Nouns and Verbs
Do you remember what are nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs? I had to revisit and teach these parts of speech in my English class, leading me to a handful of realizations —
While it is true that ‘verbs are action words’, verbs, action, and words are all nouns.
A noun like love is meaningless if it is not practised like a verb, the way bell hooks reminded us. Like bread, it has to be, as Ursula K. Le Guin described, made and remade all the time.
The English language likes to waltz around its own rules. A word in English can be both an action and a thing. You can weather the cold weather, you can season with pepper in any season, you can plant a plant, or a kiss, and kiss change, and change a bulb, and light a little light. You must practice yoga to have a yoga practice, you’ve got to be writing a lot to have some of your writing shine out there. And the sexiest nouns have an in-built action in their etymological DNA - essay means to try and poem means to make. Aha
Wintering
There is also great relief in turning a noun into a verb. The continuous, -ing form of the verb sets a stationary thing into motion, a ‘process’ for you and me to slowly unravel. Last year, I came across Katherine May’s balm of a book ‘Wintering’ and months before I read it, I had already gained something deeply valuable from the title.
May does not refer to winter as just a season, but also a metaphor for difficult times, times when one feels frozen. I have experienced both, and often at the same time. Over the years, I have confronted how painful winter is for me, how much I need to do to simply bear it. Maybe another season tests your mettle, makes you unreasonably gloomy or irritable. Maybe not.
My existential angst, body aches and sensitivity are at their peak in winter. I feel ravaged, humiliated, kidnapped by the cold. If I have a tendency to indulge in self-pity, it’s 10x during those bleak days when the sun disappears like a recently-married friend. If I am alone, winter ensures I sense the loneliness deep in my bones. If I have trouble writing all year, in winter I forget I have language, pens, and fingers.
Worst of all, winter reminds me that I have a body, a body that has the audacity to demand time and attention. Can you believe it? It demands creamy moisture and thick covering. It protests my neglect. My skin becomes dust and marches to the inseam of my pants, my lips crack up, ribs hurt and crouch to hide the guttural scream for water and warm food. For a person disconnected from their body, self-care during bad weather doesn’t come naturally.
How do you cope with a season that rattles you?
May’s book teaches what to do with winter. ‘Wintering’ turns winter into a process of not just coping with the season but gathering its gifts along the way. Her words bring out the generosity of winter as the cold nights tuck us into our beds a bit earlier, a book in our hand, hands covered in hand warmers. It inspires us to commit ‘deeply unfashionable’ acts of slowing down, resting, listening to the body and syncing with the natural world.
I learned that winters are not just about the cold and the frozen and the dark, but also about enjoying my warm breath, the shimmering light of a new lamp, a cup of hot chocolate and fluorescent green socks.
This is the first year I am attempting to befriend winter. I bought my jackets before the winter collections were on display. My new Bajaj heater sits like an owl beside my writing desk. I went to the dry fruit store and asked the kind fella there to give me the best assortment in XYZ rupees. I played peek-a-boo with the sun and shamelessly turn my back to soak his warmth as if demanding a lover for a warm oil massage.
Winter is still painful, but wintering is exciting now.
Adulting
Learning to prepare for the changing seasons is a part of growing up. One day you realise like the poet Robert Hayden, that your parent bore the worst weather to make it better for you, out of a lonely love, and that you have to now do it for yourself.
Another noun that was verbed in the last decade was adult. When I first read the word ‘adulting’ on websites like Buzzfeed, I ignored it. The word hid behind a door in my mind for years. In recent months, I saw myself fail at accepting challenges at work. I saw the mess that is my bank statement, the 5-days-in-a-row payment to one naughty company - Dominos, my size zero savings. My social skills have atrophied to an extent where being in one room with people is enough to induce a neat panic attack. It is taking me daunting amounts of time to improve my equations with food, time, and technology.
In short, I have been failing at being an adult.
And yet, I have grown suspicious of childhood nostalgia. I find that I prefer being a failing, tangled, imperfect adult to remaining a helpless child. I like how responsibility is shaping me, and how I value having the resources to help myself.
As May says: to winter one must stop wishing it was summer, similarly: to adult, one must stop wishing it was still childhood. There is merit in embracing the power and privilege and messy glory of being a grown-up in the world. There is compassion in seeing our parents and their generation as people who had to grow up overnight and had no language to speak about it.
And so I arrived at the word adulting again, found music in its -ing, the permission to be a work in progress. Adulting is no crash course. It is not an entrance exam either. It is not even a sport, though it depends on everyday practice, there are no medals and the only opponent is trapped inside our mirror.
So what is adulting? The only way I have been able to understand this experience of being an adult human in the world is through paradoxes, through contrasting ideas that hold truth together. I have been working on a list of the paradoxical contracts of adulting, which I hand to you eagerly:
The Paradoxical Contracts of Adulthood
While adulting, we will learn to explore and enjoy our solitude. And yet we will step out (or click that zoom link), being socially curious. We will find companionship and propose collaboration while continuing our baatein with our tanhaai.
While adulting, we will give up our learned helplessness, walk out of our own pity parties. And yet we will recognise when we need to ask for help. For us, alumni of feminism, isn’t independence overrated? Let’s be interdependent.
While adulting, we will not expect others to guess our needs as if we were babies. We will learn to communicate with ourselves and others, on paper and across a table. And yet we will choose silence for the powerful clarity with which it communicates. Let’s not over-explain, justify, say a hundred sorries every day.
While adulting, we will take small risks. Though fear will ask us to hide, we will go seek what is on the other side of it. We will have the courage to be vulnerable. And yet, we will preserve ourselves from people, things, and images that hurt our body and spirit.
While adulting, we will accept that the world is a brutal place. And yet we will also be open to how benevolent it is. Let’s reduce the news, let’s travel to new places, and soon this paradox will be clear.
While adulting, we will train to be good receptionists at the guest house of the body, we will welcome all emotions. We will get better at feeling [v] our feelings [n]. And yet, we will encourage ourselves to take action. Emotions often follow actions.
While adulting, we will persevere. Growing up is constant showing up. And yet, we will quit with pride at times. We will rest and retreat, every night and every winter. We are not machines. (Say this once everyday)
While adulting, we learn to take responsibility. It starts with recognising when we are regressing into childish behaviour when we are in the swamp of avoidance and resistance. Responsibility involves doing repetitive tasks one does not particularly enjoy. And yet, and yet, and yet, we will allow our inner child to lead the fun times, to find joy and have a little playdate every day.
While adulting, especially as an artist, we will engage in invisible hard work, in drafts and prototypes, that nobody will see, we will have to unplug and go underground. And yet, we will coax ourselves to emerge again, to show our work, to share our gift.
While adulting, we will find and own the true richness of our families of origin. Humour? Cooking repertoire? Curiosity? And yet, we will give up the rest, especially the inheritance of generational trauma.
While adulting, we will strive to make better choices, escape the need to make a ‘perfect decision after perfect deliberation’. We will make the best of the choices we made in the past. And yet, we will reserve the right to change our mind, to choose afresh.
While adulting, we will learn to be in the present moment, accept who we are right now. And yet, we will befriend our past and future selves before they sneak up on us. We will thank our past selves for surviving and create conditions for our future selves to thrive. At the social level, we will read history precisely because we can leave a better legacy.
While adulting, we will identify our imposter system for the defence mechanism it is. We will trust our skills and work at the workplace. And yet, we will discover that the real fear is not: everyone will find out how incapable and fraudulent I am, the real fear is: I will find out how powerful and worthy I am.
While adulting, we will leave school and the obsession of paper degrees, but commit to lifelong learning and evolution. And yet we will accept that who we are is enough. As Jung says, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” We are Evolving and Enough. *wink*
While adulting, we will discern when to advocate for ourselves with fire, and when to surrender with trust. We will break the toy that is our ‘self’ to understand all its parts, and then reassemble it so that it hops or makes music or whatever it was truly meant to do. Therapy is one safe way to do this.
While adulting, we value our attention as our superpower. We pay it to the right people and pursuits. We eat with so many senses tuned in, that we rarely feel like spending on artificial food. We learn to invest in buying such new things, that they eventually become the old things we hold dear when we don’t wish to spend at all.
While adulting, we set our house in order as well as change the world. And yet we cultivate the humility to leave perfectionism for Aamir Khan and idealism for universities.
While adulting, we share our knowledge and resources. We are always willing to teach the subject ‘How to Treat Raju 101’ (you insert your name okay?). And yet, we will remain teachable by all people and nature.
Adulting is harder for those who choose to live by scripts other than the social ones prewritten for their age and gender, updated for modern times. And yet, we marvel at how much more joyful this hard process is.
Which contract made sense to you? This is not an exhaustive list. If you have toyed with such paradoxes as you grow in the world, please add it in the comments.
Please share this essay with other warm adults.
Reading this on the coldest day in my city hits different ♥️
I kept nodding (sometimes taking deep breaths and closing my eyes and nodding) while reading. Thank you for sharing this!! This is refreshing. I am still brewing the idea of adulthood and adult-ing. For me, adulting meant be a machine, follow a script, do what others do, life will be fine. And I did that as a kid. I was an adult-kid. Always working for that 'good girl' medal. Now, I am an adult-kid too. Choosing to leave school(the link you posted), designing my own way of life, having fun everyday. Understanding that 'good and bad' are my own judgements against myself and it is that what makes it more hurtful.
I hated winters too. I experienced snow for the first time some 5 years ago. First three years I hated my job and my life and that worsened in winter as I had to walk in snow, slip fall etc etc. Snow looked like dandfruff flakes and it disgusted me.
But after I quit that job, explored my own life and what I want from life, and started having fun. I made snowman. I played with snowballs, I jumped on fluffy cotton candy type snow. And snow flakes now look like sugar powdered on chocolate cake.
I tried the hotchocolate with marshmellows as they show in movies etc and I tried hard to feel like a character from some poorly written rom-com themed around Christmas. However, when I made some hot-spicy-tangy rasam and sipped that while watching the snowfall from my 4th floor hostel window, it hit all the right spots. It was a never-written highly emotional real life thing happening. Like the 19th point, it was harder to follow that poorly written script of how I should probably feel, but updating it to suit `me`. The process of making that rasam from scratch was long and difficult but very very joyful unique and only for me!