tsvetoslav shalev

The first time I realised I wasn’t invincible was during lunch at my grandparents’. I was in my pre-teens, chowing down on cabbage sarma – a ball of rice, mince and spices, wrapped in pickled cabbage leaves, boiled for a long time. When cooked right, the wrapper has a distinct snap and chew to it, while the filler provides this piquant, savoury taste. The combination itself, absurdly addictive. You never eat just one of these “dumplings”. Regardless of their size, three at the very minimum. In addition, I’d usually grab one each and every chance I could, whenever I entered the kitchen throughout the day. To add to the argument about my voracious appetite, I seldom savour what I eat. Unless in the company of a good friend or a colleague, as soon as food arrives, an invisible stopwatch starts ticking someplace in the back of my mind, and the contents of the containers before me, a critical deadline looming. As I am deleting one sarma after another I can feel a sudden tightening of the throat. A larger cabbage string, torn but not properly chewed on, has somehow made its way down my windpipe. Panic has total control over me, as I try to cough this thing out and eventually find a way to just barely pull it out, by pinching it with my index and thumb fingers and pulling on it. The incident left me deeply shaken. So much so, that for a time I was quite afraid of eating anything. Every bite of food had to register and make its intent to go down the foodpipe clearly, before I was ready to swallow. And even then, it always felt like a gamble with my life. The closest example of how it felt is if you’ve ever feared of choking when being asked to swallow a large pill.

That incident was well over three decades ago. Since, I’ve had many other near-misses with death. Some still very frightening, while others oddly mundane feeling. I’ve also had family members, school classmates and familiar faces from my hometown die on me throughout the years; the word on their departure reaching me, almost always when I least expect it. Nevermind the fact that with the high-availability of “social” media and news, we unwittingly bear witness to death and suffering on an industrial scale, too. Yet, my relationship with the end has never been a healthy one, philosophically speaking. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – sandwiched between two eternities, our existence seems way, way too fragile and brief. So upset am I by this unraveling, that in my mid twenties I began talking about death as this huge waste of time and potential. Knowing that each and every one of us alive right now will someday expire, we still get out of bed and go about daily chores as if all of this is normal. But it isn’t. And still, I cannot help framing the existence of complex life in terms not too dissimilar to those of managing the lifecycle of a product or service. My Orthodox Christian upbringing doesn’t really work for me on this subject-matter. A god I haven’t chosen for myself has allowed my tortured existence, is constantly expecting me to check in on him and finally decides to either reclaim my soul, or discard it in Hell. Our souls, those of our loved ones, of strangers and enemies are all merely loaned to us, then reclaimed in due course. Those of us still on this side of the veil of tears, we’ve not much left but to light a candle to said god, and plead with him to spare a thought for the souls of our dearly departed. I am not a huge fan of such an arrangement and it gives me no solace to speak of. Contrast and compare that with a fairly recent practice by Buddhist and Shintoist practitioners, of allowing folks to post letters directly addressed to friends and loved ones no longer alive. No middle-man, no pleading, religious practice as infrastructure and as a service, enabling an impossible connection between the world of the living and the realm of the dead, free of the burden of inhumane rituals. At some point, the amassed letters are burned as an offering. Ashes to ashes, literally. I was moved to tears, learning about this, but no solace to be had just the same. Just a neverending effort in futility. Death is the sort of full stop you cannot expect a reply to follow from. Ever.

As previously mentioned somewhere in my posts, the reasoning above is merely a narration of my poor attempts at reconciliation of the human condition and this reality we all inhabit. I am yet to figure out how to properly break this cycle of rumination, or I run the risk of wasting a life by spending it largely on endless preparation to begin. Here’s the video that inspired this: https://youtu.be/vVvUiHKKY6A?si=fAOyOBAxCU3keOPn&t=18. I hope it helps.