After the first quarter of 2022, a time to reset the year

In April, I am going to teach myself to read again. I have been too busy for too long. I must resist the inertia of constant movement and apply an opposite force to slow down. My adult roles in my home and the world require me to do so many things so fast that I remain in the same mode when I temporarily have nothing to do.

Advertisement

I read all the time anyway, so what is it that I am going to teach myself to do differently in April 2022. I will read from books, not devices. I will read long form, not tweets. I will read chapters, not updates and captions on social media posts. I will read long e-mails to friends and fellow writers after I drafted them and I will re-read them after I have sent them off.

Won’t I get left behind if I get off the wheel of constant rolling information and news breaks on our various media accounts? Am I not a social media consultant sought after for my advice on how to get engagement, grow followers and influence minds online? Yes, but the internal hard drive of my brain is full and can barely process data when required to recall or analyse it. It is time to spring clean my internal digital storage. Empty the trash, uninstall apps never used and clean up the cache.

The first quarter of the year is over. The arrival of the third wave of Covid, with the Omicron variant, made it feel more like the extension of the last year. Before we knew it, the newness of 2022 waned and we found ourselves wading through the same fears and fatigue. Too numb to even feel the anxiety anymore.

I know I am not alone when I look at the date and wonder where did the months go? Yet, the years seem to be racing past as if on an express train. The days seem to be the longest to get through.

As spring rapidly makes way for yet another Indian summer, this is a time to recover and recuperate. To admire the flowers in other people’s lawns as we go for aimless walks. To pluck soft, dark, juicy shahtoot from the tree in the neighbourhood and remember the taste of childhood once again. To organise excess food in our homes and feed animals who share our streets as their home. To notice that one’s knees are hurting less than they used to and make a note that the body recovers when the mind calms down. Just like the body lets us know when we are stressed, but we have disassociated and cannot recognise our own distress.

A book that arrived by courier as I was typing this column is described on its back cover as a truly comic novel about love and the despair of depression. The author will break your heart with humour, promises the blurb of Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason. Another book waiting on my desk for April to start is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Ocean Vuong’s book title is a full sentence, laden with promise and longing — On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. A third book is described as a book of magic. “When you have finished, you will want to hug a tree,” writes Jerry Pinto about Bijal Vachharajani’s Savi and the Memory Keeper.

Maybe I will write about these books and essays that I read in April when I file a column in May. After a month of reading, I can schedule a month of keeping promises.

On my Twitter timeline, the Delhi-based poet Michael Creighton tweets, “Advice for those worrying about nuclear war: spend less time on Twitter and more time in books.”

I stare at the tweet and then copy it here to share with you. How is he arriving at the same solution as I seem to have decided for myself? The answer is obvious to me as soon as I frame the question. When our anxieties are shared, the solutions are universal too.

We are no good for anyone else when we don’t feel grounded within ourselves first. After the relentless onslaught of the pandemic and the ongoing disintegration of democracies and social decencies as we knew them, I need time off to rejuvenate my strengths all over again. I want my calm back. I will practise patience all over again.

Both calm and patience will return effortlessly like homing birds when I lessen my participation in doom-scrolling and refuse to be contaminated by disinformation and hate.

“When you finish writing, send me a copy of the column too,” my husband said to me on the phone, when I told him that today is the morning when I write for The Tribune. It means something to him to read what I write here. We want to be influenced by each other in quiet ways. We appreciate interludes that offer a chance to be thoughtful and speak deliberately. Let the summer of 2022 be that time and space for you too.

—The writer is a filmmaker & author.

natasha.badhwar@gmail.com