Pensive in Bhutan

Getting to know Bhutan it struck me that the sense of design doesn't stop at the houses hotels, or restaurants. No, they have a gorgeous gas stations and ornate bathrooms on the side of the road. It reminded me of a line in the Steve Jobs biography on how he cared about the design of the circuit board no one ever saw, the way his dad cared about the backside of the newly carpendered wardrobe. A sense of design that reaches beyond the surface, beyond the obvious to become a way of life.

At dinner tonight (sitting alone with my thoughts), I wanted to record my days here. Reading back over my journal the other day it was ridiculously obvious which entries pre-compose in my mind. The others read like the small child sitting across the restaurant from me tonight sounded - that almost-cry - just a tone let out to let the world know that you're alive. The kind of noise you want to shush.

I started composing, from the art surrounding me. A serpent dragon that formed the spine of the pillar; billowing clouds exhaled from the mouth embrace the ceiling in the series of rolling ringlet and peaked valleys. I admired the way Bhutanese art compliments the curve of a circle with this sharp lines of the square or rectangle. It somehow evokes the way life can flow out of you like a Sarah McLaughlin song, and then, how all that love and hurt and raw emotion can seem surreal or unimportant next to career choices or whether today is a monday morning works day or a Sunday afternoon laze.

Composing lines changes the way I observe things changes the observed, like a photon no longer exhibiting the interference of wave, yielding under observation to become just a single particle. I've been watching my thoughts in preparation for a day of meditation, and over dinner, I started wondering how much my life, my story, my everyday interpretation of the world would change if I started composing lines all the time. Using it as a way to mark my path across this world - written, memorized, or just recited to myself in moment. I wonder if I can do it like the Bhutanese build their towns: meticulous, a way of life. As I learned to meditate, can I also learn to continuously compose in my mind's eye? A recited composition of meaning, told every moment by me to me.

Settling in

With a week and half here under my belt, things are starting to get easier. I still get ripped off at the grocery store and don't realize it until I walk away that I did the conversion to US dollars wrong and overpaid by ten-fold, but it happens less frequently. When I hail a richshaw now, I look to check that it's a green one because the black ones pollute more, and I have now definitively figured out how to get home which is quite a relief.

It's nice having some time to live in a new country rather than just passing through for a 10-day whirlwind vacation. There's not the constant pressure to see something new every hour that sometimes intoxicates forays into the world constrained on both sides by work-a-day schedules. Instead, I'm able to plan out small trips and find time to just lie down on the couch in some shorts after a day of long-pants sweating in the no-A/C office.

My new apartment is lovely not only because of the two very sweet french men that have been so welcoming to me, but also because of the pool. It's lovely being able to come home from work and take a dip, or go for a swim in the heat of the day on the weekend. I've been able to practice some of the techniques I learned in the few weeks before I left in swim lessons, and am still struggling to get down the butterfly. It's hard to always remember to come up for air.

Walking out of the office today, I realized that I have dinner plans tonight, dinner plans tomorrow, a friend's cooking club on Thursday, and a trip planned for the weekend. Just a week ago I knew literally nobody. It's amazing that that through work, new roommates, and a few future Stanford GSB classmates I now seem to have an active social life overnight. I was trying to plan when I'd go to meditate here and couldn't find time in my schedule when I could get there for a dharma talk for almost 3 weeks. I guess some things are the same the world around - if you want time for yourself, you have to make it.

Bangalore Barrage

For the past two days, I've been wandering around enjoying getting to know Bangalore at a lazy, summer hot day pace. Today, it hit me; smacked me in the face. A rush hour barrage upon the senses --horns, holes in the road, rickshaws and motorcycles roaring toward me onto the slim pickings of the sidewalk -- a journey home fraught with potentially deadly intersection crossings. 

I wasn't fully sure where I was going, since I'd just moved places and lost my bearings I'd so carefully established in my weekend wanderings. So I just walked up the main road following directions from my new co-worker, and figured I'd recognize the intersection where I turn from seeing it in the morning. Block upon block of jam-packed shops with a constant cacophony of horns passed by me and I kept going, not knowing when I'd see anything familiar. 

At a particularly large intersection, I paused, overwhelmed and unsure of how I would ever cross it alive. The heat hit me and I wondered idly if I might faint. I stopped and got a bottle of water. I crossed the street, sprinting for the other side. Continuing on in the wrong direction, a rat ran out from under the sidewalk. It unnerved me and for the first time in my sweaty feet day I wished my shoes were not quite so open to the world. 

As I reached the end of the block, I realized I was was lost. I was supposed to have taken a left turn somewhere but instead the street I was on came to an end merging into an even larger, more chaotic thoroughfare. I stopped, feeling my senses rise. I checked myself, reaching for my map to guide me out of the mess. Here, a map is not so much useful for following roads as it is for helping me annotate the landmarks by which everyone here navigates. "Wipro signal" my scrawled note from last night read, and I sighed and turned to a store clerk. No one really speaks English, but that's why the landmarks are useful. He pointed me back where I came from. 

I went back up the street, past the rat whose tail I could still see under a hole in the pavement, back to the intersection where I'd bought the water. I turned right. The intersection was unrecognizable from its 9 am self. A relative placid lake then, it now teamed with people, and surged this way and that. I felt like a dingy in a mid-ocean storm. No wonder I had missed the turn the first time. The city was fundamentally transformed by the 6 o'clock rush homeward.