* ˚ ✦ East/West is a newsletter about the cultural roots of wellness and the tangible effects of wellbeing. Thank you for sharing, clicking ♡, and commenting on this post — you are keeping this project alive.

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In spring the insects start crawling and the cottonwood leaves bloom from their trees. Breaking through the bark. There is a pair of peacocks that lives in the evergreen trees behind my house, next to the nursing home. I hear them make sounds like cats. It used to confuse me — where is the stranded cat? I’d ask — but now I take the sound as a secret, bestowed. I know its source.

The Main Street of Bozeman, Montana, roars to life. People are sitting on benches and young women don tube tops to the pub. Folks who do not look like they live here stand outside stores and solicit passersby for signatures for various causes. Men in durags blast through the strip, raring their engines as they go. Dogs idle outside coffee shops, tied to poles by a string. Grandmothers roll strollers with their precious cargo, avoiding the vagrants who insist on conversation. The people are waking up.

My brother is on the brink of meeting his first child, and I am on the brink of getting married. This makes me very emotional, and I tell friends and acquaintances this all the time. “I will meet my nephew in one month — I’m pretty emotional about it,” I’ll say. As soon as I say the words I recognize them as dead language. The words don’t seem to carry anything. You could almost call them a deflection, a way out.

But I am emotional, and I know this because of the way that the slightest and most simple moments bring tears to my eyes. It’s not about anything grand, really. In fact, it’s the opposite of that: it’s just about change, about the motions of life.

Wedding planning does not make me emotional, but all of the family members who swelled up in the aftermath of the engagement do. They express such happiness, such unparalleled joy, in assuming the task of helping two people, a young man and a young woman, build a life.

The older I get the more I am beginning to understand myself as someone fundamentally shaped by the fact that I have a good family. I don’t mean to say I have a perfect family. I just had people who — early on and continuing still — were unfailingly generous with me. They were generous in love and in spirit.

I lie in bed reading William Kittredge. I love the honesty of his opening line: “Our ideas of paradise, it is said, originate in childhood.”

I used to think that childhood came and went — one shot for each of us. But now I know that childhood begins again when you give it to someone else.

My mom sends me photos of the moringa plants she has been growing from scratch. A couple of weeks ago she bought a pack of seeds. At her house, she swaddled the seeds in damp paper towels and waited for them to germinate. Now they are growing on their own in delicate little pots. She says she’s saving one for me and I’ll tend to it, when spring fully arrives, on our back porch.

There is global turmoil and it’s hard to feel removed from it. I used to find it easy to not discuss politics or the state of world affairs at social engagements, but now I find myself feeling bored, and fake, to not state the obvious. There is death and destruction in the world. Darkness. In the mornings I often pray for truth to be revealed, and then I remind myself that truth has already won. I believe that.

I believe this is the source of the emotions: the fact that all of this can be true. The preciousness of life; its fragility. The violence toward life doesn’t make the life any less sacred. Instead, I think, it makes protection of life paramount. I’m thinking about all of this on the eve of spring. About the turning of the clocks, about the way we can never go back. The beauty in that. Like the fox that wound through my parents’ property three springs ago, the way I will never stamp that fox from my memory, its ephemerality. Or the yellow-flowered weeds that arrive every spring, when the valley turns green. The carcass of a mule deer that washed ashore the riverbank and sat there, caught on the rocks, for weeks. The way that, when spring came, the river washed it away.✦˚*

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By The Way: Writers Wanted

As many of you know, I’ve been teaching writing at Montana State University here in Bozeman for the past couple of years. Recently, I’ve been dreaming up new ways to share my love for writing outside of the traditional writing contexts (i.e., classrooms).

So... I want to work with you (yes, you!) on your writing.

Here's the deal:

I'm opening up 10 slots on my calendar for a free writing session with me — all you have to do in exchange is answer a few market research questions from me. This is for both a) newcomers who have always secretly wanted to experience the power of writing and b) folks who have an established writing practice and are working on a specific project, and c) anyone in between!

Here are some topics we could cover:

* developing a vision and clarity for your writing project
* crafting, refining, and getting your work out into the world
* building a sustainable writing routine (even if you're not a "writer")
* and more!

Sound like a good way to spend an hour of your week? Comment " ✏️ " or DM me & we'll put it on the calendar!

Recommended Reading:

Last week, I purchased the The Historical Dictionary of Indian Food, a compendium of definitions of various Indian foods and where they come from. The book is brilliant and deeply historical in nature, drawing off of various Sanskrit and Tamil terms to trace the genealogies of the food cultures that originated in South Asia. Many of these food traditions have been exported West, but many have not.

I bought the book in the hopes that it would furnish answers to the various questions I get when teaching Indian cooking classes on the esoteric beginnings of certain ingredients I have always taken for granted — they were just spices in my mom’s kitchen, and I didn’t question where they came from.

At a recent cooking class, for example, a guest asked me exactly where hing, or asefoetida, comes from. Hing is the basis of many a meal in India and, in the U.S., is often referred to as the “secret ingredient” that makes Indian food taste “Indian.” Hing is a resin, I told her. From which tree? I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that it provides an umami flavor and is a digestion aid.

So I bought the book, and as I was reading I felt that the book was an affirmation of the thesis that’s been percolating in my mind during these past few months of teaching cooking classes. Which is: in the U.S., Indian food is profoundly misunderstood. And it’s not for our lack of familiarity with Indian ingredients.

In some ways, we’re not at fault for this: for many years, I misunderstood Indian food, too.

But now the wellness space has changed. Now, the wellness industry has moved its spotlight to Asia: Traditional Chinese Medicine, but also Ayurveda, dominate American conceptions of health and vitality. There’s no real excuse anymore to misunderstand Indian food, especially if you’re drinking golden milk lattes or ordering biryani for takeout.

In my cooking classes, these are the top misconceptions I revel in dispelling about Indian food:

Traditional Indian food is healthy, not junk food

Ghee, cooked vegetables, steamed foods, fermented foods: for the most part, the home foods that are cooked in India are extreme health foods. This is because, to many in India, food is indispensable from spirituality and religious belief. When food is viewed this way — as an extension of the spiritual world as opposed to solely a material to consume — it follows that the food we choose is healthy.

Many Americans associate Indian food with heavy, creamy butter chicken or saag paneer and deep fried samosas, and pakoras, et cetera. Certainly these foods exist, but they are far from representative of Indian food as a whole. If you walk into any of my relatives’ homes in India for dinner, there will be a spread of local, regional vegetables cooked in the most delightful ways — daal, okra, bottle gourd, carrot, turmeric, ginger, cauliflower, and more.

Take ghee, for example. Traditionally, in India, ghee was used as a food purifier, and thus was sprinkled atop each dish before eating. Ghee was like a prayer, in physical form.

India doesn’t have a monopoly on uber-healthy ancestral foods — as I’ve argued previously, all cultures (yes, even yours!) are stewards of vitality-boosting food traditions. I always tell our cooking class guests that while my mission is to share the beauty of traditional, vitality-enhancing Indian food, the greatest outcome I could imagine is that each person would interpret the class as an invitation to discover their own familial food histories and integrate that wisdom with their everyday lives.

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“Indian food” as a category doesn’t really exist

If you walk into an Indian restaurant in the U.S., chances are you’re ordering food from just one region of India. That cuisine is usually north Indian food, and you can recognize it by dishes like naan, paneer tikka, rogan josh, chole batura, and daal makhani.

The food that my family eats in Maharashtra isn’t even on the menu at restaurants in the U.S. Most people in the United States, no matter how many Indian restaurants they’ve been to, have never heard of these dishes.

It wasn’t until I spent time in India that I understood the disparities between the food I ate at my family’s homes and the food I encountered at restaurants in the U.S. Indian food is not homogenous — if it appears that way, it’s because you’ve only eaten one type of Indian food.

“Authentic” Indian food is impossible

One of the biggest reasons folks decide to take our cooking classes is because they’ve tried cooking an Indian dish at home, or perhaps just enjoy eating at Indian restaurants, and want to learn how to cook something “authentic.”

I always find myself looping back around to the same conclusion in every single class: the idea of “authentic Indian food” is not only a myth, but relies on antiquated ideas of cultural purity. India, like every other place in the world, is a place created by conquest and collision.

Nearly all of the food traditions that are often considered quintessentially Indian are the result of a foreigner invading or migrating into the area known as India.

Even chai is the result of cultural contact: black tea was introduced by the British in the 1930s when the British-owned India Tea Association launched a massive marketing campaign.

British officials traveled town to town, house to house, showing Indians how to brew a cup of tea. Like traveling salesmen, they set up shop in courtyards and villages, conducting demonstrations of how to make tea.

Indians latched onto tea, but made it their own by adding spices. The British rebuffed this “spiced tea” because it meant that India, now their largest market demographic, used fewer tea leaves and more spices to brew what would become the de facto drink of India.

When we taught our masala chai & biscuits class last month, I felt like I was bursting a balloon when I told our guests that chai recipes in India vary from household to household. Some use cinnamon, others don’t. Some use lemongrass and mint, others don’t.

It’s all up to you, I told them. There’s not one “wrong” or “right” way.

We demonstrated a few different ways, a menu of variations. Perhaps we didn’t satisfy their desire to learn the “one” authentic way, because that doesn’t exist. But we showed them something true, which is that nothing is pure, and everything is improvised, always shifting: from moment to moment, need to need, family to family, place to place.✦˚*

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Mixing food and emotions has gotten an unnecessarily bad rep. We talk pejoratively about “eating your feelings”; dietitians opine on how unhealthy it is to pass judgement on food, to label some of it “good” and some of it “bad.”

This attitude is no more evident than in the ascendance of GLP-1s, a billion dollar industry that is effectively silencing the hunger cues of millions of Americans. It’s as if our dollar has spoken and said: we actually don’t want to bother with food at all, how it’s made or how it makes us feel. Life’s better when we don’t have to think about it.

Life is not better this way. As the founder of a grassfed ghee business, I believe that cooking and eating are among the few enduring activities that make us recognizably human in our modern world. Our ancestors might not recognize our jobs, our screens, our calls, our cars. But they would recognize our act of eating. Slowing down for it is essential.

But, of course, all food is not created equal. The industrialization of our food, the poisoning of our soils, the profound alienation of strolling through a supermarket with no sense of how the food appeared and who made it — this is normal, but that doesn’t make it good. Some food really is just better — for you and for the future of the Earth.

Our Psychological Problem with Modern Food

As a society, we’ve too long viewed food in a narcissistic way: we understand food only in its capacity to say something about us as individuals (I am healthy, I am fat, I am rich, et cetera). This leads to self-aggrandizing or self-hating behaviors because food, in this instance, isn’t really about food. It’s about unresolved emotions that have little to do with the food itself.

But food has so much more to say, if we listen to it. Food communicates cellularly, with our innate bodily wisdom, a vast network of internal messaging that runs 24/7 without us even clocking it. Food also communicates something of where we come from, our histories and how we arrived.

Take the moringa tree, for example. I’ve been having a moringa moment. Moringa, which is from India, is sometimes called the miracle tree because it’s antispectic and antimicrobial. It’s so effective that it’s been used to purify water.

I’ve been hydrating my face with moringa oil in the evenings, whisking the plant dried into moringa lattes, making moringa cookies, and more. (Comment this post if you want a full rundown on moringa and how to integrate it into your life).

Every time I bring my moringa out of my cupboard, I remember the slender and delicate moringa tree my mom once grew in her garden. She doesn’t have that tree anymore, but its memory makes me think of the curries she made with its seed pods, the way she tended to its leaves, the reverence she had for the plant.

And then I think of all of my ancestors in India who have relied on this plant for centuries, as nourishment and preventative medicine.

The Rise of Traditional Chinese Medicine & Ancestral Eating

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and even Ayurveda are having a moment right now. In the wellness discourse, Asian-ness is the reigning paradigm. Every influencer is drinking broth and tea steeped in jujubes. Ayurveda, the Indian version of TCM, has long been a mainstream guide for the wellness-inclined westerner.

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The revival of these ancient medicines in popular American culture is wonderful in many ways. We should be looking to ancients to understand the now. I want more steamed meals, cacao ceremonies, shilajit, chrysanthemum tea, and oxtail pho! But in the zeal for TCM and even Ayurveda, we’ve lost sight of one quiet but sturdy fact:

We all have our own ancestral foods and medicines, and we would do well to be students of them. Asia is not the only place in the world with a robust system of preventative and lifestyle medicine.

Every region and culture has their own version, and we can find our versions by noticing patterns: What are the top ten dishes that my ancestors ate? you might ask. Which ingredients or methods are carried over from dish to dish?1

For example: earlier this week I making an ingredient list for our anti-inflammatory Indian cooking class. I was struck by the simple wisdom that emerged from the base ingredients of each dish.

Ginger, garlic, cumin, coriander, green pepper, red pepper, turmeric, cilantro, ghee: a trove of anti-oxidants and digestive powerhouses that can protect us and keep us well.

When eaten every day, the benefits compound — not just cellularly, but emotionally, too. Eating ancestrally lends us a sense of continuity and coherence, a belief that our lives do not stand alone in time, but are part of the vast chain of history.✦˚*

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I’ve been sensing a heady, cultural shift lately, one that I would describe as a desire for simplicity.

It looks like this: a couple of weeks ago, Morgan and I were exiting the Bozeman airport when I noticed bystanders toting hexagonal boxes by the baggage claim. I nudged Morgan and pointed, asking if he knew what the boxes held. I couldn’t imagine what was in them: perhaps ornate and avant-garde cakes?

He chuckled and in an exaggerated southern drawl said, “cowboy hats.” We live in the number one tourist destination in Montana, so perhaps I should have known that people really fly with cowboy hats — for fashion — in protective boxes.

I silently mulled this over as we walked to our car. As we loaded up our luggage in Morgan’s F150, I tried to imagine all the reasons that someone might buy a $700 cowboy hat and delicately pack it for their Montana vacation.

They want to touch a feeling of authenticity, of feeling genuine, of touching something real, I said. Americans are longing for simplicity. Our world has become so overloaded with synthetics, fillers, chemicals, deep fakes, “fake news,” and lawsuits over all of the aforementioned that something as simple as a cowboy hat is somehow worth the hundreds of dollars and the extreme care it takes to bring one on a plane.

Whether or not the cowboy hat buyer is actually partaking in authentic Montana culture or merely its simulacra is sort of beside the point. For the cowboy hat buyer is not buying a cowboy hat: they are buying permission to want to go back in time.

It’s all very The Simple Life.

It would be easy to malign the cowboy hats and their boxes as out-of-touch, excessive, and elite, but that would be too simple.

I believe that the cowboy hats are cyphers for a desire that most of us feel, a desire that is not exclusive to wealthy Big Sky Resort guests and Yellowstone Club clientele.1 I’m pretty far from purchasing a felt cowboy hat and voluntarily spending time in Big Sky.

And yet I sense this longing in myself. It’s part of the reason why I moved to Montana two years ago, why I fell in love with a knifemaker who drives an F150 and hunts wild game in his spare time, and why I only buy whole ingredients at the grocery store (cauliflower head, bulk rice, tea, milk, etc.).

I moved back to the American West for the same reason I suspect the traveler with the $700 cowboy hat vacations here, and it has to do with what this place represents to us: reprieve from the noise, a return to what feels natural and free, an opportunity to grasp something that feels real, which is another way to say landscape, which is literally bigger and more in-your-face here.

It almost doesn’t matter that our ways of going about this are different. Me and the traveler with the cowboy hat: same drive, different ways of getting there.

“Going West” is just one possible outgrowth of our culture-wide longing for simplicity. They manifest in myriad ways, ranging from the consumerist to the philosophical.

Perhaps you own a Brick or a dumb phone, or actively flirt with the idea of either. Perhaps you seek unadulterated, natural, and authentic food and “single-ingredient” lifestyles, preferring whole ingredients and materials (EVOO, wool, organic cotton, hard wood, cast iron, you get the idea). Perhaps you’re just trying to get off your phone and read more; perhaps you, like many of us, are dabbling in Traditional Chinese Medicine and sound healing.

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Whatever your flavor, these all strike me as a response to the latent and overt chaos of our collective moment: the vortex of the news, what’s online, what’s available at the store and online, what’s being sold to us on Instagram ads, YouTube ads, podcast ads, all of the hot takes, all of the bad takes, all of the takes in general. It’s a tornado. The natural response is to exit, to run to a dark, still, quiet place — to simplify.

But our attempts to “dumb-down” or simplify our lives, though valiant and maybe even necessary, are just the top layers of what is at its root a spiritual problem.

The external ways in which we try to simplify our lives will do little to change our material reality if we don’t acknowledge the heart of the problem, which is that we are grasping for something that feels “real” and “authentic” because we feel unmoored in a society that often feels spiritually awry.

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So, in this case, I think the problem might also be the solution.

Our best shot at the simplicity we desire is in a return to spiritual simplicity — perhaps the last frontier of our psychological return to where we came from.

All of the other stuff, the vacations, the fantasies, the products, and the lifestyles that we aspire to, are surface. What will sate our desire for “realness,” for “authenticity” will be, paradoxically, something that we cannot see or hold.

I visited mass the other day where the priest discussed the general and seemingly pervasive sense that there’s a lot of darkness in the world right now. This is a common line and I sometimes question if the darkness really is overpowering us or if we simply feel that way because we choose to tune into it everyday: on the news, on our phones, even in everyday speech.

I want to believe that there’s just as much — and even more — light than there is darkness. I think we have to believe that if we are to have any hope.

Even typing those words — lightness, darkness, etc — is difficult for me, because as a culture we have developed a defacto stance of what writer Catherine Shannon calls ironic detachment or a general aversion to finding meaning.

Talk of spirituality, of terms of “light” and “dark,” arouses suspicion. I think of this exchange between filmmaker David Lynch and writer Mitch Horowitz in 2017:

Mitch: I think part of the problem with our spiritual and intellectual culture today is that if something works, we are immediately suspicious of it. We’re suspicious of simple things. Which I think is a problem.

David: Well, it is a big problem. The proof is in the pudding, in the tasting. So, it’s difficult to describe the beautiful experience, the bliss of transcending to people who haven’t experienced it. But it’s true that there is a treasury within each one of us human beings.

There is a treasury within each of us human beings.

At mass, the priest said that despite the darkness, we must become light. He was talking about Catholics, which I am not. Still, I took his words to heart.

We are right to respond to the chaos and darkness around us by simplifying. But it’s not just an external simplification. The key to satisfying our cultural pangs for what is real and what is pure is within us, and it’s a simple worldview: we either strive towards light or away from it.

The other stuff: the cowboy hats, Bricks, dumb phones, ancestral diets, et cetera are merely attempts to capture one simple thing, the peace that comes from inner clarity.✦˚*

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Last month, I visited an Ayurvedic clinic in Mumbai for seven days straight. My aspirations were dual: first, I wanted to understand the ancient Indian medical system in a context that wasn’t my family’s house or a book.

Second, I wanted to see how the system assessed and addressed my specific physiology and bioenergetics, which I had previously only discussed in the parlance of Western conventional and homeopathic medicine.

What I received was an in-depth look at how ancient Indian medicine views “the patient,” or, in more accurate terms, the whole person. My Ayurvedic practitioner, Dr. Nair, has a shimmering office on the 16th floor of a high-rise in Bandra West. In her marble floored office, resplendent in natural light, she collected my 3,500 rupee fee (around $40) and took my palms in her hands. She asked no questions about myself or my health concerns. This is where my diagnosis began.

Step One: The Pulse Test

The hallmark of Ayurvedic treatment is what’s called a pulse test. Dr. Nair clinched both of my wrists between her fingers and closed her eyes. Then, for several minutes, she just listened. In between listening to my pulse, she jotted notes on a chart that was written in Hindi.

The pulse test, also known as nadi pariksha, is a 5,000-year-old practice in which the Ayurvedic doctors places her fingers on the wrist’s radial artery to listen to a pulse, which is essentially the beating of blood through the arteries as it passed outward from the heart.

Ayurveda believes that the blood carries information, which can be broadly understood metaphorically as the five elements: earth, water, fire, air and ether. There are three distinct combinations of the elements that result in particular psycho-physiological forms, which are called doshas. The three doshas are pitta, vatta, and kapha.

Dr. Nair continued to listen to the rhythm, rate, and movement of my pulse before asking to inspect the whites of my eyes and tongue.

Step Two: Questioning

As mentioned above, Ayurvedic doctors are not supposed to know of a patient’s health condition before administering a pulse test. The idea is that they gather all the information they need through three modalities:

1. Nadi Pariksha - Pulse Test

2. Darshana - Pure Observation

3. Prashna - Questioning

Having completed the first two, she moved onto the last part of the diagnosis, prashna, or questioning. She asked me about the color of my urine and stool, as well as its texture. (“Is it dry? she asked). She inquired into my menstrual cycle and my daily rhythms — when I wake up, what and when I eat, when I eat dinner and when I sleep.

Then, out of nowhere, she asked, “Where does your anger come from?” I sense that you harbor some anger. I gave her a look of confusion. “I don’t know that I am angry,” I said. “I suppose I get frustrated by forces outside of my control.”

“Are you expecting other people to be like you?” she asked, and though I hadn’t articulated it to myself previously, I understood in that moment that I was.

Her last question was “What was happening in your life 2-3 years ago?” She could sense, she told me, that something had happened in the period of my life. I told her it was a time of extreme uncertainty and instability. I was moving across the country, extricating myself from relationships, and setting up a new life in Montana.

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Step Three: Body Type Reveal — Vata , Pitta , Kapha

Finally, Dr. Nair revealed my prevailing praktriti, which is essentially my unique ratio of the three doshas — pitta, vatta, and kapha — that form my unique psycho-physical being. Prakriti is another word for Nature.

She told me that my prakriti was Kapha, which is associated with strength. “Kaphas are the building blocks of life,” she told me. They are sometimes too intense, and well-suited to careers in management.

Similar to Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda is attuned to the seasons and views the three doshas in that light. If we are to use the earth’s seasons as its metaphors, Kapha is spring — cool, heavy, sticky, and slow. Pitta is summer: bright and hot heat. Ayurveda describes Vata as analogous to late fall and early winter — dry, windy, and cool.

In Ayurvedic thinking, one’s prakriti describes their general constitution and therefore holds implications for the way they live their lives. Kapha types are described as strong with heavy bones and literally thick skin. They tend to move slow. The point is to understand your prakriti so you can then align your eating, sleeping, and emotional patterns.

Step Four: Lifestyle Interventions

Much of Dr. Nair’s advice hewed closely to universally beneficial tips for health and well-being: eat three meals a day; walk for 10-15 minutes after lunch and dinner; go to bed before 10 p.m. sharp.

She also told me to avoid raw foods and cold foods (smoothies, ice cream, milkshakes), which is, again, very TCM-coded. In their place, she suggested eating moong beans, matki, and masoor dal, and two teaspoons of ghee a day.

She prescribed me an exhaustive list of recommendations for diet and lifestyle which I won’t reproduce here; some highlights include “get out of bed immediately after waking up” and “surrender unconditionally to the Divine. It will help.”

Step Five: Treatments

She recommended two Ayurvedic treatments: Shiropichu and Bahya Snehan, which I began the following day.

During Shiropichu, I sat on a wooden table while the practitioner continuously placed a mound of cheesecloth soaked in warm herbal oil at the crown of my head. This continued for about 45 minutes: the practitioner soaked the cloth, placed it atop my head, waited three minutes for my scalp to absorb the oil, and repeated the process all over again.

The sensation of warm oil on my scalp was vaguely calming, but the greatest benefit of shiropichu, for me, was forcing myself to stare at a wall in silence for 45 minutes. I had no book to read, no music to listen to, and due to the language barrier, no one with whom I could shoot the breeze. It was sensory deprivation at its finest; I made peace with the feeling of being utterly bored, which I haven’t felt in earnestness since I was a child in the early 2000s. The feeling reminded me of this passage by Joe Dispenza in his book You Are the Placebo:

Shiropichu was followed by Bahya Snehan, which is essentially Ayurvedic massage, which is not like traditional American massage at all in that relaxation is clearly not the end goal. Instead, Bahya Snehan is like lymphatic drainage on steroids: the body is covered in herbal oils and the practitioner firmly glides her palms across the skin and muscle groups in a quick, fluid motion. This continues for 45 minutes. Despite the treatment not being catered toward deep relaxation, it was a pleasant experience.

After the lymphatic massage, covered in oil, I was guided to a steam chamber in which I sat for 10 minutes. There was a wide hole in the top of the box for my head and neck to peek through. Warm mist blasted at me from all directions, emulsifying with the oil. After the steam bath, I wiped all excess oil from my limbs with a rough towel.

Aftermath/Results

If revitalization was the goal of the treatment, it succeeded. I left each of my seven sessions both energized and preternaturally calm, as if waking up from a long nap. It occurred to me that, since Dr. Nair didn’t formally diagnose anything as “wrong” with me, it made sense that the treatments didn’t feel particularly life-changing, just good.

On the topic of feeling good: I couldn’t stop thinking about Dr. Nair’s — and Ayurveda’s — insistence on the physical as a conduit to the emotional, and the emotional as conduit to the physical. Never once had I spoken to someone who weaved the discussion of the emotional so casually and fluidly into conversations about digestion, sleep, diet, pain, and fatigue. It was as if, for Dr. Nair, feeling good emotionally and feeling good physically were one and the same.✦˚*

Sometimes, being inconvenienced is a good thing. Last month, Morgan and I were stalled in typical Mumbai traffic when my great-aunt Gigi appeared on my call screen. Ten minutes prior we had departed from her daughter’s house, where had been visiting and saying our goodbyes.

“I don’t know how I forgot,” my 89-year-old great aunt said to me on the phone. My heart braced for an unwelcome admission or revelation.

“We forgot to take a photograph. I don’t know how I forgot.”

I offered to turn the car around. No, no, no, she said. You’re too busy. She was correct: we had a flight to catch later that evening, an hour long drive ahead of us, and a growing list of errands to accomplish before we boarded, including stopping by another relative’s house to say goodbye. It was 4 p.m. and one of those stacked days where 30 minutes comes to feel like valuable currency.

But there was something unspoken in that call, a truth neither of us articulated but both knew: this might be our last opportunity to take a photo together. I hung up, gave one look to Morgan, and asked our driver to turn around. Fifteen minutes later, we jumped out of the car, knocked on the apartment door, took off our shoes and shuffled into the living room to take a selfie. When everything was said and done, the photograph cost thirty, maybe forty five, minutes of our time. But on the car ride back, despite being behind schedule, all I could think about was how good it felt to be inconvenienced in that instance, to have my plans go awry.

It wasn’t the spontaneity that felt good; rather, it was the pleasure of making my elder happy. I could tell the photograph meant the world to Gigi, and that in turn meant the world to me. I felt connected: not just to her, but to the invisible threads that connect me to her and to my family at large. These threads are vital, and we all have them. They lend meaning and coherence to our lives.

How we’ve justified a life of convenience

Since that day, I’ve been thinking about our cultural aversion to doing things with the sole purpose of making other people happy, especially when it conflicts with our schedules and plans. The therapy cottage industry has generated a thousand phrases to denigrate this behavior: we call it “people pleasing,” not “protecting your peace,” or simply not having boundaries.

Of course, there is always a limit to what we can do and give for others: our time and resources are finite. But I wonder if the systems we’ve built to get our lives to “run smoothly” are actually just ways to insulate us from the often inconvenient dimensions of having family and friends.

We’ve created a society where it’s perfectly acceptable to mentally or physically opt out of family gatherings simply because we want to. So many Americans broadcast their personal difficulties in engaging with their family over the holidays, whether they’re overbearing, delusional, or politically dissimilar.

The issue is that overbearing, delusional, or politically unhinged is essentially what family is. We cannot choose our family, no less than we can choose our neighbors, or the people shopping beside us at the market, or the folks with whom we share an office building. Attempting to erase the “burden” of doing things with and for the people who test us the most — test our own ideas of who and what kind of people we truly are — further plunges us into numbness and away from the vitality that we desire.

While the trend toward extreme convenience is most starkly observed in the realm of our most intimate relations (i.e. family), the phenomenon is atmospheric throughout American society, down to the most minute level: There is DoorDash if you’re hungry and Uber if you want to go to the airport. There is Rover if you want someone to walk your dog and Taskrabbit if you need help building a bookshelf or installing a ceiling fan.

The outcome of all of this? Simply asking your friend or family or neighbor for help — for a favor — takes on the sheen of inconvenience.

A way forward

In India, it’s practically unheard of to stop by someone’s house without being invited in for a cup of tea. Even if you’re just stopping by for five or ten minutes, you will be offered tea, oftentimes a snack, sometimes even a full meal. It’s a custom, and it’s nice, actually, to pause with a warm cup for a minute before going on your way.

When I returned to the States, I challenged myself to begin inviting visitors in for tea, no matter if it was in the middle of a busy workday, or even on a weekend when I’ve made plans. So often friends or acquaintances stop by my house, maybe to return a loaned belonging, or drop off a check, and I don’t offer them anything at all.

I quickly caught my mind back-peddling, playing its old familiar games: that’s unrealistic, too inconvenient, I told myself. It would throw off the rhythm of my entire day.

Of course it would. But I think it might be the only way. By sacrificing convenience, I think we might revive something much more valuable, something that we’ve long lost: friction. It is friction and texture that allow us to see our lives more clearly.

In her 1925 essay titled “Modern Fiction,” Virginia Woolf wrote,

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday …

It occurred to me, while revisiting this passage, that the myriad impressions of our lives only expand under the power of inconvenience. The inconvenient moments are often the ones engraved with the sharpness of steel, like that afternoon in Mumbai when we turned the car around just to get a selfie with my aunts.

I won’t forget that moment with my great aunt. In the car afterward, I felt as if my consciousness was a sheet of paper that the sharpest pencil in the world suddenly pierced through. Behind the paper — what I hadn’t seen before — were color, and texture, and emotions I couldn’t quite describe, even to myself. They were tinged with sadness, and also happiness, nostalgia. I wondered when I would see her again. I thought about my future children and what sort of relationship they would have to this place, my mother’s homeland.

I would have missed these impressions if we hadn’t gone back. We were rushed the rest of the day, up until the moment we boarded our flight, but that minor inconvenience was worth it. It affirmed the wrinkles and the detours — uncomfortable, awkward, and sometimes painful — as the supreme goal, the raison d'être, the priority that should supersede our need to check off every box, get ahead in our careers, and be as unbothered as possible while doing so.✦˚*

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