Dancing in the dark 'til the tune ends
It was the summer after sixth grade and I was in India with my family for one of our routine trips. This particular trip, however, I had been asked to put on a thirty-minute solo classical dance performance at my cousin's wedding. My mom is a dancer herself, so growing up, dance practice for me doubled as your average mother-daughter bickering session. Now add the balmy humidity of a Chennai summer into the mix, and you might guess why I was elated when the wedding day finally came around. I had put in long hours and was ready for a real summer vacation.
The morning ceremonies seemed to inch by and after what felt like an eternity, it was time for me to ascend the stage. I made a graceful entrance from the side wing which cued the music to begin. The performance kicked off smoothly and at the ten-minute mark I realized that I was truly enjoying myself. It was that point where you suddenly come back into consciousness after having been lost in performing. Surrendered to muscle memory. I did a couple more steps and then out of nowhere, the music just stopped. Hearing my mom's classic dance advice (even if the world stops spinning, you keep performing) ring through my head, I continued on for a few more seconds. As if it were stolen from some scary movie, the lights flickered twice then went completely black. Unable to see into the audience for my mom to save me, I stood there, alone on stage, at a loss.
For the weeks leading up to the performance, my mom and teacher had mentally and physically prepared me for uncountable varieties of undesirable situations: audience distractions, heat, underwhelming audience, forgetting steps, being too tired...But they had not anticipated or planned for a blackout (And who would?). This was just unlucky. As if the pressure of being an American performing South Indian Classical dance in South India wasn't enough, I now felt doubly vulnerable. I could feel my ears throbbing and my lip quivering. Lucky for me, it was pitch black. My performance had been ruined. The hours of rehearsal had gone down the drain.
A few weeks ago, I was asked to video record a 1-hour conference then share it with a broader team. At the conclusion of the meeting, I went to dump the video into my Public Dropbox. The file was too large. Settling for my second option, I tried uploading the video to YouTube. There too, either the size of the file or my internet connection (or both) battled and won against me. Several hours and options passed and I found myself at the end of the work day with a missed deadline of one minute ago. That evening, I finally came up with a solution that would require me to upload the video in three separate parts to Box. I started the upload process at 8 PM. Two hours later, the first video upload was complete. I started the second one at 10 and went to sleep about an hour after. I then woke up naturally every hour, on the hour to check the status of my uploads. Between the hours, I was dreaming about the upload (not even remotely joking).
At 3 in the morning, disaster struck: the upload which had been 95% complete at 2 AM had failed, likely due to some edge case communication error. I restarted the process. With the second file upload complete at 5 AM, I headed to work where I left the third and final video uploading while I went to the gym. In what felt like the epic completion to an impossible race, I reached 100% and 3 of 3 videos uploaded at 7:55 just as our director walked into his office. I breathed a sigh of relief and started with my real work.
If I've been able to communicate even half of the stress and labor that went into what I would imagine should be a pretty simple task involving the "cloud," you might share my frustration and disappointment when my director was unable to view the files on his computer for whatever reason and instead ended up contacting our company tech support to host the videos on an enterprise video-hosting site. What a complete waste of time. I can't believe I literally lost sleep over this I thought to myself. I blamed myself for failing at a simple task, when in reality, I had truly done everything in my control (and even some things that were out of my control) to follow through.
We are living in a world where technology is continually advancing and in turn becoming increasingly embedded in our day to day lives. While this comes with a lot of good, the fundamental problem, in my opinion, is that we are unable to separate technology and that which we can control from that which we cannot. For example, extreme heat causing a power failure. The worst part being that modern technology has led us to falsely believe that we have control over most everything around us, which in fact, is far from the truth.
Last weekend, my parents were involved with a religious ceremony of sorts. Part of the ceremony included serving a feast to the Hindu Gods. The act of serving food on a plate allocated to a divine spirit was interesting to think about (especially when the logical, realistic side of you knows that the food is actually going to be thrown away or eaten by a person in the room). A rarely-used muscle is flexed when you consider the philosophy of a supernatural being, one that could be bigger than life and outside human control, when we are so accustomed to thinking about the concrete. What we know. Reality.
This morning, I learned via this article in The Daily Pennsylvanian that a girl from my graduating class is a Hurricane Sandy casualty after her home was struck by a falling tree. I just sat there, lost in the thought of a truly, purely natural disaster. So sad, for lack of a better word, for her family and friends. It's natural occurrences like these -- earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes -- that define the phrase "we're only human." This poor girl was a powerless victim with little to no warning or control over the fate she would suffer. A notion that we, as thriving, striving individuals so rarely recognize or accept.
It would be pretty depressing to resign ourselves to beings pawns in nature's chess game. And I'm not at all encouraging us to move in this direction. But as we continue our trek to this "Brave New World," it will do us good to reflect on our lives once in a while. Push yourself to engage and perform at the best of your ability, with whatever you truly have control. But past that, we have no choice but to let life take it's course. The sooner that we can learn to accept this, the more freely and fully we can live our lives. Because you know, there is nothing quite so beautiful, quite so exhilarating, as dancing in the dark.
The morning ceremonies seemed to inch by and after what felt like an eternity, it was time for me to ascend the stage. I made a graceful entrance from the side wing which cued the music to begin. The performance kicked off smoothly and at the ten-minute mark I realized that I was truly enjoying myself. It was that point where you suddenly come back into consciousness after having been lost in performing. Surrendered to muscle memory. I did a couple more steps and then out of nowhere, the music just stopped. Hearing my mom's classic dance advice (even if the world stops spinning, you keep performing) ring through my head, I continued on for a few more seconds. As if it were stolen from some scary movie, the lights flickered twice then went completely black. Unable to see into the audience for my mom to save me, I stood there, alone on stage, at a loss.
For the weeks leading up to the performance, my mom and teacher had mentally and physically prepared me for uncountable varieties of undesirable situations: audience distractions, heat, underwhelming audience, forgetting steps, being too tired...But they had not anticipated or planned for a blackout (And who would?). This was just unlucky. As if the pressure of being an American performing South Indian Classical dance in South India wasn't enough, I now felt doubly vulnerable. I could feel my ears throbbing and my lip quivering. Lucky for me, it was pitch black. My performance had been ruined. The hours of rehearsal had gone down the drain.
A few weeks ago, I was asked to video record a 1-hour conference then share it with a broader team. At the conclusion of the meeting, I went to dump the video into my Public Dropbox. The file was too large. Settling for my second option, I tried uploading the video to YouTube. There too, either the size of the file or my internet connection (or both) battled and won against me. Several hours and options passed and I found myself at the end of the work day with a missed deadline of one minute ago. That evening, I finally came up with a solution that would require me to upload the video in three separate parts to Box. I started the upload process at 8 PM. Two hours later, the first video upload was complete. I started the second one at 10 and went to sleep about an hour after. I then woke up naturally every hour, on the hour to check the status of my uploads. Between the hours, I was dreaming about the upload (not even remotely joking).
At 3 in the morning, disaster struck: the upload which had been 95% complete at 2 AM had failed, likely due to some edge case communication error. I restarted the process. With the second file upload complete at 5 AM, I headed to work where I left the third and final video uploading while I went to the gym. In what felt like the epic completion to an impossible race, I reached 100% and 3 of 3 videos uploaded at 7:55 just as our director walked into his office. I breathed a sigh of relief and started with my real work.
If I've been able to communicate even half of the stress and labor that went into what I would imagine should be a pretty simple task involving the "cloud," you might share my frustration and disappointment when my director was unable to view the files on his computer for whatever reason and instead ended up contacting our company tech support to host the videos on an enterprise video-hosting site. What a complete waste of time. I can't believe I literally lost sleep over this I thought to myself. I blamed myself for failing at a simple task, when in reality, I had truly done everything in my control (and even some things that were out of my control) to follow through.
We are living in a world where technology is continually advancing and in turn becoming increasingly embedded in our day to day lives. While this comes with a lot of good, the fundamental problem, in my opinion, is that we are unable to separate technology and that which we can control from that which we cannot. For example, extreme heat causing a power failure. The worst part being that modern technology has led us to falsely believe that we have control over most everything around us, which in fact, is far from the truth.
Last weekend, my parents were involved with a religious ceremony of sorts. Part of the ceremony included serving a feast to the Hindu Gods. The act of serving food on a plate allocated to a divine spirit was interesting to think about (especially when the logical, realistic side of you knows that the food is actually going to be thrown away or eaten by a person in the room). A rarely-used muscle is flexed when you consider the philosophy of a supernatural being, one that could be bigger than life and outside human control, when we are so accustomed to thinking about the concrete. What we know. Reality.
This morning, I learned via this article in The Daily Pennsylvanian that a girl from my graduating class is a Hurricane Sandy casualty after her home was struck by a falling tree. I just sat there, lost in the thought of a truly, purely natural disaster. So sad, for lack of a better word, for her family and friends. It's natural occurrences like these -- earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes -- that define the phrase "we're only human." This poor girl was a powerless victim with little to no warning or control over the fate she would suffer. A notion that we, as thriving, striving individuals so rarely recognize or accept.
It would be pretty depressing to resign ourselves to beings pawns in nature's chess game. And I'm not at all encouraging us to move in this direction. But as we continue our trek to this "Brave New World," it will do us good to reflect on our lives once in a while. Push yourself to engage and perform at the best of your ability, with whatever you truly have control. But past that, we have no choice but to let life take it's course. The sooner that we can learn to accept this, the more freely and fully we can live our lives. Because you know, there is nothing quite so beautiful, quite so exhilarating, as dancing in the dark.
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