To Paying Attention
ZAKHIYA
Image credits to Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash
Dear Annankeeri,
I am in a workshop where I am asked to write a letter to a young person, reflecting on my journey in ‘biology’, I am choosing to hear ‘science’ instead, because it's one and the same for me and for this context, making this a prompt to reflect on my becoming. You are now the most important young person, like every other younger person I know and so I address this letter to you.
You keep asking me what I want to become when I am bigger, and you are the only person now who doesn’t correct me when I start a sentence by saying ‘when I grow up/ when I become big’, and that is when I feel most understood and liberated, when it doesn’t feel like an odd thing to still dream of becoming.
So this is an answer to your question, this is an explanation of how I have become and how I hope to become. I love that you have ten new things that you want to become every time you ask that question and you continue to surprise me with the reasons that you give for those. Maybe someone in your school is going to tell you that you should pick one and focus, but I won’t and I know our parents wouldn’t either. I get a glimpse into your head, your curiosity and the way you pay attention when you ask me these questions, or tell me these things, and thank god for the phones.
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Mary Oliver has this quote that I love, she says, 'To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work' and I think that is all there is to be taught."
When you are curious is when you pay attention, and when you pay attention you get more curious, it's the one inexhaustible cycle that can wheel your journey. Life is long, life is tedious, the system will keep forcing you to determine but the world is ever changing and the only way to make sense of it all is to be curious and to pay attention, to what is around and to what is within. That is what I live by and that is what has been my foundation, and I do not exactly know how I arrived at this, but it has a lot to do with being curious and paying attention itself, to nature, to people, to conversations, to silences to thoughts, to books and to words and art. When I read Mary Oliver’s articulation a few years ago, it felt like I got words to say what I had felt in my heart and brain to be the guiding principle.
So I went behind what caught my attention, and then I would want to make sense, to understand and I put in all the energy I could muster up in seeing it through until conviction. Initially I went behind birds and snakes and bees and people, then I went behind games and newspapers and magazines and books, behind television and radio, and then behind friends and their thoughts and then behind my own mind.
It's been a rollercoaster or so. Sometimes I end up missing the bus, often getting late to school, some other times people think I have been lost, sometimes people are creeped out with how much I remember, sometimes I can recall a long lost story, but at all times I have been elated at witnessing my own mind recall anecdotes, make connections, identify patterns, and discover possibilities. And in this process I found relatability and belongingness and understanding.
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Science I believe is this process as a whole, a process of finding out and of finding out about finding out, and doing this in a way that refines you as a human being. Science, I would hence say, is the humility of intellect. And if you do this, in whatever said discipline you are forced to label yourself as, you’ll still be a student of science, and that is what I think I have become, and also what I want to become.
I hope this process expands your conscience, heals your heart, excites your mind and engages your senses! I hope it brings to you nurturing people and an everlasting sense of purpose. Because like Simone Weil said, attention is also the rarest and purest form of generosity.
With love,
For teaching me how to love in ways that are shameless,
Saki
About Zakhiya
Zakhiya P C is a PhD scholar at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. For her PhD she looks at behavioural data of bonnet macaques trying to understand their social structure and individual personalities. She graduated in 2020 from IISER Pune with an integrated bachelors and masters degree in the natural sciences. Zakhiya is a laidback writer, and a situational artist. She is curious about the workings of people and the world around her, and hopes that her expressions are an honest documentation of these thought explorations. She like to express through words, lines, colours and photographs whenever expression becomes inevitable.
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