Have you ever dreamed of starting something? A relationship, a business, a new world order? It is so easy in these days of American self-help seminars to dismiss this stuff, these puffed-up attempts at “imagineering”, but why not just stop. And think about this process some more. How do you make something new happen? How do you even see things as they take shape? So many things come to us as finished. We are taught to take things to completion, and to seek out completed things, to avoid the unfinished, the formative. We live in an age of information, and yet forget that this means in formation, that form is a verb as well as a noun. Yet at the same time we are exhorted to be bold, to be creative, to make our worlds, to… Imagine… Incidentally, Imagine is also the name of the world’s most popular song. It is supposed to be radical. It is supposed to make us question everything, yet it is so, ugh, so popular. Does this make it mundane? Or does it make it about something we can all understand, all care about: So, again, how do you start something new?

Obviously there is an element of leaving the past behind. Which is harder than it sounds. Bad relationships, relatives and friends who make us unhappy, habits that make us ill or depressed, sources of income that make us feel bad inside, whole industries and infra-structures that may be propelling us to extinction. You see it’s the same problem across the board, it is indeed very hard to let go of the past, and that’s because it can be dangerous. How do you know until after the event which parts of that which you let go of,  which parts are really, really valuable to you? But how? Do you move forward and keep living unless you let go of something, at least something, at least the younger self who died as your head hit the pillow?

But that can only be part of the picture, because you also have to fashion things out what you have to hand. To take various things from your past and your surroundings, and put them together into something new. And here is the strange bit, all those things, as you put them together, they will change. And as you put yourself together with those new things, you will change too. OK, it’s not enough to just “be the change” because you have to be part of something more than just yourself, but isn’t that the most terrifying thing, to be part of something other than yourself, and to be changed by that becoming?

I have dreamt, long and hard. I have let go of a lot of things, some of which, on reflection, I should have kept. Relationships, businesses, a new life, a new human, a Phd, maybe even, yes, a political party, I will leave you to guess which I started, which I am starting, which I let go of, and what I regret; (and, more to the point, what I do not regret in the slightest.) Every time I am faced with being part of something larger than myself, some part of me is  very afraid. What will I lose? My will? My ability to decide over my life? My bedroom? Well, all for one and damn you all… But. Will that strategy really work?

Here it is, The Thing, if you like. We know that how we are living, right now, even as our hearts beat inside us, we know it is impossible. It is as if, as the very funny Zizek puts it, we are the Wiley Coyote who has run over the cliff, but we have not yet looked down to realise we must fall. We know, especially in India, that not everyone can have this life we enjoy, and that even if we (Who are we? What do we own between us?), if only we continue to enjoy this life we have, that things will fall apart at the seams. Yet we keep on running. Why don’t we look down? What are we afraid of? The past? The future? Or simply of losing ourselves.