this "bandwidth" issue.. of life and living...

I think, the first time encountered this question of "bandwidth" within myself was when I was reading a book "Setting Free the Bears" by John Irving (having got introduced to him through his "The World According to Garp"... a novel which coincided with my joining my first job and which connected me back to the "we are all terminal cases" theme...

Those were the days, when I dreamt of becoming an author/ writer - and every novel I read also went through a sub-conscious process of questioning: "if I were to be writing this, how would that be?"

...so when Graff, the protognist of the novel, decided to actually set the bears free in the Vienna Zoo, I suddenly found myself very frightened, afraid - actually petrified:... "oh, shit! he shouldn't do this!... if he does that!!..."...

This reaction led to a stream of introspection for the budding/nowhere-reaching author-me.

The learning was:

I can never become a good author/novelist, and reflect & write about realities if I cannot cope with and handle the feelings they stimulate within myself...

...and that "the writer's block" is less about other things, than about managing/enlarging the "bandwidth" of my own feelings... and learning to live with their conflicting and incongruent existence within me...

But, of course, I never became a novelist/ author!...

...even though that learning about the "bandwidth" remained with me, e.g., - I mean,

...how can I deal with the rage/dejection/sadness of a "pink-slipped" employee if I have not felt that within myself; how can I deal with the sense of vulnerability of a growing-up teenager, if I can't reach out to my own sense of vulnerbality back then; how can I touch the life of a person without an anchor, if I don't accept one such anchor-less part in my life as my own; how can I admire people for they are, their achievements/talents, and yet vehamently disagree with them, if I can' deal with such dualities and contradicitons within myself...

...and at personal level it turned out to be:
- how can I be good/bad, right/wrong, saint/sinner... 'two souls in the same breast" at the same time....

When we were growing up, one of us trio had written these verses क्या जीवन का ध्येय यही है?...:

मुझमें है मष्तिष्क, हृदय है,
मझमें काम, क्रोध, और भय है,
जो अपना है उसे दबा कर,
रूप देवता का कर लूं मैं,
क्या जीवन का ध्येय यही है?...

... this was almost 4-decades back... but absorbing these words into life has been a lifetime project:
...to accept and recognise the congruence in the incongruities within self and life..