Butler Yeats

My dear friend,

I think this March has marked two years since we last spoke. I know it won’t be very gracious of me to acknowledge that it is shame, I guess, which brings me back to you. Shame and a slight desperation.

I should clarify … I have kept up with your various musings. From the songs you have written to the areas you have traveled, the growth in your

craft

relationships

profession

and confidence …

it all has made me smile, and has inspired me, from a distance.

As you know, a few weeks ago, I went “home.” I wasn’t enthusiastic about returning. My last memories there were fraught with fear – the lively colors that make up Seattle were replaced by black clouds and wildfire smoke. It was both a summary of a tumultuous summer and a foreshadowing of things to come. But when my mother tells me she worries I'm not eating enough, she is less concerned with my actual health than a desire to feed me with her own hands. And so I packed my bags, boarded a cramped flight, and stepped back into a world that I felt estranged from.

After a year and a half of not hugging your parents, upon the first time in doing so, you realize the dynamic has changed. My father is no longer my protector … he is my friend. My mother, meanwhile, is less my nurturer than I am hers. A shift occurs where neither seek to teach me anything anymore – they simply want to listen to the experiences I have accumulated and the knowledge I have gathered. In short, they seek to breathe the same air that I have breathed in the last year and a half, making us more unified in the process.

While I have begun to close the gap that stands between my parents and I – a gap that can only be explained by us being born in two different worlds – I’ve been reminded of the distance that has separated you and I for the past few years. We have been divorced not just by geography, but given our distinctive paths since we last saw each other, by experience and philosophy. You, as the

activist

artist

teacher

innovator

athlete

…

you, in short, have had to take part in the happenings of “home.” In order to function, you had no choice but to face up to the world around you. Meanwhile, I have been privileged with the time and space to turn inwards. While this has brought it peace, it too has a price … each day that passes, I stray further from considering and connecting with you. In some ways, you and I are facing the potential of coming of age in two separate worlds. It is this which has brought a nausea upon me that could only have been alleviated by talking to you again.

I should first thank you for sharing your world, and all its insights, with me. After two years, I was not sure where to start. With so much to catch up on, it would have been easy – and understandable – for you to relapse into platitudes about your journey. But what I heard in our conversations over the past several weeks is something that has become increasingly rare in my life: an honest account of “what’s going on.” It feels as if time has not escaped us, as if we have been holding each other’s hands; in a sign of true and genuine friendship, a beat was not skipped.

But since you have been so charitable in opening up to me, it is my turn to open up to you. In the few weeks that have passed since our conversations, I have tried writing multiple letters to you in response. I have sat through the words you spoke, and have tried to digest the feelings you conveyed. My delay in writing to you is just an indication that I feel inadequate in even trying. My insights have felt half-baked and the confidence in my words have diminished with each attempt. I think the only reason I should respond to you is because I will try to convince myself of something – I guess I am equally talking to myself as I am you.

What I have heard from you in the past weeks is uncomfortable, though it is not surprising. At first glance, what you articulated was exceptionally clear: a deep, and seemingly inoperable, anxiety. This is beyond just what merely all young people must face; it is more substantial than trying to discern if you have chosen the right career path, or if politics can be redeemable, or if one can make a difference in the pain and suffering of others. I initially surmised that these feelings are a natural byproduct of your our context …

where you must work 60 hours a week, only to decide if that money should go towards one’s savings or one’s substandard apartment …

where you pay increasingly higher taxes, even though the cracks on the pavement become wider, and the moans of the sidewalk sleepers become louder, each passing day …

where democracy, less an ideal than a medicine to protect us against the sickness that occurs when man has unchecked power over others, is on its precipices …

where we have convinced each other that financial prosperity is mutually exclusive from intensely loving another person (will the next stage require that we destroy each other to make ends? We will then have to go further, not stopping until we destroy ourselves) …

Yet if this was truly just an anxiety of context, I would have heard irritation and anger in your voice. I got neither from you. Instead, this anxiety seems to just be the flowers of a garden bed; they are the outer surfaces which are readily apparent to the eye. And if I understand the roots correctly, it is only because I have understood myself in the last two years …

A sense of futility and hopelessness rapidly spreads when its roots are

Loneliness and Suspicion.

If you have known Loneliness in the past years, it is because the world too has met Loneliness. Shut indoors, the power of a hug has turned one into a threat. A biological fear of outsiders has descended into a spiritual fear where only routine and homogeneity provide comfort. The consequences of this are profound: there is a tendency to think the world revolves around oneself. At its extreme, this feeling gives a group of “patriots” a sense of righteousness to kick down the walls of a republic. However, in its most diluted, though stubborn form, it can lead one to believe that the insecurities, fears and pains they face are singular and unprecedented. We think of ourselves as abnormal, and to stop this from being exposed, we wear masks or let others’ masks mask us. The unknown, the outside is certainly scary. But as Loneliness shakes our hands, He reminds us that the inside is equally so. One puts on a performance, another creates an alternative world … in either route, we complicate what it means to engage with others fully and authentically.

And if Suspicion has reared its ugly head in your direction, it is because it has been creeping up on us for years now. You are not alone. On the one hand, we grew up believing that truthfulness and progress were not just lofty ideals … we believed they could be attained in this lifetime. After all, our first images of politics were tied into that red and blue poster, plastered with the phrase “HOPE.” Yet on the other hand, we have found our adolescence enshrined with images of death. The bombs in the Middle East battle against the bullets that ring through a school. Your backyard is swept up first by a hurricane and next by a protest against unchecked police violence. The high expectations we had of the world continue to crumble in plain sight; and once we question the legitimacy of things around us, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe in the righteousness of our own mission and purpose.

You could now understand why I have struggled to write back anything of value to you. In each attempt, I worry that my words are either hollowed, or worse, cliched. What does one say as part of a generation that is full of self-doubt and without a safety net?

Instead of finding an answer, I was sentenced to grapple with more questions. Do we have any hope to hold onto? Is optimism an obsolete value? Is there any point in trying to move forward? I sought guidance from philosophers long dead … I found them unrelatable. I thought music would push me towards a conclusion … it only made me envious of the artists’ spirituality. I traveled to different cities and talked to different people … I felt no more comfortable than when I started. I was ready to bury this project away and push off the weight of these questions only to realize that the answer had been in front of me the whole time.

That is, the night when I felt most directionless and inadequate, I fell asleep dreaming of my parents. One image was of my father, weeping as he finally held his wife’s hand again, a woman he had not seen for over a year because he sought to immigrate to new lands first. Another image was of them silently brewing a cup of chai, with coy but warm smiles, rebelling against their label as “foreigner.”

As the night wore on, the focus of my dreams shifted. I began to see my sister, lonely on the night of her wedding, abandoned by her family who could not approve of her marrying the man she loved. Her soon-to-be husband sat next to her, lightly touching her hand, and lightly stroking her hair, as if to acknowledge the pain she was feeling and cement the unbreakable commitment they were going to share with each other. She cried harder, knowing that despite her trials, she was going to be forever cherished.

And as I woke up, I laid face to face with my own partner, deeply anxious over the fact that the paths our lives are leading us head towards different destinations. But as she sleeps, I am reminded of those memories even time and distance will not erase: the single tear she sheds at the end of a play; the care she expresses in my worst moments of self-castigation; the smile she displays when discussing the next acting course she has enrolled in. In these simple moments, within the solitude of our four walls, the elegance of life is displayed in its most explicit manner.

If at first, it seems that the connective tissue between these images are nebulous notions of romance, I cannot blame you. But romance is only one pathway that brings forth the hope necessary to live life. Rather, what these images have in common is something more basic, and something you and I have shared through abjectness and elation alike: a need to tell the truth, our truth.

And if the imprints of my mind are any indication, telling the truth must start with the radical act of acknowledging the sometimes horrible circumstances we find ourselves in. It means accepting that the world around us can be cruel, that man can be utterly evil and that no depraved deed is out of the realm of possibility. If generations prior argued over the merits of integrating into a burning house, perhaps we are better suited in thinking that the house is burnt down already.

But in accepting the baseness of others and our world, perhaps we will begin to see ourselves a bit more nakedly. I, Hashwinder Singh, am composed of the same flesh and blood as those I chastise and I too will be lured into battles with Pride and Wrath, anxiety and fear. To deny this would be to deny an essential part of my humanness, to suppress it would make me only half a man. And though no one can accuse you of being inattentive to the deepest part of your soul, the fact that far too many have has caused irreparable damage to this world – by distrusting ourselves, we distrust others … our age, alongside our institutions and communities, become corroded by self-absorption … ultimately, the value placed upon life become diminished.

The first step is not for the faint-hearted; to live without the constructed masks will only bring forth the greatest unease and uncertainty. Yet for the person who courageously does, then the real work begins.

All that is torn down must be rebuilt again.

In the final act, when a wife nestles with her husband, a groom touches the hand of his bride and a lover smiles amidst departure, the hardest act is that of faith – that there is an order and unity in our world that will always course correct us in the most difficult of times. It is to believe that if nonsensical, irrational horror can be seen on this Earth, so too can nonsensical, irrational goodness; and that the more life seems to justify despondency on its surface, the more the cause of righteousness simmers underneath. In sum, faith pushes us to recognize that if we are connected to this world’s Demons, we are inextricably intertwined with its Saints.

Time is of the essence – our thoughts and actions serve not just as prophecies of the next age, but the next year, month, and week. The longer we wait to venture out into this new world, the quicker we fasten the noose on our own dreams, let alone those after us. It is here I must now come back to you. If nothing else secures my heart in hope, through being able to witness your own journey, I know that the irrationally good and beautiful exists. I know that the revolution we so desire starts with you.

You see, it is an overwhelming task to fight against gun violence in Chicago or for immigration cases in Houston … yet you get your hands dirty each day, knowing that one life will be impacted by your work. It is a lonely task to be an upstart filmmaker when those around you have “stable” professions … still, you pick up that pen every morning, confident that your story will give hope to one kid back home. It is an impossible task to both fight against the trauma of your own childhood and give your whole being to others … still, you have kept your soul open for each of us to find refuge in.

Assuredly, the consequences of true faith bring forth a battle each day, one in which you wage in the privacy of your own home, or in quiet moments of reprieve. The greatest believers must also be great skeptics and thus I know you question whether the anguish and sacrifices are worth it. Yet faith is not a private act. The man who claims faith but works for himself is a heretic to our cause. Instead, true faith makes one believe they can change the world for the better and as a result, it must bring one to act amongst its people. So I smile when you tell me stories about the elderly women you talk to each morning or when the students you teach show a bit more interest each day about cultures outside of their own. For if faith brings you to community, it also gets affirmed within community – to enrich one life is to enrich the world; and to enrich the world means that you are an indispensable crusader for good within it. The sacrifices you make are needed now more than ever.

As for me, I know this lesson far too well. For you to pick up my phone call, and lay bare your deepest thoughts and afflictions brought to the surface my own insecurities and has perpetuated my own desire to live truthfully. And for you to answer that call highlighted a trust in me, which I must now extend onto others. My hopes for an idyllic future can only come from that.

It is here that I will leave you, as I embrace the philosopher who proclaims that love affairs are an instructive theme on what it means to live. I would only add that love affairs are far from being exclusively romantic. They are shared everyday between the baker and his customer, between the rabbi and her pupil and between the friends who are committed towards pushing each others’ boundaries of what our Being can become and where our hearts can reach. And it is here that I will leave you, with the poet who questions if anyone hears his cries amongst the Angelic Orders … I know you do, ready to lead him and I into a new world predicated on tenderness and grace.