Musings at 58

I turned 58 last Thursday. Never one for fussing about my birthdays, I didn’t make plans. But it turned memorable of its own accord, starting with a couple of people coming to my home to watch the CPL match the night before.

Three, actually. Two of whom I had not previously met, but whose presence on our landscape has always brought me succour; and the other, my friend who was scandalised that we had never even said hello. Things could have gone any which way, especially as our mutual friend ended up being fairly late.



But they had me at hello. The night sauntered along so merrily that by the time the match ended jubilantly with a TKR victory, we listened to music and shared stories until the wee hours of the morning when my birthday crept up. The nature of the conversations was a powerful reminder of the importance of community.

If we had not inhabited a shared philosophical outlook, a common tribe of convictions, it might have been a superficial encounter—pleasant, polite, and passing. Instead, it awakened the sense of belonging, one that has been flagging under the dead weight of a society that seems to have gone to sleep. Yes, there is a tremendous amount of agitation, frantic energy that is concentrated on crime and the other malignancies plaguing our spaces.

Perhaps we have been driven into a state of such panic that we cannot pause and reflect on the roots of these afflictions. Have you ever seen crazy ants? Have you ever noticed the difference between them and soldier ants? While the crazy ants seem to be perpetually scurrying around erratically, soldier ants have a focussed, disciplined pattern of movement, like they know where they are heading and what their goal is. True, people are living on the edge; stress has them teetering on the brink of total collapse.

And we are being herded along this road of madness by the vacuous minds with raised voices inciting dotishness and urging us to forget reason and spew bile, particularly through social ­media platforms. Outside this crazy-ants frenzy, nothing is happening, nothing is changing; it is a deathly stillness. We are not moving towards any meaningful positions of action.

If the sky is falling, we are chooking it down with a broom, squawking and asking everyone but ourselves to prop it back up. Don’t you find it exhausting to be surrounded by all this vicious chatter? It is tiresome for me, and it makes it even harder to write a column, because always my back brain is ­wondering: what’s the point. So, I welcomed the unexpected reminder that communities still exist, particularly the ones where I feel that I belong.

For most of my life, I have gravitated towards people who are much older and much younger than myself. I treasure the wisdom of my elders, as much as I relish the vitality of my juniors. I feel privileged to have that exposure.

I suppose it is why I have lived with the idea of being both protégé and mentor, lapping up knowledge and passing it along. As much as I am innately reclusive, I understand the power of human connection; how facial expressions, body language, gestures and tone can infuse texture into a conversation. We don’t quite get those nuanced messages through our devices.

I think it was Jimmy Carr who was talking about how things are no longer passed along by elders because young people are learning via YouTube videos and Google. Not only is it an impersonal replacement that robs us of vital bonding experiences, but honestly, people peddle all kinds of crap on their pages, and naïve minds lap it up. There is a question I often ask when the young ones are touting this method, or that fad.

They say you should do this, or you shouldn’t do that. Who is they? I ask because I think it is important for us to pause and reflect on whose instructions we are taking without questioning the source or the source’s agenda. There is a kind of absurdity in the mindless way we are satisfied to passively receive these messages and this is why I think we can so easily be brainwashed into accepting nonsensical premises and positions.

And it is why people with voices can trumpet blatant untruths with confidence and impunity. We absorb the toxicity, infecting ourselves with it and regurgitating it on social media pages as invective, cruel and insensitive, and serving no positive purpose. It’s personal poison.

Some years ago, feeling overwhelmed by the sense that there were so many irritants in my space that it was blistering my sense of peace, I made a list with three headings: people who brought negative, positive or neutral vibes into my space. I resolved to distance myself from the negative ones. Not to slap them away, but to ease them out of my space, because sometimes their negativity is unconscious.

It made a huge difference to the quality of my life. Although it has meant cutting ties with mostly blood relatives, I do not regret it one bit. That’s why I strongly advocate redefining the word family.

It’s more meaningful to fill your space with people from your community. By the way, my birthday was made more special by the precious lunch I shared with my daughter. I couldn’t have asked for more.

—Author Vaneisa Baksh is an editor, writer and cricket historian. E-mail: [email protected] or express@trinidadexpress.

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