I spent much of last week in Nepal, primarily operating as a corporate menace but also reading, walking, eating, drinking, and being a person when I could.
There's a nice thing about being away briefly from your routine life. You get to pretend to be someone else for a second and depersonalize from your own going ons. I sometimes do this odd thing when I travel, where I make up a totally false personal history to chatty cab drivers who invariably ask with an obscure accented twang, "So where you from?"
Me: "It's complicated.”
Them: "Nothing is complicated."
Me: "My mother is half Nepalese and half Indian, and my father is from Bihar in India. They eloped in the 80's. My grandmother's sister still lives here, and I'm here to meet her."
Them: "What do you do?"
Me: (serious voice) "I'm an economist."
Facts:
I stopped studying Math when I was in grade 8.
The people I had planned to meet are not associated in any manner with my hypothetical grandaunt.
My parents, Ganesh and Radha, were victims of the oppressive Tamil matrimonial mafia. They had the exact opposite of an elopement.
I can be a joker sometimes because cheap thrills are the juice of life. But a part of me was also trying to bridge with this lovely, kind dude who owed me nothing, but still presented such an openness and curiosity toward me. It felt important to be understandable to him in some way. And in the moment, temporarily making up a Nepalese heritage seemed uncontroversial.
I think a lot about casual exchanges such as this one.
On most days, these allegedly low-stakes interactions offer an opportunity to pick up your energy. It's often the place where who you really are shows up. And it's where you encounter the under-discussed but beautiful thing that is human decency.
I was in Kathmandu's familiar traffic. The dense air smelled faintly musty, and you could see tons of dust on the horizon. For several minutes all of us humans waited for the congestion to let up. Our faces had a passive and worn appearance. It felt like we were trusting vaguely in the motions of the day.
By my window, a couple on a scooter spoke sweetly to their toddler and fixed his hat. Behind them was a man with a cart of oranges just waiting around, shouting out loud about god knows what to no one in particular. On the roadside by a sweet shop, this little girl with pigtails put a marigold garland on a puppy. The puppy was delighted.
These little performances of humanness are cool. They feel like the thing that holds us together. You are reminded that everyone is doing their best, and you feel called to do your part in contributing to this tenderness.
In the days I was in Kathmandu, everyone I asked to take a picture readily obliged. Some even took several and then asked if I was happy with them. The guards at the government building I was trying to enter figured a way to get me in without a pass so I would arrive on time. When I hiked from Nagarkot to Kathmandu over 20 kilometers, I relied more on the goodness of strangers pointing me the right way than Google Maps.
On the face of it, these are small, silly, nothing moments—just people doing the bare minimum. But I tend to savour these a lot more than stuffy, officious interactions. There's a sparkle and sincerity to these sub-anonymous exchanges that conferences and high-off events just cannot seem to accommodate.
I'll say that ephemeral connections are more powerful than we think, and we should be more present in them. Their transience makes them a really good way to know who we are and how we show up. They are an opening to experience a shared sense of humanity. And they are, by design, perfectly balanced for connection and detachment.
Intimacy doesn't need to be the sole privilege of those in our inner circles. Yes, the inner circle is good, etc., but the puppies, calves, little children, and grandmothers in the corners of our world could also do with some tender loving. It's easy, it's free, and it feels stinking good.
Fight me. I'll wait.
These are the moments I live for! Whenever I am fed up or uninspired, I go for a walk. I realise that only when we go looking for such everyday magic, we find it freely available all around us. Something like the gratitude diary - when we need to make daily entries, we find enough and more to be thankful for!