(A few months after) Spring Cleaning

I cleaned my house yesterday. For anyone who knows me, this is a magnificent accomplishment. My philosophy is a clean room is the sign of a cluttered mind. So, my house isn’t really messy per say, just an appropriately disorganized environment for my creative consciousness. I have a friend who complains that he can’t come visit me without leaving with some sort of paint, or marker stain on his clothes. I tell him it’s a souvenir, from the most magical place on earth.

But every once in a while, it gets a bit much and I have to clean up. When I finally get to the cleaning part, I actually really enjoy it. There’s something oddly relaxing about mundanely removing a mess. Apparently, I’m not the only one who gets joy from getting rid of junk. Studies performed at Arizona Statue University show that maintaining a clean home makes people feel “happy, satisfied, comfortable, and healthy”. Associate Professor of Psychology, Carol Nemeroff, Ph.D., says, “The urge we have to clean may be a trait that is biologically programmed into us,” says Nemeroff. “And, because we know that good hygiene leads to good health, cleaning may ultimately be related to a basic survival instinct.”

According to research from the U.K., 57% of the population finds a feeling of satisfaction in cleaning. I guess I’m in the other 43% of the test subjects. I have a roommate in the fall for the first time in a year and a half. My biggest worry is that she may not be able to handle the mess that results from my liberal lifestyle. Whoever lives with me has to be well prepared. It’s not that I don’t like a clean house, it’s just that I don’t mind so much when it’s not. I’ve met other people who share similar opinions. I feel like it’s one of those things that very defined in a person, either you can handle a mess or you can’t. Research shows that 38% of women and 24% of men feel real stress about living in a messy environment.

Then there are people who really can’t. People who have clinical issues with cleanliness, to the point where it begins to control their lives. In the United States, approximated 3.3 million people suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder, that’s 2.3% of the population between ages of 18 – 24. That means that 1 in 200 American adults have OCD, and twice as many have reportedly had OCD at some point in their lives. OCD is on the long list of anxiety disorders, like agoraphobia and post-traumatic stress disorder, that terrify me. Whenever I see disease like this, in the frequent Grey’s Anatomy reruns I’ve been watching all summer, it just stumps me a bit. I can’t imagine having a chemical imbalance like that, affecting my life in every way.

It makes you realize how much chemistry and arrangement of neuron affect who we are. There’s more minor versions of this chemical control on our personalities; ticks, habits, addictions, they’re all rooting in brain chemistry. The realization that so much of ourselves is determined by biology shifted the way I interact with people. I accept that there’s certain decisions my friends make that I can never understand (Though, there’s probably many more of mine that leave them puzzled). Once you realize certain aspects of someone else will be inherently different due to their genetics, interaction between people gets beyond dominating the conversation, winning an argument, or changings some else’s opinions to your own, and there’s nothing left to do but learn.

I’ve always been a firm believer in the idea that ignorance is the root of prejudice. One of my gay friends used to always instruct the homophobic to get a gay friend. It was the best advice against exclusion I had ever heard. Friendship is one of the most powerful tools in fighting malicious ignorance.

So yes, there are certain decisions that other people make that we have to accept we can’t understand. But, the closer we get to people with differing opinions, the more we begin to, if not understand, at least respect their viewpoints too.

कल (kal)

I love the way words are like little definition puzzles. Understanding how a word got from a series of syllables to a having a concrete definition can always be a fun ride. It’s even more fun when you take it overseas. I love having my multicultural friends explain what words mean in their languages. My favorite part is asking them about the untranslatable words, the Spanish, German, Arabic, Korean, word that turn into be a phrases when expressed in English. The words that embody an idea that takes so many more to explain itself. I have one of these in my own language, my favorite Hindi word, कल (pronounced kal). The word कल means both tomorrow and yesterday, leaving listeners to figure out which one it is depending on tense and context. A concept difficult to grasp for my friend found unbelievable until the following:

I’ve always loved this word, mainly because of the idea that it represents. In Hindi, tomorrow and yesterday are the same. Past and future meld into one, what you did before and what you’re going to do now are both expressed through the same word. It readjusts your view to thinking in terms of today and everything else. There’s just now, and the rest of it.

It really encourages you to live in the moment, a notion that’s been on my mind a lot recently. Like my fellow collegiate friends, I frequently find myself discussing “the power of living in the moment” or many other common post-modernist talking points that have always been found on college campuses.

I think about it a lot, the environment and people I’m surround by. It tastes like idealism, with some rebellion sprinkled in, and is soaked in hopefulness. But what worries me is how ancient the recipe seems. I worry that all this idealism, struggle for positive change in the world, is just a side effect of being “the Youth”. A natural reaction to reaching adulthood while still hanging on to the hopes of adolescence, that’ll fade out by the end of the decade.

Oddly unsustainable optimism.

This thought depressed me for a long time. I’d worry that all the enthusiasm and energy with which I approach my life, education, and future career would eventually wane. Every day I would get further away from this age, and the vitalizing, revolutionizing feeling that comes with it. It felt like growing up meant the passion that comes with youth had to age too.

I hated the finite nature of those catalyzing feelings.

But then I realized, just because the attitudes of youth eventually disappear doesn’t mean they aren’t a powerful force. Throughout the years young people, in the short time that they stay that way, have shaped entire generations. In the 60s, youth brought about the Love Revolution affecting the music, politics, writing, and every other cultural aspect of the decade. Even today, young people all around the Middle East use the technologies they’ve grown up with, social networking sites, to bring about dramatic change in the nations governments.

Youth has power, youth can bring change and being in this chapter of my life I feel like I have a sense of responsibility to my generation. When I turned twenty, an older friend said something to me that galvanized this feeling, “On my 20^th birthday all I was thinking was, this is the beginning of the most life-shaping decade of my life.”

And he was right, this is the most directionally defining decade of my life.

So this is my advice to all the young people sharing my sense of social responsibility, wanting to catalyze some sort of change in this world before you become obsolete.

Forget about कल for a while, because all we have is today to make a lasting difference.

Falling asleep to television...

When I was younger, I always thought I was the only one who fell asleep to television. When I was finally old enough to discover the sleep timer on my tv remote, I was thrilled to know there were others. According to a study conducted at the University of Maryland Medical Center, “many people fall asleep with the television on in their room. Watching television before bedtime is often a bad idea. Television is a very engaging medium that tends to keep people up”.

Still, every so often, I’ll be visiting a friend's place or crashing on someone's couch and still be shocked when I learn that they share my nighttime routine; thirty minutes, preferably set to a late night talk show.

The most recent friend to share my sedative said something that stuck with me. “It makes me feel like people are talking to me,” he said. Not the first thing one would associate with sleep, yet there is something oddly comforting about falling asleep to the sound of people, there’s something safe about it. Probably because it reminds us all of younger days in cribs, listening to family continue in the next room. Or maybe that was just my experience. Being Punjabi, often considered the Irish of India, my family has always had that unique quirk of expressing enthusiasm through volume. I’m sure many a young night was spent falling asleep listening to the sound of my father telling a new joke or my mother trying to add her two cents while fighting back chuckles.

Yet most sleep therapists don’t seem to accept my nostalgic views. They advise patients who are having trouble sleeping to “remove all mind-stimulating electronic devices from your bedroom”. Bringing a TV, iPod, or computer into the mix of the bedroom trains the brain to see it as a space for things other than sleep, making it more difficult to fall asleep when you want to.

Falling asleep with the television still on, or other types of auditory stimulations, disrupts REM cycles making it harder to fall into a deeper sleep. Making it harder to dream. I thought about it last weekend and realized I can’t remember the last dream I had. I have a vague sense of when it was, maybe three or so years ago, but I’ve almost completely forgotten about the sensation of dreaming.

This realization depressed me for a while until another friend told me that she’d been trying for months to get rid of her dreams. But she didn’t use the word dreams, she said nightmares instead. She told me about how she hadn’t been able to sleep, for months now, because of the nightmares. After hearing that, I was glad I no longer had dreams. I remembered nightmares again, the complete and utter lack of control you have when you mind takes you through its darker alleys.

But what keeps me excited about the world of dreams is the other extreme, dreams where you have complete control. There’s a scientific term for this, lucid dreaming. Lucid dreams are dreams where the sleeper is aware of the fact that they are dreaming. This allows them manipulate their dream environments, literally giving them the ability to create their dream worlds.

Lucid dreaming is such a powerful psychological phenomenon that therapists are using it to fight cases of chronic nightmares. At Ultrecht University in The Netherlands, the Department of Clinical Pyschology took 23 nightmare suffers and treated them with lucid dream therapy. When the study was over their lab report noted, “the nightmare frequency of both treatment groups had decreased,” leading them to conclude that, “Lucid dream therapy seems effective in reducing nightmare frequency, although the primary therapeutic component remains unclear”. These results show that dreams can be a formidable tool in eradicating chronic nightmares and anxiety but even the scientists who performed the study can’t tell us exactly why.

This leads me to ask several questions, starting with, what exactly are dreams? If they have the power to stop insomnia and fight anxiety, what else can they do? We all know dreams hold a significant space in our psyches, but when it comes to articulating this significance, even the scientists seem at a loss for words.

Apparently they’ve been trying for a while to define our nighttime delusions. In 1991, the year of my first birthday, the Lucidity Institute published a laboratory study entitled Other Worlds: Out-of-Body Experiences and Lucid Dreams. The report compared the experience of a lucid dream with the out of body experiences dying patients often experiences. The report says,

“We have concluded that OBEs can occur in the same physiological state as lucid dreams. If you believe yourself to have been awake, then you are more likely to take the experience at face value and believe yourself to have literally left your physical body in some sort of mental or "astral" body floating around in the "real" physical world. If you think of the experience as a dream, then you are likely to identify the OBE body as a dream body image and the environment of the experience as a dream world.”

When they’re dreaming, these people literally feel like they’re leaving their bodies and going to heaven, Nirvana, or whatever term organized religion chooses to put on the euphoria the comes from complete satisfaction. You may not want to reach god in your brain, but you have to at least be awestruck at the magnificent show your mind is putting on.

So the next time you’re heading to bed, stop before you set that sleep timer. Take a second to think about the worlds of wishful thinking you could be missing out on.