My year in a Glance (2019)

If anything, 2019 was the year in which I became a lot more optimistic. Not because the year didn’t have any pitfalls but rather because I managed to reach a point in my life where I realized that giving a fuck just didn’t matter. Things will always go to shit and life will always give you an ample dose of sadness to complement any happiness you may get. So might as well stand tall and laugh rather than complaint about something that is out of your control. That being said, unfortunately, it took me quite some time to realize this and even now there are times when I struggle with the vicissitudes of fate.

The start of the year was one of the best I could remember in quite a long time. Mainly because I adjusted within my working group and spent the most quaint and wonderful birthday in Grenoble with them. While I didn’t really celebrate my birthday, as is the norm, it did coincide with me taking a long walk in the picturesque mountains of France with my supervisor. We discussed quite a lot of things, none of them being Physics, which made me realize that I would settle within this group just fine. This was further strengthened by making new friends within my institution during the various summer schools, retreats and conferences I attended. People who preferred to talk shit rather than discuss science all day long.

There were a lot of firsts which happened this year too. From going to my first Jazz concert courtesy of Gertrud, to moving into an apartment alone, to representing the group at a conference, to winning the prize for best scientific poster, to me co-authoring my first paper. I also was fortunate enough to supervise my first bachelor student, internship student, introduce my post-doc to Pakistani cuisine, and screw up to the point where I considered resigning from my job. It was the last incident which taught me to keep trudging onward, no matter what. To stare at my failures in the face and build myself up despite whatever shit is going on in my life.

I also was lucky enough to finally break out of my self-imposed fetters of despair which had clutched me hard last year. Not only did I attend many more social events this year, but I also managed to make new friends, who I went onto care about a lot in a short amount of time.

Speaking of caring for someone, I also managed to meet old friends and their significant others during the year. From visiting my friend and his wife in Berlin to attending the wedding of another in Pakistan, I was lucky enough to share small moments of joy with them. I also met a person who I always wanted to befriend in the past but never could. However, none of those moments could hold a candle to that I spent with another friend, just quietly sitting for hours.

I did break my foot near the end of the year and managed to miss visiting yet another trip to Mount Tibidabo in Barcelona but hey, at least I could stare at the landscape of the city once more with high hopes to return. I would like to say that this and my screw-ups were the only misfortunes I encountered this year, but that would be a white-faced lie for life was kind enough to introduce me to pains and stress I never thought were possible. For each possible joyous moment I experienced, I bore shitty moments 2 fold. However, I rather not talk about all that because my pain and misery is mine to bear, the world doesn’t need me to add to its sorrows. Also, no matter how much I complain, it could always be worse.

So as the year nearly draws to an end, I sit at my home in Pakistan, heading deeper in a dark tunnel, alone and scared. But that is fine because, at the end of the day, this is what life is. An abyss filled with small flickers of joy, so even though I fall hopelessly towards certain doom, I rather enjoy the few brief glimpses of happiness I experience while laughing at the monsters who seek to destroy the last shards of my self-composed identity.

A Physicists Hope

There was a quiet in the night that made things far uneasier than they should have been. There were no distractions to derail his thought process, nothing near him to keep his hands busy. Not that he needed something as it was one of those rare moments when everything apart from his precious thoughts made him angry and added to his prebuilt frustration. Today, however, the topic of his disdain was a bit severe than usual as to him it was his identity as an experimentalist that was under scrutiny. He wasn’t sure if having a favourite theory and holding onto the belief that it would be proven true muddled his integrity as an experimentalist. For you see, he was at a point in his life where he wanted… nay… almost needed the many world interpretation to be true.

For you see he was just tired of life bullying him, he was exhausted playing life’s cruel game of making him run towards things before snatching them away just as he got close to something worthwhile. Granted, he also have had a lot of screw-ups in his life and it could be argued that he deserved this fate. But this also raised the question if he was indeed such a heinous entity in the paradigm of life that his punishment was to be eternally stuck in the hamster wheel of damnation?

Guess, to him it didn’t matter anymore as now all of that had cumulated to a point where the only solace he could find was within the notion that in one of those infinitely parallel universes, a version of him had whatever he ever lost and wished for. That somewhere in those many worlds, there was a version of him that was truly happy and on top of the world. But at this moment in time, this was all there was to it, a hope and a dream attached to a mere conjecture which had neither been refuted nor accepted. Something which had no physical evidence present of being true, yet he desired nothing more.

To be fair, it didn’t really matter what his beliefs were as long as he was able to part with them in front of evidence to the contrary but that was the problem; he wasn’t sure if he could actually ever accept MWI to be proven false. If he could work anywhere near the topic without letting his personal biases seep into his work. While it was nothing new for a physicist to fight against surmounting evidence than to admit that what they once hoped to be their legacy was nothing more than a fallacy disproven by experimentation, he couldn’t make his peace with that. At least not in this version of the many realities that could exist. “Many realities that could exist”, the sheer thought of such an obsequious idea was enough to make him giddy. How could he simply put his personal biases aside when and if the time came? Maybe he couldn’t, maybe he was destined to stand on the wrong side of reality but there was a chance that he would be happy there. All these thoughts and many more rushed through his head as he finally sighed having reached an unfavourable conclusion. He would rather be right and objective than be happy even if it meant losing any semblance of hope and forever participating in the pointlessly torturous game of life. After all, “The truth should always reign supreme”, this was his dogma, this was his Hippocratic oath

Idée fixe

In that moment, she was perfect because she was rather an idea than a person and this annoyed him more than it should. For you see, such ideas are quite often contagious, they are wild and often far from reality; and for him she was becoming his idée fixe. He was tired of being vexed by false realities, he just wanted his muse to disintegrate her veil of perfection and be reborn into a more immaculately imperfect yet realistic entity. He just wanted to see her imperfections, which made her perfect for his love; he just wished to paint her in her imperfectly perfect self and see her image distort to its real form. He had grown tired of chasing fantastical ideas; he longed to either paint the most unrealistically realistic painting or never paint again as he had outgrown the childish desire of delineating mere ruminations. Deep down he was aware that this muse, like all others before her, would fade to the ravages of time, yet he desired nothing more than to expedite the process. He had had enough of being bound in the loose fetters of ambiguity.

“Either set me free or dispatch me with one blow, for I can’t endure this life of tormented captivity anymore.” He screamed towards the cosmos only to be replied by the hollow echoes of his own voice followed by an utter, deafening silence. The universe, in its infinite yet sadistic wisdom, had given him his reply. With heavy eyes, he picked up the brush he had thrown away in anger. And as he continued from where he had left off, he couldn’t help but murmur, “But I, being poor, have only my dreams;”

Mamihlapinatapai

He silently stole a glance across the table into the eyes which had managed to captivate his thoughts. There was a depth in them that he just couldn’t explain, a mystery and intrigue that fascinated his inner curious child. Even though their meeting was nothing more than two stories merging for a fleeting moment; a spark had been lit in his brain that had been extinguished long ago. Those were the eyes of someone who had experienced life, saw things which he only could dream about. He needed an excuse to stare at them just a bit more, so he asked the only dumb question he could think of: “um, what color are your eyes exactly?” Even though he knew they were classified as blue, he had ulterior motives. She widened her eyes on purpose while answering his question just to satisfy the requirements of a proper answer and he couldn’t help but chuckle inside. That was it, thay was when he knew what kind of a person sat across him and he couldnt help but bask in the warmth and kindess which emnated from across the table. She was as genuine as the came and he was happy to share a moment of her time even if it meant that they like straight lines were never to meet again. Some moments in life just feel good and nothing more, there is no desire, no want. These moments require no explanations or labels because the purity of such interactions demand nothing more than respect and a sense of glee. For him, it was one of those occassions, something that he would remember forever, something he shared with someone he would be lucky to call even an acquaitance let alone a friend.

Untitled

For a human being, he was more perplexed by his own species than any other. Despite his best attempts at understanding their conventions and habits, he got nowhere. They were still as big of a mystery to him as the day he was born. For no matter what, no matter how hard he tried, he could not come up with a generalized pattern to befriend them or gain their affection. While it was infuriating in its own right, the whole thing was further aggravated by the fact that he really wanted to excel at those social interactions, now more than ever. For he was lonely, not that he couldn’t live alone, he actually reveled in his solace but there were times when he actually required flow of ideas and thoughts different than his own to further his understanding of the world and its many mysteries. He did his best work when he had spaces to let his ideas be heard and criticized upon; when he had a chance to make his thoughts clearer by explaining them to someone else. In hindsight, it would make much more sense if you also had 10 voices in your head locked in a constant struggle to drown the other 9 out.

It wasn’t that he didn’t try, he always made a sincere effort but often some phrases were lost in translation. To him, somebody saying, “I am busy, maybe later” used to mean just that until someone used it to mean, “Yea, please stop bothering me.” Similarly, “we should meet and catch up some time” used to mean “I am just being polite, we won’t ever meet or talk again” until someone used it in its literal sense. The whole thing was far more complicated than solving a Rubik’s cube but then again there are clear, precise algorithms one can follow to solve those things. This, on the other hand, was far more complex than interpreting an eleven-dimensional object in a four-dimensional coordinate system. There was no rhyme or reason here, instead just a hell lot of variables that changed depending on the person they were being assigned to.

All of these contradicting experiences have had led him to the point where he felt unsure of his most basic interactions, even with those who were close to him. He was filled to the brim with insecurity and confusion and if there ever was a moment in his life when he thought he finally had a handle on how to interpret social interactions, along came a person to shatter his house of cards. This had come to a point where it went from being funny to depressing to back to being funny again. And to think this was only for normal social interactions, the poor kid had no idea what awaited him in his search for a life companion but that is a topic for another day.