Orbiting

The title of this post is taken from a short story by Bharati Mukherjee. In it, the main character's lover, an Afghan immigrant to America, tells her family about "orbiting" various international airports after fleeing his country. I won't tell you how the story ends; read it for yourself. I decided to use the word because I thought it very apt. If you think about it, all we do in life is orbit around certain goals, certain beliefs, and certain people. We change our path of orbit every now and then, we have our personal equivalents of the sun and the moon, we experience "perihelion", "perigee", "aphelion", "apogee"; some of us "revolve" faster than others, and we all have a "dark side". (It is amusing to think that whatever we point to in nature has characteristics that can be attributed to us. So much for the debunking of myths and the anthropocentric theory. They still have some relevance. )

I came up with this theory of orbiting because I recently felt that I was at loose ends. I am orbiting right now between doubt and certainty, between reading my books and reading chem notes, between the past and the future. I do not know why things bother me this way. They just do on such a regular basis; my cycle of orbits are already so convoluted I am bewildered by every little thing. So much has happened since I last wrote, and I feel more than ever that I am a lonely sphere of rock floating away into space; not even a planet, I am dwarfed by the vast expanse of weightlessness, the imposing pull of others' gravitational fields. I am not depressed, but there is an indefinable thing that eludes me. What is it, and what is my life? To that, I know not the answer any more than you do.

A Play of Passion

As old Walter Raleigh said, our life is a play of passion. By "passion" he meant suffering, as in "a Passion play", a play that re-enacts the sufferings of Christ. Passion, if you consider its root "pathos", means suffering, and is not really the emotional and physical rapture we associate it with today. Perhaps it is true that life is really about suffering, and all other things are trivial compared to what we must suffer. Perhaps our successes are only marginal triumphs before the inevitable fact of death. To suffer is to live, and to live is to suffer. From the moment we are born, we are under the shadow of agony-- our mothers experience it through childbirth, and so do we. We cry out at the difficulty of having to go out into a new world, of having to leave the comfort of our mothers' wombs. Our mothers are pained by each new act of disobedience, of treachery, or else they leave us to ourselves in order to cope with their own private sorrows. There is really no such thing as absolute gratification in life. If so, one might question the need to achieve status, to accumulate wealth, to gain knowledge-- if all they do is increase our suffering with every loss. Indeed, to be wise is to suffer, to feel grief, as it is said in Ecclesiastes that the house of the wise is the house of mourning. And with each gain, with each loss, we become more aware of the inherent grief of our existence; death is not merely physical death, it is also made up of the small slow deaths that grip us while we are corporeally alive. Yet there is hope for us: in the Passion of Christ, he rises again after being crucified and entombed. We have hope in the word timshel, "Thou mayest", that we can defeat the clutches of death that so readily grasp us; we have hope in the salvation we gain by the sacrifice of Christ.