This is a blog post from
We had our end of semester exams in May, and it was the most draining two-and-a-half weeks of the entire academic year. The exams were the only things between us and a luxurious two-month summer vacation. Our prep for the first two papers was decent, reasonably thorough. We tried to mug up some critical quotes, we read parts of our texts over. But there was a week between the first two papers and the last two, a week in which our energy completely tanked. I began to spend a good part of my day watching British crime drama and stand-up.
My friends all slept. Between twelve and two in the morning we’d summon up the discipline to scan through our texts, but it only took one distracted person to throw the rest of us off. We didn’t want to study. We were all looking forward to something beyond these exams, something with meaning, something that would give our lives a sense of balance. For me, it was my totally unstructured, internship-less, assignment-less Bangalore summer. I wanted to go back home and see my friends, walk my dog, cook with my mum, bake with my brother, see as much of my dad as I could before he went back to Chennai. I wanted to bask in a light lazy routine, to build my summer around the things I wanted to do. I would be productive, but on my own terms. This was the plan, so to speak.
Well. I’m here now, and the view from five weeks in is a good deal bleaker than I expected. I’m grappling with two opposite sets of feelings. The first: I feel like I should have achieved something this summer but haven’t. The second: I’ve been keeping track of specific types of tasks and obligations that I wanted to attend to but haven’t — for instance, I haven’t managed to meet some of my friends, I haven’t spent my days writing, I have baked only one cake, and I have not gotten my nose pierced. I don’t know what it is I wanted, and why it is important to have purpose (I’m on vacation, after all). These things irritate me more than I can express. The feeling that I have fallen short of some elusive summer vacation productivity goal looms over my days. It hounds me into the bedroom for escapist afternoon naps, gnaws at me when I’m scrolling through Facebook at midnight (“If you’re awake enough to do this, why not write instead? Why not do something for a change?”).
The more fancy and ambitious my goals, the more likely it is that I will look for a grand, sweeping sense of purpose in order to achieve them.
I am not able to convince myself that it was silly to expect a summer with more energy and a clearer idea of what I wanted to do. It all started with this: I made a plan to document my grandmother’s recipes, to visit my grandparents every day and write down my conversations with them. It was supposed to be a beautiful, detailed record of my relationship with them, of their conversations with each other, of their meticulous daily routine, and of my grandmother’s precious food memories. In my head I had decided it would be my best writing yet, the most meaningful thing I could do with my relaxed summer days. In my head it became something so magnificent that it began to intimidate me, to corner me into a slob-state out of which I didn’t even want to emerge.
Following this, all my expectations have taken the same route to disappointment. I’ve constructed elaborate images of what my life must amount to in these two months, of how many heart-warming selfies I must take with my school friends, of all the stacks of novels I will make inroads into, of how much meaning each of these exercises will carry. Then I resist the actual execution of these ideas. I watch a lot of television, I Instagram all my food, I spend hours thinking of wry photo captions and experience vague insecurity till I have garnered some twenty-odd likes. I procrastinate with great relish.
I’ve spent the last week or so trying to come to terms with how little I will “achieve” in my remaining time here. The question at the heart of all this is, why is it so important exactly to work with goals like these? And this is worth asking not just because I’m supposed to be on vacation and without a care in the world. It’s also because, as a student, I’m not unacquainted with issues of how to set manageable goals and how to muster the motivation to meet them. In college, the systems of marking and evaluation feel very arbitrary. Typically test/exam questions and results have little to do with the actual learning from reading texts, attending lectures and formulating my own ideas. The disconnect between effort and performance makes the goal — that is, the shining marks I would get on all my tests and exams in an ideal world — seem like something very abstract, removed from reality. My motivation to go to tests and classes adequately prepared dissolves.
In this situation, I have two choices: either I maintain that my goal is all-important and find a more effective method by which to achieve it; or I begin to work with a different notion of what the goal is, and how I want it to affect my sense of purpose. The first option is practically but not emotionally viable. I did begin my days and weeks with a very clear idea of the little things I want to do and when and how. But as time unfolds, my evaluations of myself (as pathetic, hopeless, jobless, skill-less, unimportant) get the better of me, up the point where I am no longer able to follow through on plans. The second option is more radical, and frankly, more interesting. If I were to function with a more short-term set of goals, the shape and feel of my life could be very different. The more fancy and ambitious my goals, the more likely it is that I will look for a grand, sweeping sense of purpose in order to achieve them.
The truth about my summer plan was that is consisted of many small social and personal goals, but when I put them all together, they turned into a very daunting meta-goal that began to mean things about the state of my life. But I have done well with many of the more spontaneous and less obviously meaningful tasks I set for myself. I’ve done my summer shopping, I’ve been learning how to drive, and I’ve de-cluttered my portly old dressing table. I’m beginning to realise that these things count as ways of spending time. I’m not heavy with expectation as I do them, but I take them seriously.
Perhaps another question bears asking. Is it bad to be without purpose? Is it bad that the days are just sliding past, that when my brother is at school, my mum and basically I live like our five-year-old dachshund — eating, sleeping, stepping out for walks? Is it terrible that sometimes I want to do nothing, feel nothing, but sit and sip at my good strong filter coffee and stare at the dust settled on our deep blue jute lampshade? When, even for a moment, I am able to shrug off the feeling of being tied to the various things I meant to accomplish, I feel so much more relaxed and satisfied than when I’m chasing myself with my own expectations.
But if being without expectations is so enjoyable, why am I worried? Perhaps I am more heavily conditioned in this respect than I realise. The social consensus is generally in favour of goals. You are seen as having your life sorted out if you finish high school with a plan, graduate college with a plan, all so that you can find a job, sprout a family and plan the lives of your children. If you express doubt, uncertainty, a penchant for breathing a bit, you’re in in danger of falling into a goal-less limbo — a space where nothing is clear. Nothing except maybe the present moment.
There are many things in my life that feel like goals and that seem to impart a sense of meaning to days that could otherwise seem like utter drudgery. But the sense of purpose comes and goes in waves. It sometimes abandons me in the middle of a particularly exhausting day, leaving me with very little to hold on to by way of belief in a larger scheme or in a map of my own life. This is probably because purpose isn’t quite what I otherwise take it to be. It doesn’t necessarily provide stability, or consistent meaning, or energy, or sustained motivation. Instead, it often gives rise to feelings of anxiety, a fear of not being able to achieve anything. Purpose gives me the illusion that if I complete everything I set out to do, I will reach a state of equilibrium. But I know that even in the impossible event that I exhaust all the items on my life-agenda, I will make a new set of plans and proceed to wring my hands over them.
So this is the new plan: I’m going to keep an eye on this plan-making habit. I’m going to watch what it does to my expectations. I’m going to do some nice things in these remaining three weeks, but I’m not sure what they’ll be. I’ll figure it out. I’ll jump off the train and wait on the platform for a bit. I can get back on later.
