So…

What is all this about? What’s with the whole ‘lightness’ thing I’ve been talking about? Well, I don’t know how many people can follow the convolutions of my twisted mind, but try to hang with me here if you can.

Kundera talks about how “a life, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance…and means nothing”. This is because eternal return is nothing more than a myth, and any event in the world occurs only once, leaving behind nothing permanent. On the other hand, if “every second of our lives occurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus was nailed to the cross”. Thus, every move we make in our lives will bear a heavy responsibility since it will happen again and again, turning moments into permanent markers of our actions.

I think that every one of us longs for that weight. We yearn to leave our mark on this world, desperate to have our ephemeral lives affect the course of this world in some permanent way. This is why we want to be scientists, to make a discovery of significance that will change the way people live. Or rock stars, to have our music waft through the airwaves centuries after we are buried or burnt. Or architects, to erect a physical entity that will hopefully stand long enough to be seen by our great-grand children.

Thus, every moment in our lives, we try to do something that will help us achieve this permanence, filling ourselves with the weight of responsibility and pretending that what we are doing somehow transcends the mere window of time given to us in this world. It is not a coincidence that the way most of us find relaxation is when we do nothing, or do something ‘trivial’ like dance, play, travel or party. In those moments, we shed our heavy burden of accountability and enjoy doing something that will have no affect whatsoever on the course of the world. We know that getting drunk and doing the cha-cha, even in a world of eternal return, will have no significant impact on the planet’s destiny. Thus, we enjoy the lightness of the moment, have a good time, and then go back to wearing the cloak of responsible living.

This brings me to keviv. For keviv, lightness is not just a moment of silence between the loud hammering of everyday life. Lightness is a way of life, a continuous harmony interrupted on occasion by a few seconds of heavy responsibility. In society’s eye, keviv is a lazy, care-free, irresponsible person, with no sense of direction and no goals for his life. In reality, keviv is just choosing to embrace lightness, choosing to avoid the burden of living life worrying about how every little action will be etched in permanence. Also, according to the eternal return of Hindu philosophy, actions in this life affect the next life of the human, and this continues till salvation is achieved. Although this acts as an impetus for some people to behave a certain way in order to be saved from hardships in the next life, keviv believes that life should be used to find that salvation, searching for the true meaning of life and connecting with our soul rather than trying to change the course of our next birth.

Thus, keviv lives for the underlying forces that propel each of us. He searches for love, for it’s meaning, for its origins, for its nature and for its happening. He wants to spend a lifetime searching for his true love, believing in his soul mate as the one God meant for him to connect with. He explores emotions, trying to understand the complex and mysterious forces that pull at our heart-strings and control our inner selves. He tries to reach out to as many people as he can, in order to learn about different lives and to enrich his own. He enjoys the beauty around him, beauty in its various forms, beauty that God intended for us to live amongst, beauty that lives within each of us.

keviv causes a lot of problems for me, since, as Vivek, I am supposed to be a responsible young man making a living for himself in this world. Everytime keviv becomes ‘irresponsible’, choosing to enjoy the moment rather than think about the long-term affects of his actions, Vivek becomes affected. If keviv chooses to wander the streets of New York City taking in the beauty of the electric night, Vivek looses time to study, time to do something more constructive. If keviv chooses to indulge in an emotionally draining love-affair, it prevents Vivek from expending his full energies in working hard in school and finding a good job. Thus, it becomes very hard to balance the needs of keviv with the responsibilities of Vivek.

Leading keviv’s life makes it very hard for Vivek to survive in this society, in this world filled with expectations and accountabilities. Emotions rarely carry much weight in this society, and the soul has become a forgotten being in this increasingly materialistic, cut-throat world. Yet, to keviv, love and other emotions form the very basis of life, and the soul carries him on his journey. Thus, Vivek has to carefully balance this with the tangible realities of the world outside, trying to form a career and become a successful person in terms of the yardsticks set by the society around him.

That is the unbearable lightness of being keviv.

As you can imagine, it becomes hard for me to stay sane with all of this going on in my head. Thus, I figured that if I had a place to output all of this madness, it would help me maintain my sanity in the long run. This blog/journal/site is meant more to help me understand myself by writing about how I think/react/live on a daily basis, and if anyone else chooses to join me in this mess by following what I write, so be it.