L’Shanah Tovah

Greetings from a new, new year. I’m sitting in my Hyderabadi apartment with my two flat-mates, Myla and Shlayma. We celebrated Rosh Hashanah with full group of fellows up in the mountains… and Yom Kippur as a trio in our new home: an as-yet-undecorated, marble-floored, pink-walled flat in an unknown, monsoon-soaked city of six million. It’s been quite a transition. My thoughts for the Jewish near year have been lost and found in various corners, but my overall meditation on life as it is beginning in ‘Incredible India’ (as the tourist slogans go) comes from Trudy (that philosophical bag-lady standing on the corner of walk-don’t-walk):

“On the way to the play, we stopped to look at the stars. And as usual, I felt in awe. And then I felt even deeper in awe at this capacity we have to be in awe about something. Then I became even more awestruck at the thought that I was, in some small way, a part of that which I was in awe about. And this feeling went on and on and on… My space chums got a word for it: 'awe infinitum.'

Because at the point you can comprehend how incomprehensible it all is, you’re about as smart as you need to be. Suddenly I burst into song: 'Awe, sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found thee.' And I felt so good inside, and my heart felt so full, I decided I would set aside time each day to do awe-robics. Because at the moment you are most in awe of all there is about life you don’t understand, you are closer to understanding it all than at any other time.”

– The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, by Jane Wagner, performed by Lily Tomlin

Note: yes, this is the same play I played with in my thesis. And yes, I’ll be working hard on my awe-robics this year. ‘Nuf said.