Shall we dance?

It’s the end of a long day. I’m at home, sitting absolutely still on the couch. I feel overwhelmed, like a vessel that’s filled to the brim. It’s the good kind of overwhelmed because I’m overwhelmed with happiness; so much so that I feel that I’m going to start crying any moment. I had a wonderfully rewarding day today. I presented my work for the first time in my department and received a very enthusiastic and encouraging response to my work. I attended a teaching workshop where I managed to convince a group of absolute strangers from impossibly diverse backgrounds that the human gut is a fascinating and wondrous system to study. But this overwhelming joy has very little to do with all of that. Instead it comes from a brief couple of minutes in an hour long tango class. 

I want for so badly to be able to describe it to you, but try as I may I feel as though no words could actually do this feeling justice. Have you ever been so aware of something that the world sort of melts away for a little while. Your eyes are open but you aren’t really seeing anything. You are awake but you aren’t really thinking. Your brain is just absolutely quiet; no inner commentary, no internal dialogue. It’s the loveliest sort of silence. I know my description sounds like being in a daze, but it’s not; in fact it is the exact opposite. You have such crystal clear focus that your actions actually don’t need any thinking; it’s instinctive, like a reflex. It’s you and your partner, the music and the movement; all intertwined in a way that you can’t really tell one apart from the other. You lose yourself for just a little while and become part of this ephemeral whole and it is magical. 

How much fuller and richer would our experience of life be if we could just be more like this. Live life like this perfect tango. Not react to or “deal with” the circumstances in our life, constantly analyzing if we are moving in the right direction or whether other people approve of where we are going. What if, instead, life were your dance partner. Circumstances lead and you follow; and just like in tango, you aren’t dancing for an audience but only for yourself, for the sheer joy of creating that movement with your partner. There’s no right or wrong move; there’s beauty in just being still and connecting with the other person, beauty in finding that sync where the lead and the follow are virtually indistinguishable. You can go slow or fast or even be still; but connected....always connected. And in that connection there is magic…..in that connection there is peace. 

What if we were to get up every morning and say to life….”Shall we dance?”

To each his own

 

It has been a year since I officially received my PhD degree and with it the hard-earned right to call myself Dr. Namrata Iyer. Despite all the effort that went into earning that prefix, it is one I am still acutely uncomfortable using. Its as if using it gives an impression of being something I am not. Doctor, in my books, has always been someone who is working to save lives, an expert in his field, an authority. And expertise is something I felt I sorely lacked at the end of my pursuit of this degree.

I used to always find it weird that this degree was called Doctor of Philosophy. Its been the subject of many a joke in my graduate life, with students mourning about the "sage/hermit"-like life they were forced to lead on graduate salaries and having to forsake most materialistic desires! But having come out alive and whole from this process, I am beginning to realize how apt that title is.

PhD essentially is a process of examining the world around you, whether at a micro or macro scale. Looking at one tiny drop in this vast ocean of unexplained phenomena and asking a question of it; a question whose answer might provide some clue as to its true nature. Most of the time these questions do nothing more than satisfy our curiosity. But the beauty is that in the process of asking this question, you end up learning things about yourself you would never have discovered otherwise.

No two graduate experiences are alike and some are decidedly harder than the others. I for one had it easy by most standards. Not too much pressure, freedom to plan my work, timely completion of the thesis and a decent recommendation to go where I wish. Despite that, my PhD posed one challenge that till date I struggle with....and that is dealing with failure. Coming into graduate school, most of us have an excellent academic record, top of our class, good research experience and all that jazz. In short, we're used to being successful at what we do. But then, suddenly we find ourselves not only in the company of equally brilliant peers but also staring down a question/project that comes with no guaranteed solutions.

Apart from the rigors of dealing with our mentors, colleagues and their expectations, the project we choose is in essence a black box without any instruction manual. Especially in fields like biology, the things you deal with literally have a mind of their own. Sometimes things come together like a neatly assembled IKEA piece and sometimes you realize you don’t even have all the pieces to begin with. In a field where each bacterium, each mouse you pick up is unique, you are struggling to discern a hint of pattern or a trend amidst a sea of noise. For many, this struggle ends in triumph while some face down defeat, sometimes at the fag end of their graduate tenure.

Having found myself in the latter category, I was faced with a sort of existential crisis. 5 years of my life invested and nothing concrete to show for it. It made me wonder if I'd made the wrong choice doing my PhD and whether I'm really meant to be a researcher. Maybe I just don’t have what it takes to make it in this field. Its a long and hard fall to take for someone who, while showing outward humility, never really expected to fail at anything. But being in that position forced me to take a long and hard look at what I really want in my life. It made me step out of the preconceived notion of what life after PhD should be like and make peace with the uncertainty of the future. Not everyone is destined to be a PI and that doesn't mean there isn't a place for you in the system. Being a part of a good research team with a good leader can be just as satisfying as leading one, as long as you are doing work that you find engaging. When faced with the question of whether or not I want to a postdoc, I realized taking that on doesn't mean I am sentencing myself to an academic rat race. And it turned out to be a wonderful decision in the end. I was lucky to find a group and an environment that allows me to grow academically and also personally. I've explored both teaching and science writing in the few months that I've been here and look forward to building a path that allows me integrate things I am passionate about.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not touting myself as a success story....far from it. All I know is that PhD needn't be the be all and end all of your life. It is just one chapter, one experience and your success and failure in that isn't necessarily an indicator of how the rest of your life will shape up. Whether or not it leads you to academic success, it definitely does leave you stronger and better equipped to ask questions of life and deal with the answers you get. It is a degree that each one of us would be fortunate to have. So even though I persist in my discomfort with the prefix doctor, I am proud of being Namrata Iyer, PhD.

I do.....???

Age has its many advantages. Take my case for example, almost thirty and yet unmarried, but with a huge storehouse of information on the institution that is marriage. It’s one of the many perks of having almost every one of your near and dear friends married. It’s a privilege to have seen many of those relationships go from being “just friends” and in some cases, strangers, to becoming life partners….and each one unique. Some cases where relationships have just grown stronger and stronger over the years, and some where time and circumstances tore people apart. Considering all this information I have, one would think I should’ve figured out this whole marriage thing after all. Well, I sure as hell tried.

Our movies do a great job of drilling in this notion that when the right person comes along….you just know it. You get this gut feeling…that it’s meant to be. It’s a lovely thought and I’ve seen it happen too. Not the love at first sight kinda thing of course. But two people who are with each other and just somehow know that they want that person in their life forever. This calm certainty, without ever having to analyze or think about it. God I wish I had gut feelings like that. With me, well, knowledge or insight has always been hard earned. Marriage always has and still does, to some extent, freak me out, though my concerns have changed over the years. I went from worrying over whether the other person was right for me, whether he really loved me to wondering whether I was right for him; whether I could be trusted to fulfil on a lifetime commitment to someone. I’ve lived enough by now to know that saying you love someone at one point doesn’t just ensure that those feelings last the rest of your life. It takes real effort, each and every day, to keep that alive. Sounds boring, sounds tough….not at all romantic. Well then, it must be the truth.

I watched this movie as a kid…it was, and still is, one of my favourites. The Runaway Bride. A story of this girl who keeps running away from her own weddings; panicking at the very last moment in the face of this lifetime commitment. Until…she gazes into the soulful eyes of Richard Gere, someone who knows the real her, when she herself doesn’t.  And she just knows, that he’s the one for her. Well, I made the movie sound horrible…well done Namu!!! Don’t get me wrong, it really is a wonderful movie. And yes, I don’t blame the heroine…..those soulful eyes really are irresistible. But what I loved about her, is this desire to be the ideal woman for the person she is with, to the point that she lost herself in the process. Comical though it may seem, it’s something I myself have felt. 

Nobody ever asked me to change or criticized my choices or appearance. I have been lucky that way. But tragedy is…they never had to. The voice in my head was doing that for me already. And is it really so wrong to do whatever it takes to make the person you care about happy? Well I tried, and I failed….multiple times. And dreadful though it was, it forced me into a situation I had always feared…being alone. There’s nothing I hate more in the world. And as promised, it was a horrible time in my life and I am really really glad that I had to go through it. It taught me a lot of things and I am truly grateful. When left to my own devices, I had no option but to figure out what I wanted for myself, by myself…without having anybody to approve or disapprove of the choices I made. I hated it…but it was liberating nonetheless! It takes a certain kind of confidence and comfort level with who you are to be willing to try new things and change. Being alone didn’t get me set into a rigid definition of me…just gave me the confidence that every change I make is my choice and not a sign of being lost or scared. I don’t think I could’ve built a happy relationship without that realization. I’m still very much a work in progress…I guess everyone is, in one way or another. 

There’s a line in that movie…a proposal but without the usual hearts and flowers. This unusual declaration that their marriage will have its tough times, with one or both left wondering sometimes whether they should bail. And yet, you know in your heart that you would be missing out on something if you didn’t ask that person to spend their life with you. Okay okay…it sounds much better when Richard Gere says it. Hell he could propose in Russian and still make it sound romantic. But that’s really all the certainty, all the guarantee you’ll ever have….what you feel for that person at that very moment and the willingness to try and build a happy life together. All the rest you kinda just take as it comes.  It’s so much more peaceful this way….knowing that there are no set right answers out there, no guarantees either. Suddenly, marriage  doesn’t seem that scary anymore. Well, that’s not entirely true. But it’s a good kinda scary….like the butterflies in your stomach when your nervous. Like a big adventure…with some guaranteed good company even though you’re not quite sure where the road leads. And if you do enough things right, the adventure can last a lifetime. If not, it’ll still be one helluva experience.

So then,do I really wanna go down that road?? I think…. I do!!! :)