scheherazade through the looking glass: cycles

by Parisa Aryán

In memory of my grandfather, Mohammed Salahshourian

They say that the hardest thing in the world is to follow your own advice. I can testify to that. When I started writing this column, I didn’t intend for it to become an advice column at all; I just wanted to write about my life as an Iranian woman in Spain. However, advice has gradually started slipping into the articles, and I like that. But precisely because following your own advice is always the hardest thing to do, people have actually started quoting my articles to me when I’m feeling down and forgetting my own counsel — and I like that too.

And after all, who am I to give advice to anyone? My overdramatic actress’s soul can fluctuate from a state of absolute Zen to something dangerously resembling hysteria in the space of two minutes. I have made terrible errors in judgement when it comes to love and relationships. Every night I decide not to stress about work and every morning I wake up obsessing. And I have been know to cry out of sheer frustration for not losing the four kilos that I was absolutely sure were making my hips look twice as big as they should. So really, am I the right person to be giving any of you advice?

You know, I believe that on a subconscious level we all think that we know more than everyone else. We are so quick to criticize, so quick to judge the thoughts, feelings and actions of others. The human race is in a permanent state of mutual misunderstanding. I have recently become very consciously aware of that. I have felt very misunderstood, but have realized that I was misunderstanding as well. I guess that we all have so much more to learn than we think.

And the thing is: in life everything happens in cycles, even learning. And when we complete a learning cycle, we end up comprehending something that was escaping our understanding up until that point. Of course, the thing about cycles is that you have to allow them to happen – you must live and learn. You can’t expect to learn anything if you don’t take action, if you don’t work hard at following your dreams, if you don’t put your heart on the line, if you don’t risk losing, failing, falling and having to get up. The upside is that when you do manage to get up, you will have done it, you will have completed that cycle and you will be a more complete being for it.

I believe that I have recently completed a learning cycle, although truthfully, I think we are completing cycles and starting new ones every second of every day. I was thinking about this yesterday as I left my flat to go to a rehearsal. Coincidentally, yesterday the very first hints of spring were in the air. I could hardly believe that I could smell spring in the air in the first week of February, but there it was.

For me, the beginning of spring has always represented the beginning of a new cycle, especially because in Iran the beginning of the New Year is marked by the beginning of spring on March 21st. On that day, the whole family gathers around our equivalent to a Christmas tree: a table or a cloth placed on the floor, hosting seven objects/food starting with the sound “S” in Farsi. This is called Haftsin and it’s a tradition that dates back to the ancient kings of Persia, who believed that these objects would bring joy and good luck for the New Year. Similarly, a mirror and candles are always present because they bring light, and the Koran is also present for religious reasons.

The very first memory of my life is being woken up by my Mum in the room that I shared with my sister in our house in Iran and seeing the light of candles in the living room. I remember asking my Mum if it was my birthday and my Mum explaining that it was actually New Year. We went into the living room and I distinctly remember climbing onto my grandfather’s lap and being held by him. I was two years old and didn’t have the slightest notion of time. It obviously never crossed my mind that the cycle of our life in Iran would soon come to an end or that when my grandfather completed the cycle of his present life, we wouldn’t be there to say goodbye.

As we get older, we start getting a notion, an awareness of what time is. We realize that our time is not infinite, that it goes by much faster than we would like it to and somewhere down the line, somewhere between getting older and trying to get at least a little bit wiser, the key to it all pops into our minds: make good use of your time, don’t waste it, once it’s gone, it will never come back, and one day — shockingly — it will run out, you know? The real tragedy is that we don’t usually remember this kind of thought for a long time. And once more, we wake up in the morning feeling frustrated, sad, worried, and once again we believe that it’s acceptable to waste precious days, hours, minutes of our lives being miserable for a thousand different reasons that our minds diligently make up as we go along. Jorge Luis Borges once said that if he ever got to live his life again, he would have more real problems and fewer imaginary ones — every time I think of that it makes me regret all the times that I’ve been miserable for no good reason at all, except for my “imaginary” problems.

In the spirit of following my own advice, I have just promised myself to try much harder not to do that anymore. If you think about it, the fact that our life experiences come in cycles not only makes it all so much more interesting, but it also means that it keeps giving us chances to start over. Let’s do it.

tagged under:advice, food, living abroad, middle east, race