The majority of my life falls within two major buckets – personal fulfillment and human connection. Personal fulfillment meaning work and the work life balance, hobbies and activities I enjoy, travel, writing, dancing, and so on. Human connection meaning the things I do to connect with others – the types of people I choose to connect with, and the information I choose to share to bolster that connectivity. While looking back at the human connectivity piece, I’ve noticed that my metric of connection has changed over the years. That when bringing people into my world in the past, an indicator of relationship depth was how much trauma we managed to share with each other from our own personal experiences. That was once the height of my human connection – to be able to clearly express and share my most negative life experiences with another person, to bring them into a space so vulnerable. But the more I talked about it and the more I processed those negative feelings, the more I realized that my trauma is no longer a metric of depth – simply because I never had a problem expressing those traumatic moments to others. What I did struggle with however, was bringing people into the brightest and most positive moments of my life, the intimate moments that bring me joy when I think back to them. The moments that are small and simple and undramatic, that another person could tarnish by not understanding why they mean so much to me.
These moments are scattered throughout my life, starting from my earliest memories and sprinkled throughout my experiences till the present. Some with people I still know and love, some with those I no longer speak to, and some in complete solitude – all of them large in number and all just as meaningful.
I remember for example, when I moved to Karachi back in 2004 and I accepted the change in environment as easily as only a child can, with no ties to the life I lived back in New Jersey. We used to have a Chowkidar named Ghani who couldn’t have been older than 26. He lived in a separate part of the house and would be in the main outdoor area every morning just in case we needed him for something. And every morning, I would run out in my little cargo pants and t-shirt and Ghani would teach me how to play cricket. I would stand close to the house with a long plank of wood the length of a cricket bat and a tenth of the weight, and Ghani would throw a tennis ball that I’d hit with all my might. The ball would fly up and over the gate onto the street. “Wow, isko dekho bhai, aadmi jaisi taakat,” he’d beam and run outside to find the tiny tennis ball on the crowded streets of Badr Commercial. Then he’d run back inside and we’d do it again, an endless loop of Ghani’s patience, his stamina, and his joy at my success. Outside my family, I’ve never had such a patient teacher. And as a woman, I’ve never been made to feel as physically strong as I did when I was a tiny 7-year-old being taught cricket with a plank of wood and a tennis ball.
I remember for example, my summer in Seattle this year before I moved back to the East Coast. A couple of close friends invited me to their building rooftop for a small barbecue. You could see the most beautiful parts of the city from that rooftop – the buildings, the markets, the water. It was slightly cold; there was a light breeze painted with a quintessential Seattle drizzle and we sat under large umbrellas as we ate and talked about nothing in particular. We began to talk about music, mainly the different types of music from our individual cultures. One of my friends played an old Mexican song paired with a style of dance I had never heard of before, and as the wind carried the song over to other areas of the rooftop, strangers scattered all across beamed. “Play it on the Bluetooth speaker,” they said. And he did, and as the song continued to play, he asked me to dance. His movements swift and graceful and mine as if I had two left feet, and yet I enjoyed learning and he enjoyed watching me learn. And when the song ended, we heard a burst of applause from the newly discovered audience that had been there all along, that I had forgotten in the breeze and the music. Never had I so seamlessly forgotten my surroundings for the enjoyment of something so new.
I remember for example, back in high school around 2014 when I used to go to hot yoga every evening after school. I’d change into my workout clothes, grab my mat, and enter a 105-degree room with 40% humidity for the next hour and a half. The heat of the room is in itself, a physical release. With each of the 26 postures I’d feel my body groan and ache and change. I’d feel the impact of daily life as I went into one posture after another, breathing into each stretch to exhale the stress trapped within my muscles. Sweat poured out of my body onto the towel on my mat and as we hit the 90-minute mark, we heard the sweet melody of relaxation. I’d lay on my back, my body tingling and fatigued, and in that moment I felt like I had been reborn. Never had I been so aware of my body’s abilities. And never had I been so aware of its constraints.
I remember for example, when I studied abroad in Shanghai in 2017 and took a formal dance class for the first time. We had a movement for our final show that took up the bulk of our class, and then we had units to expose us to other types of dance forms. There was one day in particular when our professor brought another woman in who told us that we were going to build our own movements with a partner. I paired up with the professor of ballet and then we were given our next instruction. Once the music started, my partner and I would have to close our eyes and dance, but one part of my body – any part throughout the movement – had to be in contact with one part of her body the entire time. An exercise in physical contact and moving in unison. The music started, I closed my eyes, and we began to move. I lost myself in our movement, no longer focused on anything but maintaining contact, doing what the music asked me to do. It was over as quickly as it began and when I opened my eyes, I became overwhelmed by so many emotions, so many memories, that I began to cry. With everything I had held inside for years, everything that had been pent up so aggressively and so unkindly, I allowed myself to release. The woman who had initiated the exercise sat next to me as I gathered myself, and I told her that this was the first time in a long time that I had been touched so intimately and so consensually. That with the experiences I had, physical touch was toxic to me, abhorrent, malicious, and that for the first time I felt myself release the poison that had been trapped in my body for so many years. Building a movement so physically driven and yet so pure intentioned, so light and untainted, gave me a part of the human experience that I feared had been snatched from me. Never in my life had I produced such a beautiful movement. And never had I so easily let go of something that carried so much weight.
I wonder if human connectivity would be different if we shared those beautiful moments that mean the most to us, that are small in nature but exceedingly vast in value. Maybe the true indicator of depth is when the other person can appreciate those experiences, simply because they recognize the value of you sharing them. Or maybe they can connect to the purity and simplicity of smaller moments that build up the bulk of our lives.
Images - تصاویر 