8 minutes for 'what we will'
8 minutes for 'what we will'
Although it might have worked in the past, the May-Day model is just not true anymore. I hear the cries for the need to do what we will, if not for 8 hours, at least for 8 minutes...
A lot of my friends expressed the need to exercise their creative muscles or at least spend more time on fulfilling pursuits. We want to read more, probably pick up the ukulele that’s gathering dust in a corner of the room, run around the apartment trying to find a pitcher for our watercolour paintbrushes, try making and having a new dish and move our bodies at the gym or on the yoga mat.
These are disparate individuals with their unique personalities and yet they all have one attribute in common—all of them are aching for some sort of release from the pangs of early adulthood and in their own ways, mourning the loss of their carefree childhood days.
We virtually pat each other on the back and offer comforting words to each other. Something along the lines of “Good things to come — just you wait!” or “It’s going to be okay” or the cult favourite “We’ll figure it out”. Deep down, some of us are starting to believe that there might be a falsity to those affirmations. The world doesn’t owe you anything and there’s the good chance that any day, the future can turn out worse than the present and all your good days would be behind you. To add salt to the wound, there’s always the comparison trap to escape from. When I’m confronted with these thoughts from the dark recesses of my brain folds, I remind myself that the human condition is a mere passing phenomenon on this pale blue dot that Carl Sagan talks about and as much as it is pockmarked with tragedy, we as a species seem to be good at one thing—resilience. We can move on from heartbreaks, natural disasters and an uprooting of life from one place to another, albeit some quicker than the others.
In trying to live a good life, we must understand that we are part of a generation that has grown up with the highs and lows of a culture that’s vastly different from any other in the history of humanity—the shiny internet! As Maria Popova pointed out in an ‘On Being’ episode, the internet is a young medium and not one generation has completely lived and died with it. It has changed our relationships, education, work, emotional intelligence and it’s not intuitive to our hunter-gatherer brains and bodies and our internal dopamine mechanism. Most of all, it has changed our relationship to the self, productivity and free time.
On my trip to Delhi four years ago, I had visited the ‘May Day Bookstore’ which calls itself, “Delhi’s only left-wing bookstore”. I had bought a tote bag over there along with the jail notes of Bhagat Singh, one of India’s revolutionary and radical freedom fighters. The tote had interesting typographic-art that said and showed “8 hours for work. 8 hours for rest. 8 hours for what we will.”
Although it might have worked in the past, the May-Day model is just not true anymore. But time and again, in these last few months since we’ve been in the workforce, I hear the cries for the need to do what we will, if not for 8 hours, at least for 8 minutes, failing which, it seems, we get dogged down by the mundane and descend into a mad fury of cynicism which prances around as a glorification of busyness.
I was reading The Marginalian the other day and found the following excerpt speak volumes to me. In a commencement speech titled, “On the Soul-Sustaining Necessity of Resisting Self-Comparison and Fighting Cynicism”, Maria Popova addresses young graduates and offers words of wisdom we all can benefit from taking seriously.
Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively, in yourself and in those you love and in the communication with which you shape culture. Cynicism, like all destruction, is easy, it’s lazy. There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying in our society than living with sincere, active, constructive hope for the human spirit. This is the most potent antidote to cynicism, and it is an act of courage and resistance today.
It is also the most vitalizing sustenance for your soul.
— Maria Popova
So, dear reader, here’s my invitation for us to fight the laziness, apathy and mindlessness that cynicism breeds.
Go out there! Devote time for whatever your what we will is.
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