Fortuna Favi Fortius

Still Sundays.

July 15, 2012.

I woke up in the middle of last night—-where is the middle of a night?—because I had a thoughtdream about not knowing how to make a paper boat!

This thought startled me.

Once more awake I realized this was indeed an accurate assessment. I had forgotten how to make a paper boat! I wanted to reach over and turn on my phone and do an internet search for instructions. The absurdity of this thought—that this is what I wanted to do if I decided to step out on the junction called Grand Middle after being on the long train of Night (not an express train my any means)—gave me more anxiety. What if there was no Internet? What if no one had thought of putting instruction manuals on Youtube about how to make a paper boat? That anxiety was superseded by a profound sadness: what kind of world would this be if no one knew how to make paper boats?

Where had I learned to make one? My father? Yes, but I think our mother taught us too. We learned at school too. Some kids’ boats were really cool. We didn’t need an ocean or river for them, any puddle deep enough sufficed.

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Night is a mare and I wish it was a gelding, castrated from producing thoughts that fall to dust when the mighty light breaks to create dawn out of a vast dark nothing.

When I can’t sleep Internet is the last place I turn to “hang out” with others who belong to the Grand Middle V.I.P club. I made a bowl of Wheaties cereal instead and noted how the experience changes if I pour the milk first instead after I have put the cereal in the bowl. Useless thought. Most thoughts are.

I tried to tempt myself to get on the Internet by reminding myself that I still hadn’t bought a birthday present, a book via Amazon, for a good friend. Instead I put on some classical music and fell asleep as if the music was a lullaby and I was just a kid waiting to hang from the biceps of Stillness. Not all children know Amazon is a river and where are the elders to teach us how to make  paper boats? were my last thoughts. It-probably-doesn’t-matter were the final credits before my eyelids fell into a short, dreamless sleep.

My brother Zain is right when he quotes, “Without music, life would be an error.”

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I had grand ambitions to begin this Sunday’s essay by starting: I am back!

Stillness doesn’t care.

And for someone like me every day can easily be a Sunday. I appreciate people close to me who still read what I write although they are very familiar with the sentiments I express here. But there is always an element of surprise. Or so I would like to think. I know it exists because I am equally surprised when I am writing.

I researched and found that boat making was still a thriving “art form,” not quite my concern but good to know young people can learn how to make a paper boat if the random desirethought about learning to make one popped in their digital spheres.

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Yesterday was my day-I-was-conceived birthday. I texted my parents: thank you for creating a monster. They laughed and didn’t know what to say; no different than every year I bring it up. To know your creation was so very intentional feels like a burden sometimes.

Neighborhoods in cities are like children: we just never know what they will grow into. My neighborhood in New York, New York has grown into a brat. I want to disown it.

I certainly don’t think my parents imagined their eldest would be looking for work where she felt valued despite her having worked hard for three degrees. They come from an immigrant generation where formal education was revered and it brought value to your trade. They come from a time where people did their best within a system and self-sustenance was not a choice but the only way.  My generation can be classified as “change-the-system-generation” and the ones who are actually making change happen are left with little pocket change and others get to live under the delusion they are making a difference by enduring work at some non-profit that is profiting off of people’s situations.

And I am very sure they didn’t think their eldest would take on writing seriously in a time where the mainstream publishing industry can’t take risks on new voices without at least a small confirmation the work will yield some profit. Those who say it has always been this way need to read more. A lot more. Even if it has been this way it has been for very different reasons.

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Yesterday I spontaneously bought $5.00 worth of fruit snacks from a ten year old. I couldn’t help thinking how hard he had been working all day to sell these on the street and subways. $5.00 used to be a lot for a young child. Now he will have to save five dollars three times in order to just see a movie.

I ran into a man from Senegal yesterday who had been in New York City since 1989. He was not interested in chatting unless I wanted to argue about the existence of God. I wasn’t.

I am always intrigued and impressed by those who have relentless faith in the existence of God and are willing to acknowledge that our circumstances, personal and humanity at large, have nothing to do with God’s existence.

My parents always taught us that God just means One Law, a system of checks and balances. There are no punishments and no miracles, just actions and consequences. Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to these Checks and Balances as “the chancellors of God.”

 …work and acquire […] and thou has chained the wheel of Chance, and shall sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

From The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson edited by Brooks Atkinson, Random House, 1992.

 

I told my father, a very secular man who also happens to have faith as vast the Universe, that I admired him and others who believe that there is justice. I wake up every morning dead certain there is no “God” per se but some Grand Energy that offers serendipities and synchronicities to remind one that all we have is each other and that is all we need. And at night it is too dark not to believe there has to be. In fact, there is a monument at Grand Middle station if you decide to get up and out of the train of night.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson begins, “Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable.”

I too wrote something similar once without having read that particular sentence by Emerson.

I now know that it is not the questions that bring us dis-ease but that we don’t like the answers.

Answers are like gravity; you have to learn to work with it just as in yoga.

I practice yoga because I am not a yogi. There is a big misconception that those who practice regularly are yogis. Perhaps with enough practice on the mat, off the mat, I too can open a stuck peanut butter jar without slamming it on the counter.

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When I was very little my father made this very cool design on our sweatshirts. He drew the design himself, then he made his own stamps copying the design to create a print on the shirt and then colored it with permanent paint made for clothes. The design included a phrase we had heard in a “movie” (which I learned many years later was actually a television series in the United States, perhaps to the child me in a desert with no television series it felt like a movie) based on the 1979 novel Cane and Abel by Jeffery Archer. That movie had a profound impact on me and Zain and tremendously shaped how we viewed fate.  Fortuna Favi Fortius was the phrase. It is a variation of the Latin proverb: Fortes fortuna adiuvat, fortune favors the brave.

I believe it remains my family’s guiding principle.

That is the only principle that brings me peace in uncertainty.

I think if  Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson was giving a quiz in the Socratic method, I might just have aced it.

A gift from my parents, calligraphy by an artist in Turkey.

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One Sunday a month I would like to open this space to invite essays by others. I know I am not the only deep-sea diver in the ocean of Stillness and we need more chancellors of Stillness, perhaps more like ushers. This idea came to me because of the emails I receive and the kind of “voice” that reverberates when people write to me as compared to what they share otherwise (regardless if they have a personal blog).  For reasons that are beyond me this voice boldly demands another closely listen and connect to something bigger than any agenda, personal or otherwise.

We’ll see… after all, despite best efforts, it’s just a trial of words…

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