Published in Al Bayan 2023: The Origins Issue

In the Buddhist tradition, there is no such thing as a beginning and an end, a start and a finish; there just is. We live in a sequence of so many little beginnings and finishes, starts and ends, that when you zoom out to see the bigger picture, it just is––kinda like a derivative in calculus. Ever since I started college and began to study things exclusively in the context of politics and death and colonization, I’ve felt an instinct to preserve my knowledge of math. My whole grade school experience could be mapped through the sequence of math we were taught––we started and ended the same way: we learned how to count just so we could learn to explain how math worked. When Sir Isaac Newton invented calculus, did he know how to simplify fractions? What came first: the first fundamental theorem of calculus or fifth-grade math? 

Calculus is the study of how things change, and I never want to forget how things change. If I know how things change then I can anticipate them better, so the loss of the present hurts less. Out with the old, in with the new. All the best gifts lose their shiny plastic after a certain period of time, and I’m tired of starting over and over again. 

I’ve been anticipating college for so long. They told me it was when my life would really begin, but the moment I was waiting for still hasn’t arrived. It’s been a year and I’m forgetting the calculus I’ve learned and I’m in an odd state of limbo—tortured by self-induced tension. I came here to be a writer and yet I’m still waiting for the moment of awareness, the split second right before the balloon pops when I finally have the gratification of knowing the waiting is over, like the moment on an idle DVD screen where the pixelated logo is about to hit the corner of the screen perfectly. Knowing what happens next to such a visceral degree that I can almost taste, touch, smell, feel the moment, without having to live with the moment. I pour it all onto the page and it reads like a truth and who would know that it never happened? As a journalist, I seek out the stories no one tells, but what about the stories that are imagined? In a world with over 7 billion creatures of the same species, there has to be a finite amount of situations someone can encounter because we are not too different from each other; one person’s lie is another person’s truth. 

All of this for half a second of satisfaction before life takes over and I’m no longer in control of what happens next. They never said that life was gonna be easy––a new baby covered in the comfort of her mother’s insides, eyes wide shut, but it isn’t enough to shield her senses from the change thrust upon her, so instead she cries and cries and cries; a mother lingering in her daughter’s new college dorm, because maybe if she never leaves then the moment will never end. 

A sunrise never gets old, no matter how often I see one, and that’s how I know that I’ll never see change coming. Where does the time melt between the empty blue of the dawn and the fierce pink and orange explosion of the day? I often wonder about the power contained in the moment right before the Big Bang––the potential energy churning, waiting at the threshold of the universe. And then everything exists. And now I’m looking at an awe-inspiring sunrise that makes me forget about my lingering worries from the night before. 

I used to sit frequently on the windowsill of my freshman dorm, pressing my cheek against the cool glass pane until I couldn’t feel my face. I stayed frozen, in an almost meditative state––my legs folded into my chest, my arms wrapped around my body to safely keep me in place. As I watched the world outside my room, I almost forgot where I was. The quiet of campus, interrupted only by the rustle of many trees. The unremarkable buildings with the same facade reminded me too much of my unremarkable hometown. A wave of deja vu would crash over me: I’ve been here before, in my bedroom, tears tracking down my face like the condensation of the window I was leaning on, longing for something more than the utter lack of control I felt at home where my every move was dictated by mother. Did anything change between now and then? I was still waiting for permission to start my life and make my own choices even 300 miles and one time zone away from home.  

For something to stick to my brain hard enough to persist through the innumerable distractions throughout the day and keep me awake, makes it a Problem. The difference between a Problem and a problem lies in the justification for it and if something is on my mind, surely that makes it justifiably important. A Problem keeps me up at night, a night that feels so long I forget what it’s like to know the sun’s warmth and be rewarded for my knowing. A night that feels like infinity but is actually 15 minutes because it’s taking too long for you to fall asleep. Have you ever noticed that as soon as you realize you’re falling asleep, you stop falling asleep? Change only happens when we’re not noticing. There goes the sunrise again––I smile because I almost forgot what it’s like to know the sun’s warmth and I vow to never take it for granted again. 

I have lots of Problems because I don’t have the power to forget. I’m in a constant state of awareness like a front-facing camera and I’m taking all the pictures. The pictures replay in my mind and without warning, I’m suddenly in my birthday outfit that my mom picked: the headband creating imprints in my brain; the matching cardigan and narrow skirt set that presses against my legs anytime I try to run––a reverse straitjacket keeping me in line lest I am not performing my role as a girl well enough for the audience. The thick, cable knit stockings with faint skid marks lining the calves from raking the bottoms of my ballet flats against the suffocating fabric. I still make it work, bounding across the party, looking like a penguin late to work. My headband one sudden head turn away from becoming a boomerang. I love the feeling of air on the back of my heels as my shoes clomp on and off and it’s a miracle I haven’t fallen on my face yet. But I keep on running so I don’t have to stop and see that no one is chasing after me, that any game of tag was long forgotten as they all went back to enjoying the cake with my name on it.

What lingers with me more than the itch from my birthday cardigan, or the pile of birthday gifts that I keep eyeing, is an awareness of what’s happening, something that language couldn’t articulate for me but I just knew in the same way a baby knows how to breathe through its nose and blink its eyes. These random access memories are marked by an instinctive truth that my body couldn’t deny. I had no friends who cared more about me than the food at my party. A truth that always existed but I never noticed, until I did.

It’s funny how once you start noticing something, you can’t stop. Ever since I started my Buddhism class, I can’t stop noticing signs of samsara, the endless cycle of life and death all around me. “Life goes in cycles, what comes around goes around.” I knew that I was suffering from the impermanence of life, but I didn’t realize that everyone else was suffering, too, or that there was a whole religion dedicated to this suffering, which makes the experience of suffering a lot cooler. Does knowing you’re suffering make living any easier? In Buddhism, one realm that you can be reborn into after death is the god realm––a place for those who are spiritually awakened to the world, where all senses are heightened and blissful and sublime. Yet, the very knowledge that brought them to this realm would make them never want to leave because despite the pleasures of this world, its inhabitants are still mortal, so they experience a heightened level of suffering at watching their bodies decay and slowly die. Maybe ignorance, then, is actually bliss.

Now that I’m here, the place where my life is supposed to begin, I’m too scared to make a move, to ruin the canvas and have to live with a stain that I will forever be trying to cover up. The stars are never going to align and the hand of God isn’t going to reach down to tell me my life is beginning and my canvas cannot get any emptier. There is no such thing as an origin, just the unknowing and then knowing, but I can’t ride my bike while looking in the rearview mirror. In calculus, there is only infinity running in either direction; the origin on a graph is where all positive infinity and all negative infinity intersect and cancel out. The origin is the only point where nothing exists, and like the Big Bang, take a step in any direction and suddenly there Is. The beauty of life lies in its surprises, but I’m plagued with a chronic sense of awareness that leaves me living like a deer in the headlights. And yet the sunrise still catches me off guard; the night doesn’t last forever.