It would happen on nights gloomier and quieter than usual. Tucked in bed, my mother beside me, squirming in the unique way children do when they get metaphysical: what are we doing here? How did the planet get born? Where were you before you were born? Children are the original Zen masters, philosophers who are wise because they provide more questions than pronouncements. In the Katha Upanishad, it is the boy Nachiketa who recognises his father’s dishonesty in donating spoiled goods during a ritual for the gods, and cleverly asks, “I too am yours. To which god will you offer me?” When Nachiketa is sent to Yama, the God of Death, he is given three boons. For his first two boons, Nachiketa chooses reconciliation with his father and lessons on how to conduct fire rituals. His third request, which Yama tries to persuade him against, is for self-knowledge. It is too subtle, too dangerous a subject if handled irresponsibly, Yama laments, but Nachiketa insists he wants to know who he is and where he comes from. He had the three noble qualities of children: purity, persistence, curiosity. Yama relents and the Upanishad reveals the terrain of self-knowledge.
My early youth was peppered with metaphysical episodes, as it is, I’d like to believe, for most people, recognised or not. On these storm-threatened nights, when my mother’s mind was freer than on other nights, I would latch onto it as though my body still depended on hers, and ask: “What if we were never born? What if nothing existed?” She mainly listened, knowing better than to answer. In any case, the questions were for myself. I wanted to feel the special dizzying feeling that appeared when the final question ended. My mind spun in dark whorls and reached a primal pinprick point which I assumed was the origin of life, and when even that disappeared, what was left had to be The End, even though it didn’t occur to me to ask how come The End could be perceived. But my larger-than-life questions never required an answer. Children are the inventors of rhetoric, secretly knowing the high demands they place on the confused adults around them. (Why is red, red and not blue?)
The rhetoric of childhood not only made its way unharmed into adulthood, it grew arms, legs, a rotund belly, became a factory of unanswerable questions, and turned me into a difficult person, tortured, freakish. Haunted. I lived mostly in a state of puzzlement, slapped in the face by the mystery that I agreed to be baffled by more than I would enter it. There’s such a thing as too much rhetoric, even a flair for it that can turn ugly, as things tend to when a talent is over-milked. But a person gets used to a way of life. Littering the pathway with questions, for example, as a means to live life. Or maybe it’s a strategy to make a claim on life by keeping a question-filled distance.
What if we were never born?
What if there’s no point to living?
Who are we?
These were the kinds of questions I swam through. The more I asked, the wider the waters grew. The shore was somewhere else altogether, and somehow, the shore didn’t seem important or real. One questioned to keep questioning so that landing was never necessary.
And then, ironically, as childhood became teenagehood and young adulthood, the questions turned insular, directed straight at the navel:
Why is my life so dark?
Are all people’s days mournful and melancholic?
When will this shit show end?
How the questions regressed from mature philosophy to emotional immaturity as I grew older is fodder for more questions, and it wasn’t until much later that I understood how my constant questioning was not only reflective of being lost, but also of resigning to a fate of immobility. I could ask and ask, and remain asking, and persist in an enigma of questions, with no end, no light at the end of a dark, foggy tunnel. But it wasn’t fun or useful—mystery too needs boundaries to remain delicious.
It was the pandemic that showed me the extent to which questions flavoured my worldview, and just how useful it was now becoming. I felt like a professional who’d been training for this moment her whole life, which in a way, I was. Musing alone is never as impactful as when the whole world is doing it. Collective self-reflection upped the game, at least for me and for the people I’ve talked to, read about. I didn’t mind that more questions appeared in my tunnel, because the questions had returned to the gravity and seriousness of childhood, and the self-absorption miraculously diminished. The thing that had made me feel ridiculous—questions are good, questions are brilliant, but at what point do questions get converted into real life?—brought me revelatory experiences instead, and affirmed the importance of wise neurosis. The cooped up spaces we lived in for over a year turned many people into children and philosophers. Suddenly, we had to ask big questions.
How have we got here?
Where are we going?
What does it mean to live well?
What are we supposed to do during a pandemic?
What is the relationship between humans and other species?
Because, now, death was just a sneeze away, and the roads and offices were eerily empty, and we had to sit back in our IKEA armchairs, amazed that life could change in a 21st century-technologically vibrant heartbeat. Will I live through this? How many of the people I love will die during this? How will this end? Will it, or will we go first? The questions, always urgent, turn so urgent that they effect movement and outcome. The questions are stirrers of stagnancy, the alarm clock for entering a new day.
The pandemic is the new reason people give for revelations, frustrations, life-altering tragedies or joys.
It was during the pandemic that I ….
‘started my catering business…never cooked in my life.’
‘wrote a prize-winning novel. Had been meaning to write it for decades.’
‘left my husband. Didn’t know we had nothing in common until then.’
‘realised the brevity of life. I lost both parents to the cursed virus.’
But why not? The pandemic threw us all into an enforced cell of pondering, and spat us out enriched or depleted. Do or die. Turn your life around, or else…
Pandemics are extreme things. They don’t perform in halves, or in apologetic sums. The 1918 influenza pandemic took out up to 100,000 million. The Bubonic plague made its appearance in the 6th century and returned with stubborn insistence in the middle ages and in 1855, killing 25,000,000- 50, 000, 000 in total. Before smallpox was exterminated, it seethed and raged for 3000 years. ‘Pandemic’ comes from the Greek words ‘pan’ which means all, and ‘demos’, people. Pandemic is all people. It’s democratic, unprejudiced, globally frightening and in its jolts, it unites. Suddenly, lives must change. Suddenly, lives must end or begin. Suddenly, doors are bolted, the perimeters of days narrowed by 80, 90 percent, and the faces of loved ones far too familiar. What do you do when life becomes tiny, when there is literally little room to roam?
Where else to go but down the rabbit hole, but it may not be magic that’s encountered. Just muck and spooky shadows we’ve avoided for centuries.
In a panel with Sara King, Daniel Siegal and Gabor Mate on “Building Intergenerational Trauma Sensitivity and Awareness”—an online series on trauma I attended several years ago—Angel Acosta reminds: “Covid is the memo from Mother Earth, how fragile and interdependent we are…it’s a gut check and an ego check.” It’s a view point that has been repeated by environmentalists, thinkers, theorists who have called and are calling for a gigantic gut-check, and a revolutionary reassessment of our priorities as a species. But, this isn’t new. Environmentalists have been saying this for decades. James Lovelock wrote about his hypothesis of Gaia—“ a physiological system …[that] appears to have the unconscious goal of regulating the climate and chemistry at a comfortable state for life”—in the 1960s, and cautioned that our meddling with the biosphere’s innate intelligence is deeply problematic.
Digging into early environmentalist writing is always a shock to me. Wendell Berry, Rachel Carson, Thomas Berry were already saying this then? (Another question) And other questions I’m happy to admit sound naive swirled around in my frightened head especially when the spread of Covid-19 intensified: “There were many more pandemics before this one?” “How in the world could something as gruesome as this happen now, in the 21st century?” Then scrambling to acclimatise to this narrative of the not-new, and admitting that the pandemic we’ve found ourselves in isn’t a sudden blight inflicted on us by an unfeeling god. Pandemics have been around for thousands of years even though it may have felt like a novel curse for many of us who hadn’t experienced the impact of the SARs outbreak in 1990.
Viruses like coronavirus emerge first in animals and then transfer onto humans at higher frequencies when there is more contact between wildlife and people, and when this contact isn’t adequately managed. In 2007, thirteen years before Covid-19 hit, Cheng et. al warned: “Coronaviruses are well known to undergo genetic recombination, which may lead to new genotypes and outbreaks. The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb. The possibility of the re-emergence of SARS and other novel viruses from animals or laboratories and therefore the need for preparedness should not be ignored” (https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/covid-19-lessons-for-sustainability)
None of this is new, not truly new, not exactly novel, and we clearly aren’t good at hearing warnings. Perhaps it is magical thinking that makes it so: “it’ll work out, of course it will, we are the chosen species”, “how can it not be okay? We’ve always come out okay, and no big disasters have struck.” Psychologists have found that human beings are hardwired to undervalue the severity and possibility of disasters which makes it easy for biologist Edward O. Wilson to ask, “Is humanity suicidal?” He asks the question in the context of the extinction of species caused by human effort that in turn leads to the destruction of human beings for the simple reason that every species has a place on the planet, a function to fulfil, and disturbance—especially amplified disturbance—of ecosystems impacts not merely the dwindling or killed off species, but all species. More significant and heartbreaking is the presence of the past in this journey of erasure. This planet has been cooking for billions of years, and we have evolved out of the dance of the biosphere—the 20 kilometre sliver of earth where life exists—so we aren’t abrupt additions to a pre-existing context. Countless species, earth and life processes have gone before us to amalgamate, die, rise, rot, and we are merely a percentage of the stupendous hardworking theatre of life. “Humanity did not soft-land into the teeming biosphere like an alien from another planet, “writes Edward O. Wilson, “We arose from other organisms already here, whose great diversity, conducting experiment upon experiment in the production of new life forms, eventually hit upon the human species.” (Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight For Life) Our species itself is birthed out of the earth and the self-regulating, life-loving life-system that is patient, smart, persistent and, evidently, full of faith.
Environmentalists and scientists caution that it has taken the planet a long, long time to make its creatures and spaces, to birth its props and products that, frankly speaking, are nothing short of magical. Rachel Carson, in her nervous, outraged scolding of how we commit biocide in an age where chemicals are free-flowing and pervasive, reflects on the deep time of geology: “It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth—aeons of time, in which that developing and evolving and demystifying life reached a state of adjustment to its surroundings…time was the essential ingredient. Now, in the modern world, there is no time. The speed with which new hazards are created reflects the impetuous and heedless pace of man, rather than the deliberate pace of nature.” (Silent Spring) This is time we can’t conceive with our minds, it’s closer to the region of the infinite, something we don’t do well with because we prefer nights, days and a mundane calendar we can use a Sharpie to make marks on for commemorations as significant as the next shoe-shop excursion. That we have been born out of the crust of countless natural experiments, and that something was toiling to get to this species with an intellect, are moments made for rigorous questioning. What in the world? How exactly have we come to be? What makes this type of unrelenting work possible? Are we more like children of the planet than its keepers? If we are the children of mud and rock, then aren’t we meant to get to know it, revere it, understand it, pay homage to our lineage?
But I wonder how many questions we’re asking, if we roll around in bed at all for a few more moments before we take our phones off airplane mode and bombard ourselves with messages, platitudes, puppy pictures. It takes five or six seconds to ask the question, and an infinity for the ground of those questions to born: isn’t that what the earth has spent her billion-year labour on? The creation of a species that’s able to contemplate and self-reflect? The time it takes to ask the question is nothing, but the fact that the question can be asked is where the dignity and girth of time really begs to be looked at.
Let’s spend some time on time, and its close cousin, infinity, which is endless time (or space, or both), or at least what appears to be infinity. When John McPhee coined the term ‘deep time’ in 1981, he paired it with what couldn’t be grasped by the human mind: “Numbers do not seem to work well with regard to deep time. Any number above a couple of thousand years—fifty thousand, fifty million—will with nearly equal effect awe the imagination.” (Basin and Range) Deep time has the flavor of infinity, that depthless, boundless quality that either makes us uncomfortable or wonderstruck. Technically, deep time is duration and duration automatically means shelf-life. For example, it takes the earth a period of time—an unimaginable amount of time—to produce oil. It will astound you. It only takes a dash of visualization and a moment’s pause to get to a point of astonishment. Oil is made of the remains of phytoplankton that are secreted in depths devoid of oxygen. The remains have to be squeezed and condensed by rocks, and then moved into a spongy layer that resists escape via dense rock. The sources of the oil need to heat up between 100 and 135 degree Celsius not for the few minutes it takes to heat fat up in a frying pan, not even for the few hours it may take to cook a goose, but a length of time that once again brings the human mind into an abyss, the same abyss my mind would twirl into as a child when I asked origin questions like, “what if we were never born?” Millions of years, it takes. Millions of years for phytoplankton corpses to get lodged into the perfect resting places, for their organic innards to migrate to holey layers that are adequately trapped by impenetrable rock so that they can be boiled for millions of years at the ideal temperature.
Then let us consider how long it takes for oil to be drilled out of its ancient womb—a few days if it’s an onshore well and a whopping few months if it’s offshore—and the numbers are clear. Durations like days and months we understand. Those we know. It takes me five days to write one chapter, three months to complete a teaching semester, half a minute to eat a seri muka kuih (I must think about my digestion). But when the numbers grow big and stretch into unfathomable zeroes, I come into direct contact with the limitations of my mind. It simply cannot reach that expanse of time. It’s religious time, the time of mythology, geology, biology— Brahma slept for four thousand years; it takes a long time for the rise and fall of a species before its place is filled with another; a mountain is formed after years and years and years…
But it isn’t only heaven and earth that are gifted with numerical genius. In our consumption of oil, for example, we reach those boundless mental areas. 35,442,913,090 barrels of oil are consumed globally each year, and it is estimated that there are only 47 years of oil reserves left. 47 years we can picture because it is within the boundaries of a lifetime, but the other number leads us to a monstrous immensity that although may seem infinite, isn’t really. Just because the human mind finds it difficult to convert zeroes into experiential objects doesn’t mean they aren’t countable nouns. Yes, 47 years is a finite number, and the millions of years it took to make the oil contained in that 47 year period may masqarade as infinity—time without borders—but that façade falls apart when we ask: where are we going to find millions of years? For even a million years begins and ends sometime. And we take it lightly, as though a million were a minute.
We need that kind of proliferation and abundance of time on our back, holding up earth, soil and species, as our guide to put us in our place. To just think in terms of flourishing zeroes, edging towards a semblance of infinity (but not quite), is a requirement for successful living, and for rewriting our collective pattern of egocentricity. Deep time shows us our place, tells us that life has persisted without our meddling, and that it is a long, loving process of life generating life, and it goes on without us. That is, humans don’t make life. That is, the earth itself is alive and hard at work. Doesn’t it make more sense, considering the planet has been churning out life for 3.7 billion years and early humans only emerged 2.4 million years ago (a mere 300,000 years ago if we consider our current anatomy), for us to gasp more? To think of all the time and all the space and all we have absolutely no idea about—90% of species on this planet haven’t even been discovered—and ask: “What can we learn? Who are we in all of this?”
“I and this mystery, here we stand,” writes Walt Whitman.
This mystery, I think, is the key to our survival. Step out of it, and the world, as we see and experience it, falls into grey shadows.