4 P.M. Notes #7: you stepped right into it
a mail dipped in wilderness
There is no such thing as serendipity. Walking alone on a rainy evening, when the sky is a dull shade of blue, in that hour when everything is turning to a silhouette, on a path flanked by trees so dense not one can be distinguished by the other—to spot a woodpecker, pecking persistently at a thin trunk of a tree with no arms, right before you, feels special. As if some mysterious power, with a name like fate or miracle or god, orchestrated this specific meeting between a flameback woodpecker and you. But that’s inaccurate. This wasn’t a chance meeting. You stepped out, against the drizzle, against the growing dullness of the evening, to do exactly this. To be discovered by a bird. You chose this place for that very outcome. You travelled all the way here, thousands of kilometres, to a farm, to someone’s farm, to write and spend time with friends, but also for the possibility of this little moment. This is also true for people you’ve had strange encounters with. Who seemed random at first, but say, have lived two floors down in your building, or whose hole in the wall cafe that was only able to survive eighteen months have you not only visited but also have several pictures from, or whose mother sent you tiffin boxes of mutton curry in a village named Andretta you were in only for two nights and three days because you smiled at her from across the glass window of her cafe. Nothing really is serendipity, because look back and you will find small, deliberate steps taken in the direction of this moment, steps taken towards someone’s orbit. What they say about luck, the same is true for these seemingly rare encounters. You put yourself out there for wild discoveries, and wild discoveries happen.
A goose-bumpy podcast on not-so-random randomness: https://radiolab.org/podcast/91684-stochasticity via
I found my hair towel in my travel bag, which I’d completely forgotten I’d packed. It came in handy after every walk, when the water collected by trees from last night’s rain would drip and drop over my head. Thoughtfulness toward your future self is an underrated form of self-love. Keeping a nail clipper in the bathroom, tucking a safety pin in the wallet, having a duplicate copy of the house key in every bag I might potentially carry when I leave home, are such meaningless, mechanical acts of housekeeping until the moment when I’m in need and I find myself looked after by none other than me.
As I write this, a verditer flycatcher is on a tree right atop my friend’s balcony. He is very, very quiet and not at all shy. He sits barely 5 metres from me and even steps onto the balcony grill if I step inside the room. On noticing it for a while, I see that the orange whisker-like thing around its mouth is in fact the wings of an insect wedged between its beak. That is why the bird is quiet. It is holding its food. Later, my friend tells me that it has a nest under the balcony roof. And things make more sense. It has family in the nest - maybe a pregnant bird or a new mother with hatchlings. It is hard to tell because of how the nest is placed. But seeing the bird this way is always more meaningful. To see a wild thing, in its habitat, in between the act that keeps its tribe alive.
A low-res version of the flycatcher from where I sat, and a high-res photo of what it actually looks like from the internet, and some more glimpses of my week so far, at the end of the mail.
