Surface

I am at a workshop called Self Love in Dharamkot. An old hippie man from New Zealand is facilitating. He either knows Ram Dass or knows someone who knows Ram Dass. He makes us do a walking meditation — back and forth from the balcony railing to the wall, focusing on our steps, looking into the distance where in crowded cafes, Israelis smoke their joints and get over the trauma of being complicit in genocide, or maybe joke about it, or maybe both. Not all Israelis, a part of my mind feels the need to remind me as I fight to bring my focus back to the sensations of my bare feet on the warm concrete floor.

He splits us into pairs and makes us do an exercise where we look into each other’s eyes and say something to them.

“You suffer like me.”

“You have experienced love and loss like me.”

I can’t say it without breaking out into awkward smiles to both my partners. One of them, a colourful artist from the Czech Republic, is very amused and starts giggling. “You have a very nice smile”, she tells me. We try and fail to stifle our laughs because the other pair is taking this exercise very seriously. The other man, a serious plump Indian, doesn’t laugh back. “Even I was like this in the beginning”, he tells me. “But I’ve done many of these workshops, and after a few of them, I could say the words without laughing.”

I am at the Birdhouse Cakery, a cute cafe close to our house in Dharamkot. Two nice musicians are playing Bob Dylan and Beatles songs. Many people are dancing and swaying with happy abandon. They don’t stop dancing even on sad songs, even if they know the lyrics and are singing along. What do lyrics have to do with anything? The music is not there as a piece of art to absorb, but as an opportunity to snatch moments of joy without thinking too deeply. I think about what lives they will go back to when the concert ends, and bring my attention back to the musicians who are now playing Hey Jude. The song is about Paul comforting John’s son during his parents’ divorce. I join the chorus of “Naaa na na na na na na Naaa” and smile.

I am scrolling Instagram. The Cockroach Janata Party is organizing a protest to demand the resignation of the Education Minister for the NEET debacle. I wonder what the students interested in becoming doctors think of this protest. Will they attend the protest? Or will they stay at home and study? Sonam Wangchuk is speaking in a reel about how he treated going to jail as an opportunity to think and exercise. A lady in Iran is drinking a pomegranate purple drink in a cafe in Tehran, talking straight into the camera about how the bombing can start again any time.

I am working. With Claude and friends, things that used to take me days or weeks to build now take minutes or hours. Coding has become Instagram, scrolling from task to task, dopamine hit after dopamine hit. With every hit, a data center releases heat into the atmosphere, uses up groundwater, and I become stupider. I watch a video or ten about how the world is becoming stupider with me, and how the AI companies are exploiting labour and copyright to allow me to work faster and think less.

I feel like I live on the surface of things. My writing is surfing without skill. This post is a poem about fighting the waves and coughing up sea water.

I am attending a Buddhist Philosophy class. The teacher is going through a text called Illuminating the Intent, which is a very technical text on what it means to be a Bodhisattva, to live with kindness in your heart for everyone. There is a lot of talk about how everything is empty of intrinsic existence, about whether you realize you are empty first, or whether the emptiness of the world is realized first by you. I can’t pay attention, but I enjoy the effort.

There is me. There is my immediate vicinity: the people that I love. Then the people that I know. Then the strangers I walk by every day. Then my country. Then there is Palestine. So many layers separate me from the kid they shot in the head.