By Abhra Pal
As a wordsmith myself, I am often mired in the myth that true art form would be one with artlessness. Every progress closer to that artlessness makes us see some form of nihilist beauty of existentialism. The paradox lies in simplicity. I do not know whether the time will come when I make my mark as a creator, but the wordplay of the thought chimes close to my heart – and I feel if I cannot create, the least I can endeavour to, is make the world a better place, a place to do away with that power bestowed upon me. So today for the sake of our piece, let us dig into something interesting – classism. Not the intangible socio-economic world order that sets us apart, but the one which is a big part of our existence.
Talking about class, I know exactly where my story starts – in a train. Be it the heavily packed morning train or the sparsely populated homebound one. I see people – diving into their world through the phone, a magic portal that opens somewhere in the world – be it fragile illusions, be it music, be it a book, work email – I see people, the word that comes in my mind – is escape. As a child, one of the superpowers I always aspired for was reading people. As I grew older, I realised that is not much of a superpower – if we pay attention to details, it is perfectly possible to read people like a book. We are all cut from the same cloth – we behave based on how we think, we think based on how we feel. So in a way how we carry ourselves lets on more about those secrets we think we can bury deep dive in our hearts. But today, we are not talking about secrets. Today we are not talking about anything that sets us apart – we are talking about what connects us.
Let us go back to our story. Let us go back to the train. How often do we connect to the person next to us? When I say connect – I am not talking about obnoxious jealousy that we can sometimes harbour. Can you tell me why we do not connect? Because there are invisible lines drawn between us – psychologists will tell you about many theories about why that came about. Theories aside on how they were formed, they exist. They exist due to a number of conditioning factors, they were forming even before we realise that we have started building those layers up around us – the inside of those walls often look very similar. ‘Oh! He is very well built.’ ‘Oh! She is absolutely gorgeous.’ ‘Oh! They have such a loving family’. I can go on but the inner voices we have might be endless. The point I am trying to make is there is something inherently nested in layers of shame, stigma and what not that prevents us from seeing ourselves in other people’s shoes. Why would that matter though?
It would be when we stop seeing people as the tip of the iceberg surfacing beyond our line of sight and as a whole of that big chunk of ice we are as a whole and God knows what that ice is made of. I attended a somatic workshop a few years ago that turned out to be the most illuminating experience of my grown up universe, so much so that it separates the years of darkness from the illuminated ones. One of the concepts that I heard was that when we feel some kind of emotional strain, something freezes in us. It is a sensation in the body, that our inherent threat response triggers and we wear those ice blocks as a badge of honour and our sense of self grows around protecting that small block of ice. Imagine having a cut on your arm and you sleeping on the other side trying to avoid any further pain. I am not going into somatics and modalities of healing, but trying to say it out loud that we all have our hurts, our inner bruises, our ice blocks, whether we see them or not. It is possible to grow past it and let me be clear: it is not a linear healing curve. Healing works differently for everyone, and spirals at best. The one metaphor that I love sharing with people is an onion. You peel one layer and you are bound to find another. The key starts from unlearning.
Unlearning is not as simple as it is spelled. It is a magnum opus of neuroplasticity and works like magic if you know what you are doing. In my podcast, ‘Stories and Stanza’, I am baffled by the indomitable voices of people who join me and share their vulnerability. Each piece of story I collect turns me into that wide eyed raven. I have spoken with people with a plethora of stories – one who went to commit suicide but came back, one grief-stricken soul who, having lost her entire family to covid teaches people to love, someone whose whole body is paralysed but speaks the vigor of life, someone who lost everything and built his life back up. The stories are endless but the beauty is when I listen to them, connect with them, I become them. What I learned the hard way is that unlearning is way harder than learning. Human intelligence is a predictive mechanism – unlearning untangles that mess.
This understanding of our shared human ice—our universal capacity for both wounding and healing—changes how I see that crowded train car.
Let us come back to the train story. What if all of us were on the same train, even though our stops were different, our journey was different – but we shared a brief moment and the best life we can live is with the thought that we are in this together, we are not that different from one another, no matter what the surface is letting on. The compassion to see the hidden tears – that hits close to my heart and it is not possible unless we see ourselves as who we truly are. Class divisions were imposed and act as key ingredients to stopping our unfathomable zeal to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. The single most important key to making this world a better place is to be the better version of ourselves and that happens the moment we unlearn the boundaries imposed on us.
Always remember, your emotions are mere clouds – but you are the sky, my friend – the true spirit and the paradigm of your beauty lies in artlessness.
If you like my work, do look up ‘Stories and Stanza’ on YouTube or an audio podcast app of your choice. Find the true voice of authenticity. It is not my voice, it is our voice. It is our sky.
