#2 - Expectations and Reality

The second post on this journal should have come sooner. When I started, I had envisioned myself writing weekly, if not daily. I had grossly underestimated the toll that a change of surroundings can take on a person.

When I was back in India, I would get enamoured by how eminent writers like Hemingway used to spend all their days in Parisian cafes where they did some of their writing and all their socialising. The West-centric view of the arts, thanks to a couple of hundred years of colonisation, that is still prevalent in most developing countries had a lot of us believing that the culture was conducive, rather essential, to creativity.

I had also believed that the slower pace of life would magically free up hours and days and weeks to pause, reflect, and write. Lastly, the change of location and the decrease in social commitments that accompany it would help refresh my perspective and take time out to create something of value.

Alas. Most of the cafes are small, crowded, inaccessible, and expensive. The slower pace of life is also a different way of life where one has to do laundry, wash utensils and cook every day, so those magically freed up hours have equally magically filled up. Resettling requires a never-ending list of mundane, bureaucratic tasks that need to be attended to on priority and leave you exhausted. And a dramatic decrease in your social sphere weighs you down so much that you occasionally lose the will to write.

So here we are - settling and re-settling, lost and figuring, and hoping against hope that the new reality we have found ourselves in, different though it may be from our expectations, is kind, benign, and worth our while when we look back in the rearview mirror of life.