My childhood, and my first youth, passed in the eagerness, even the ambition, to become something, to arrive somewhere. An unbruised child, loved, and lucky, I always felt I could be whatever I wanted. Even now, when I take on work that is too big for my height, I carry that confidence in my heart.
The feeling that I can manage anything is in my constitution. It shows itself as goals, as plans, and always seriously. From the outside I may look cheerful and spontaneous, but under the shell there is a planning person who sometimes takes life more seriously than necessary.
I have loved to travel for as long as I can remember, but I do not love long journeys by car. If I am obliged to make one, I take short breaks and refuse to see that I am tired. I make plans whose whole aim is to arrive quickly where I am going. I also always choose that place, and I plan it. Even swimming in the sea I love so much, I set myself marks: the raft ahead, the headland far off. If I do not, I tire of the sea at once, and I get out.
I have made choices that run alongside what people generally accept, and I have lived, relatively speaking, the respectable results of some of them. Towards work I feel I do not do well, I have always kept a distance inside. The moment I try, if I already feel I will not succeed at it, I lose the will, and I draw away. In the work where I feel I succeed, I do not hold back from exhausting myself, and sometimes the people around me, until I am satisfied by the measures I have set. A profile aimed at goals, the business world first among its admirers, is an "identity" that gets praised, even consecrated, however unpleasant it sounds. How necessary it is for a person's happiness is debatable.
I feel that the relation I made with life in childhood, through this "becoming, arriving", has been changing for some time. Whether you call the cause time, or the necessity that comes of what I planned almost always turning out different from what life planned for me, or my noticing that the things which crossed my path when I was not expecting them are perhaps what make me happiest, I could not say. But I am changing.
For a while now, even as I plan the place I mean to reach, I have begun to play small tricks on myself, and to give some attention to the road. With nearly two years still to go before forty, I have passed through a great many stages, and I have seen in practice that plans are not enough for happiness. I even see now that, for the sake of plans, I missed moments that might have been a pleasure. Knowing this, I still cannot change altogether in a moment. At least, when I catch myself still rushing in the old way, I try to breathe, and to look around.
If I can, I try to spend one week of my summer holiday in a quiet place by the sea, alone with the sea. I work the whole year for it. This year I did not break the arrangement either. I had just changed jobs, stepped out of my comfort, and was trying to put myself and my surroundings together again, so this year I truly needed the holiday. If I told you that goal-minded, planning Banu had arranged the bayram holiday back in February, I think you would no longer be surprised. For the holiday I had been awaiting with such appetite, I was about to reach the hotel, and I had not yet dipped the tip of my toe in the sea, when I found myself calculating the time of the transfer home. The seeds of this piece were sown, I think, in that moment. The first motto of every teaching that exists so that a modern person can speak with themselves is: stay in the moment, turn inward. The phrases sound romantic, but to live them is quite hard, because of the natural run of life, and especially the way that run goes in this geography. With calm breaths, it may have taken me two full days to silence the voice inside.
The second "accident" of the holiday was my adventure on a paddle board. A paddle board is a summer activity that has grown popular along the shore in recent years: the foreign word for standing on a surfboard and paddling. Because it is done on a surfboard, keeping one's balance is quite hard at first. There: a target for me.
My husband Emre and I got up on two different surfboards at the same moment. I am closer to the ground, and a little more able than he is at this business of balance, so I caught on quickly. But I cannot tell you how seriously I took what I was doing. My face was grave. At the smallest wave, a thousand manoeuvres pass through my mind so that I will not fall. Within an hour I am certain (why, it is not clear) that I can reach Simi by paddle board. I avoid needless manoeuvres, and when I have to turn I lock every muscle, for fear of falling. At the same time Emre jumps into the water, climbs back on, tries a crowd of different things while he finds his balance, learns, and, most of all, enjoys himself. But I am much better. Whatever being better means. While I would not give an inch on balance, Emre found out how to turn, far sooner than I did, by trial and error and by having a great deal of fun, and life winked at me again. In truth, even if he had been unable to stay upright at all, even if he had never managed a turn, even if he had fallen and got up again and again, it would not have changed the fact that he was taking more pleasure than I was. He played those chances. I, as usual, played safe. But could the goal itself be the happiness of doing a thing, and not the being able to do it?
I believe that inside each of us there is not, in fact, a lung, but a balloon. Some are pinched for lack of air, shrunk, without energy. Others grow as the air fills them, swell, and lift us. To look at experience not as an item to be crossed off a list, and not as a term of suffering to be served for the sake of a harbour one pictures at the end, but as a chance to take pleasure in the journey: that inflates the balloon a good deal. It lifts one's feet off the ground. I want the balloon inside me to swell too. I want to grow light, and to rise. Naturally.
I know how small the chance is that the kind of person I am, and my inner contradictions, will be a story worth your reading. But I also think that a person is medicine for a person. It may be that while I am once again wearing myself out in pursuit of a goal, one of you will touch my shoulder and let me settle. It may be that one day I do the same for you.
Who knows...