Sitting with a Butterfly

Learning to stay still

Hello!

This month started with me working on a new story. No, scratch that. I’d been working on that story for a couple of months in the back of my brain (but does working on a story subconsciously warrant a “I’m working on it” tag? I know my friend Tim will agree but until words are not placed on paper, I struggle to legitimise it). In any case, I really started working on the story once the month began with a deadline for the 9th.

The Moth Story Slam had the theme Dirt scheduled for their 9th July show. My parents were in town and I wanted to share with them what I do here in London. So obviously, on the 8th, I really started writing the story down. My story was loosely about the dirt on my shoes and how it reminded me of my own mortality (it feels like a stretched metaphor but I got it to work somehow, promise). While working on the story though I started to discover this niggling sensation that I’d been having but hadn’t been able to identify — an urgency to hurry.

The more I look back at my life, the more I’m starting to see that pattern. I’m hurrying, consistently. I’m hurrying but it’s getting me nowhere.

Today morning, in the midst of a workout at home, I was breathing hard and my watch told me my heart rate was at 134 bpm.

When your heart is beating fast time tends to move faster as well, your body willing it, pushing time toward a point where your heart will be calm again. During this quick paced heart beats, my thoughts take on a kind of silence that is uncommon when my heart is beating at its routine 68bpm. It’s like all my thoughts are trying to keep pace and they are going so fast, my brain can’t recognise them individually and it turns into a kind of ringing, a background score I can easily ignore.

(Ignoring the voices in my brain is hard if I’m not in any altered state.)

So, there I was, my thoughts taken on a hum in the backdrop of my brain, my heart beating fast while I breathed in and out, in and out, in and out. Between sets, I walked up to the window in my bedroom which was pushed open as far as it could go to keep the house ventilated and cool. My bedroom window opens to the backside of a long rectangular row of suburban houses each one with a mini garden. My window is on the shorter arm of that rectangle and all I get to see are blocks of grass and trees. In that quiet oasis, a butterfly with red wings tinged with blacks fluttered to my window and sat on the glass pane.

It stayed there, unmoving, calm, still. My heart was beating hard, my breath was shallow and quick. My brain was a blur of thoughts. And within that mad rush, the butterfly sat calmly at my window, so removed from this constant hurry my body felt. It sat, surveying the garden, dreaming of all the flowers that it could find, maybe taking rest from a feast. It did not even flutter its wings, just sat there, so still. I’ve never had a butterfly come sit on my hand, I feel I’m not calm enough for it to land. But here was one who sat on my window and though I was right there, breathing hard, chest pounding, my thoughts a humming blur, it didn’t pay me any heed.

And for a moment, a microsecond of a microsecond, I felt its calmness exude out of it to include me. I continued breathing hard but a smile spread across my face. Life lost all sense of urgency. Yes, I had to finish my workout. Yes, I had to get to many places. Yes, I had to start my work day. But for that moment, I sat with the butterfly and watched the garden below my window and wondered of its wonders.

I needed that. If only to remind myself that time is elastic if you can be present.

Until next month,

Stay still,

Akshay

PS: While writing this, I had Radiohead’s album OK Computer playing in the backdrop. The song The Tourist came along and when I reached the end of this draft, I switched focus to the song and I heard Thom York yell, “Idiot, slow down, slow down.” And it all made sense.

I didn’t plan any of this. But often, by not planning you open yourself and allow the universe to fill in.