Have you ever
wondered where thoughts come from? They could be so random. If you are anxious or upset about something, the thoughts that hound you can
make you stop in your tracks and affect your behaviour and deprive
you of sleep that you need most to think clearly and go about your daily
activities. But if you pay attention, you can actually alter your reality. How
we feel and what we think tend to
change from moment to moment so if we know our thoughts, we can watch
them come and go.
Canal de Bourgogne |
I tried meditation when I was a student at the university and I remember I had problems
staying still just like the young girl Nao Yasutani in A Tale for the Time Being written by Ruth Ozeki. Nao’s great grandmother Jiko had shown
her how to meditate.
In A Tale for the Time Being
,the protagonist, Ruth was unable to complete another novel and she had decided
to write a memoir about how she had spent years taking care of her mother, who’d suffered from Alzheimer’s. She found a Hello Kitty lunchbox that washed up on the beach and inside it an antique wristwatch, a pack of indecipherable
letters and the secret diary of a sixteen year old Japanese girl, Nao.
Nao wrote:
‘As you’ve probably figured out by now, on account of the ADD, my
mind is always chattering away like a monkey. And sometimes I can’t even count
to three. Can you believe it ? No wonder I couldn’t get into a decent high
school. But the good news is that it doesn’t matter if you screw up zazen. Jiko says don’t even think of it as
screwing up. She says it ‘s totally natural for a person’s mind to think
because that’s what minds are supposed to do, so when your mind wanders and
gets tangled up in crazy thoughts, you don’t have to freak out. It ‘s no big
deal. You just notice it’s happened and drop it, like whatever, and start again
from the beginning.’
Nao's diary was a distraction. Ruth felt
compelled to read the journal by Nao, the young girl who claimed that she was a
time being and she wanted to tell someone the fascinating story of her
hundred-and- four-year old great grandmother, who was a Zen Buddhist nun.
‘ Now , looking at the pile of
pages, she felt a quickening flush of panic at the thought of all her own lost
time, the confused mess she’d made of this draft, and the work that still
needed to be done to sort it all out. What was she doing wasting precious hours
on someone else’s story? ‘
The young
girl had left their U.S. home to
return to Japan with her parents as her father had lost his job. She had
suicidal thoughts and she sought solace in writing her journal that was kept in
a red cloth cover entitled À
la recherche du temps perdu par Marcel Proust. Nao’s father had
attempted to commit suicide and there were parts of the story that I found
depressing to read when these characters were suicidal. Nao was bullied in
school and also in the cyber world and her father was suffering from depression
and had felt helpless and
hopeless.
À la recherche du temps perdu. In search of lost time. The alternative translation of the title is Remembrance of Things Past. I have not read it and it would be ambitious of me to think that one day I
might read it. I first learnt about the metaphor Le Portrait Chinois in French class today. The Chinese Portrait is a game that is made up of what is known as Proust Questionnaire created by the famous French novelist Marcel Proust. It is a questionnaire about one's personality that ask questions like : If you were an animal, what would you be or If you were a plant, what would you be etc. After I read the novel by Ruth Ozeki that made reference to Proust, I was subsequently acquainted with Le Portrait Chinois. What a nice coincidence.
“ Hard to say. Is death
even possible in a universe of many worlds? Is suicide? For every world in
which you kill yourself, there ‘ll be another in which you don’t , in which you
go on living. Many worlds seems to guarantee a kind of immortality…”
She grew impatient then. “ I don’t care about other
worlds……”
The story is about Zen Buddhism
and may be explained by quantum mechanics and classical physics which describe
the interactions of matter and energy as they move through time and space.
These physicist theories seem to
suggest that a particle can be in two or more places or states at once. There
are times when I seem to be able to achieve so much in a day when other times,
the days just slip by and I have hardly completed any errands or work that I have meant to do. Sometimes I wish I could be at two or more places at the same time
as there are so many books I want to read and things I like to experience
as I juggle my daily activities.
Ruth Ozeki wrote, “A moment is a very small particle
of time. It is so small that one day is made of 6,400,099,980 moments.”
Six billion, four hundred
million, ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and eighty moments in a day. Apparently when you snap
your fingers, that snap equals sixty- five moments. Every moment provides an opportunity to choose our action and reestablish our will, summon our resolve. I have lost count of the moments in my
restless years as I whiled away time idling, doodling and day dreaming. I have to catch up with lost time. There is a time for everything so perhaps all those indecisions and procrastinations might have been
inevitable.
Ruth pondered about Nao.
“ In your diary, you quoted
old Jiko saying something about not knowing, how not- knowing is the most
intimate way, or did I just dream that ? Anyway , I’ve been thinking about this
a lot, and I think maybe it’s true, even though I don’t really like
uncertainty. I’d much rather know, but then again , not -knowing keeps all the
possibilities open. It keeps all the worlds alive.’
Not knowing is hard but that is
what keeps the possibilities open. Our reality is what we think it is. A Tale for the Time Being is a
brilliant piece of writing where we are aptly described as time beings as life
is fleeting and change is constant. Nao sought solace in writing in her diary. She had no idea who would be reading it. When Ruth picked it up at the other end of the Pacific, she felt
the urgency to find Nao as she read about
her despair and angst in the diary but as she continued to read it, the diary
became a kind of wake up call for
Ruth . It is essentially a story about two time beings who had somehow become
connected via a diary in the present internet era.