The Lockdown, The Ass & The Promise

Buridan’s Ass - I decided to upgrade to philosophy for this one. My physicist friends have fainted. Not at me going to philosophy. It’s on the word “upgrade”. Snobs!

There was a French guy who had nothing to do in life so he thought for a living. Also it was 14th century. Life was pretty hectic then for thinkers. His name was Jean Buridan. He then thought up something to the effect of this. In an ideal & timeless world, if a donkey (ass) was given 2 pales of the exactly same hay at the exact same distance, the donkey would starve himself to death because he wouldn’t be able to choose which pale to go to first.
6 centuries later I was born. 26 years after I was born, I had an existential epiphany. I thought I should “Grow up”.
And that marked the entry of Buridan’s ass in my life. How exactly the 2 got connected is something of a mystery to me even as of today but somehow in the quest of growing up, I made a promise. I said screw you Buridan. I am going to keep that damn ass alive all the time from here on.
Ok. That might need some more explanation. Actually in Buridan’s head this paradox was for free speech. It’s a paradox because it means if people had “ultimate” freedom of speech, they wouldn’t speak because they wouldn’t know what to speak. Get that? No? Nevermind! It doesn’t apply to us anyway. Firstly it begins with “in an ideal & timeless world”. I never saw this paradox through the free speech angle as well as I did from the “identical choices” angle which means that no two choices are exactly identical. They might look and feel the same but they aren’t.

Alright. I just realized, none of you are interested in decoding the paradox per say (I mean if you were you would google the Buridan’s ass and not be here on this page!) so I’ll come back to simple english. If you are a man (and I’m just going to take a leap here and assume that you had never seen the dish washing liquid in your sink before the lockdown) and your wife / girlfriend / mother asked you to buy dishwashing liquid from the store and the storekeeper asked if you wanted Vim liquid or Pril liquid, it’s possible that you blank the hell out.

The complexity of the 2 choices here can blow your brains off. If you then decide that it’s just too damn difficult for you to choose between Vim liquid and Pril liquid thereon deciding that you are not going to buy either and go back home to the lady without any dish washing liquid, you will get a whack on your head with a frying pan. But you will also have killed Buridan’s ass because you didn’t choose either pales of hay. You got a bump on your head & the ass got to starve & die. Pity!

And that’s what my promise of “growing up” was about. I will not get a whack, I will always make a choice (no matter how tough) & well in time & thereby make sure that donkey eats & thereby make sure he doesn’t die. I am going to stop picking up paradoxes. They make writing too damn difficult.

But it was basically a 2 part promise.

PART 1: I will think before buying clothes.

PART 2: I will speak clearly about what I feel.

Yeah. I said I was a nerd child. I never said I was a sorted person! Why it took me 26 years to come to the conclusion that I had to think before spending on clothes is beyond me. But that part was easy, I just gave up the credit card. Nope that’s a lie. That was not easy at all. It involved 3 people, 2 cheques and 30 cartons of tissues. But yeah, it was done.

The second part however was tough as hell. In order to achieve this I :
A. Needed to know what I was feeling
How am I suppose to know what I was feeling??? It’s easy for a guy to think “Shit, she is going to be mad, I am 10 minutes late” while on the other side I am angry, feeling bad, feeling sad and some other things I haven’t been able to decipher yet. (While writing this, I am realizing I could have been the issue here.)
I genuinely fell in love with this guy who once texted 
“I am interested, I don’t take your time lightly, I seriously care and therefore I am feeling terrible about being late. I am right around the corner and walking up to you right now. Thought the apology should reach you first”

Yeah…because my life has been so damn magical & filled with the kind of men who would text “that” for being late and I am now married to Ryan Gosling!

Moving on,

B. Translate my thoughts to the right words & then say it out loud.
Can you imagine telling a guy all of the above for being late? Hey guy, while you were 10 minutes late, you made me feel bad, sad, angry and a few other feelings I have not understood yet because I haven’t had enough time to process all those things you made me feel by being 10 minutes late. Yeah! Try that. If the guy doesn’t look at you like he has been struck by a meteor and then put in a big jar and dragged around in a bullock-cart over a rocky road for 20 days, marry him.

I never met that guy ergo I am not married yet. I just put in this sentence because I wanted to use the word “Ergo”. (Cut me some slack, I am allowed to have some nerd fun on my own post. And now you are questioning my idea of fun. So be it. I will still keep ‘ergo’)

Coming back, to keeping my promise and keeping that ass fed, I couldn’t run away from situations anymore so I now had to say things like, “I didn’t like the way you spoke to me. It was hurtful” or tougher ones like “No I cannot go on a date with you, you wear crocs”.
I did get an answer to the first one that said “And you thought I was talking like that to make you feel good?” Sucker punched!

The second one came back to this answer “And you point to the left while saying right, we are even, lets go on that date” Slam Dunk!
And you thought this was easy?

But if you are anything like me who ‘think and feel’ at the speed of light, you fall into the greatest category of humankind. It’s called “Sensitive”. Mix that with a little anxiety and you have yourself a party of neurotransmitters! When that happens, you do stupid things. Like I did for 26 years.

Which wasn’t ok really but I could pull through because at no point was I stuck in any form of a lockdown. I could run, I could hide & I could escape his love (Ha!). It always led to a mess but point being, I could do those things. However if you are finding yourself clambered down now, you have a pickle to sort. This could be tough. Unlike me, you cannot even ‘conveniently’ avoid it. Problem with ‘sensitive’ category of people is we feel too much too fast and we think. A lot. And then we take those thoughts and those feelings and mix them up and create this lethal cocktail that we start sipping ourselves! All of this in a split second. All we really need to go from a mess to a super cool person is just a tiny bit of channelizing the above. It’s not easy but its the sensible thing to do.

I am not the person who can advise you to meditate because that tiny light in the middle of the forehead starts dancing to ‘For Aisha by Memba’ on the count of 2 for me so I can only advice what’s helped me in that past. The ancient Somalian art of forced counting.

Ya.. it’s a really ‘ancient scientific precision technique’ where you count till 100 before you say anything when you are all riled up. (Stop looking at me like that. You don’t know any ancient Somalian literature, do you?!) Take a moment, figure what you are feeling, be honest, say it out. Start small and don’t think for a moment that doing this is going to sort all your problems and make you achieve nirvana. It’s not. All its going to do is make you think slower than you are used to. You might think what good is that going to do, but try it because a person who writes ‘ergo’ will only want good things for you.

You might not get back what you would like to hear but you will feel way better than going back to bed with your head on you hands wondering what the hell in life are you doing. Well the ass never told me that he wouldn’t kick me if I kept him alive. Ungrateful bloody Buridan’s ass. But now 5 years after keeping the wretched creature alive I finally got rid of the 26 years of being in a consistent confused state of mind. (Now it’s only random & abrupt confused state of mind! Kidding.) That brought a little bit of sanity in my otherwise insane world. Hope it helps you too.

Stay safe. Try meditating if you can freeze that dot of light in void between your eyes, count if you cant, take a moment, speak up, keep the damn donkey alive and please throw crocs away if you are using this lockdown for a clean up!

Oh ya, I did go on the date with the crocs guy though. What? It was a pretty good comeback he had! And No. It didn’t work out. I mean come on, he wore crocs.

Picture Courtesy : Anuj Alia
Back Dated: 7th April 2020