Alternate Encounters
A letter between humans, a contract between souls, and words to bridge the two.
Parts of this essay were written in response to a prompt by during a
catch-up meeting. I am grateful to her for introducing Iffat Nawaz’s Living Letters to us. Living Letters is a series of workshops that involves writing letters to the people in our lives. The event description and our prompt for the evening was, "What if we wrote a letter to a chosen someone while they are alive and thriving, in which we would pour our hearts out without thinking about consequences?"I always believed we were more than the lines we said and wrote. If life was a movie and God was our scriptwriter, God gave us very limited lines. Because I am more than the role I played. And I say beyond what you said. When we are not talking to each other, when we are not on the screen, when there is no action, drama, and suspense, we are still breathing, living, and thinking. And now our story is over. But both of us are alive. Even though God has no lines for us, I want to speak to you. I want to know who you are beyond what happened to us. After the director says pack up, where do you and I go? Can we go for a coffee? Is it possible for us to sit somewhere and write our own lines? New ones? Are we allowed by fate to do that? I don't know but I'd like to give it a shot. I want to meet the human behind the actor, the soul behind the story, the presence behind the lesson, the fact behind the fiction, the truth behind the habit, the stillness behind the repeated pattern. Do you?
There is agency in writing letters to someone without the pressure of having them read it. It is like journaling, but you have an imagined audience, someone other than you, who your words are meant for. Words convey an energy and not always can we express them or expect others to receive them. Relationship dynamics enable or disable us from saying what we want to say. But verbalizing feelings is very important to be able to understand our own selves. It shows us who we are at any given moment.
I believe that the words we carry in our brains are the ones that come out of us and get reflected back at us. But not all words that come out of us are said. And so many words remain inside us, living, without our knowledge, creating our reality without our conscious effort. We carry some through our lineage. And the rest we pick up from the world around us. When we find ourselves in relationships that are intimate, whether within the home or outside it, we are compelled to use words in a certain way. Between sound and silence, between truth and lies, we either follow norms or rebel them. Sometimes they begin to gnaw at us from the inside. And sometimes, we rise above them. It is essential for our words to be released in a safe way.
The play of words between two individuals creates a story between them. A story that is made up of several games that they will play over a lifetime, and if you believe, multiple lifetimes. According to new age theorists, souls have contracts with each other that define the way their time together will unfold. The goal for such a contract is growth of the soul through learning of lessons and if the goal is not achieved over one lifetime, the souls will come together again in another lifetime to fulfill the goal of learning the lessons. According to this theory, souls come together to help each other evolve. Once the lesson is learned, the contract ends and this will be signified either by both people parting or relating with each other in a new way, forming a new contract. It is also believed that contracts can be changed through conscious effort. This theory gives purpose to every encounter and suggests that this purpose is larger than the people involved. But it is not without its own blind spots. I find it hard to relate it to situations of extreme abuse, torture and death. But I also acknowledge my own limitations as a human being who still has a lot to learn about life and the way it works.
Whether one believes in these theories, or not, life itself is proof that the way we relate to people is subject to change over time. Even if things remain unspoken, there is a part of our consciousness that continues the conversation with the other. Writing letters is a way for us to access that conversation (or imagine it) and bring it to our conscious mind. Writing for this prompt and listening to my fellow writer-friends read their letters helped me make a connection between the possibility of conscious change in the way we relate to others, if not externally, then at least internally. Writing letters and sharing them in a safe space can change the way we feel about people and our experiences with them. It can heal us. By acknowledging my feelings and writing to another without the expectation of them carrying my words or responding to them, I was able to separate myself from the part of me that was caught up in a dance with them. And in doing so, I was able to imagine other possibilities of existence for both of us. I was able to see how relationship labels, gender, ethnicity, age, social customs, religious allegiance, caste, class and other factors define how we relate to another. Some of these dynamics are more vulnerable than others. The bottom line is, it is not just the person, but also the dynamic that we are in, that will define how we experience each other.
It made me wonder, if I knew someone in a different way, would things be different? I think so. With this realization, I allow myself to soften into life. A letter can melt a contract. The words we choose are everything.
What if you were my neighbour, and the only conversation we had was in the lift. I'd know very little about you, but we would smile every day on our way down the lift as we left for work.
What if you were that introvert in my class who had very few friends and one day, we ended up talking because the teacher paired us up for an assignment. It was nice to talk to you for a little while but then the assignment would be over and it was time to go back to our own groups of friends. I'd meet you several years later, at an alumni meet, hug you tight and remind you of this memory.
What if you were my colleague at work who along with me joined his first job and felt clueless in the corporate world. We would share lunch and collectively bitch about the management and our regrets on starting our careers on the wrong foot. Those conversations would be just right for us to detox, get back to our desks, work in the present and dream for a better future.
Wow Parool - so much to think about!
Loved this one - very thoughtful, and a very interesting thread of ideas to unravel there. Especially loved the line - " But not all words that come out of us are said."