I am in a 12-Step program, and so I find ways to notice and appreciate how forces greater than me shape my life. One of the most excellent ways I have experienced these forces recently is in which books I choose to read, and when. The forces that shape my reading decisions are large and largely unpredictable: the popularity of the book among the patrons of the Berkeley Public Library, its price on Bookshop or (sigh, I know) Kindle, an errant citation, a mention by a friend or friend of a friend, what books get left on the street, whether I resonate with the blurb I happen to find. And the factor that ultimately determines whether and when I read a book is “do I feel like it?”. I do believe that my higher power resides in the Berkeley Public Library, and also guides me to what I need to read based simply on what I feel. This year, I’ve had the luxury of letting my gut and soul lead me to books, instead of my brain, and it’s been utterly life-giving.
For example…I bought “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents” and “Drama of the Gifted Child” on the exact same day in 2018, after some googling and review-reading to find books that could help me understand my family, as my kind grandmotherly therapist was urging I do. I read the first–instantly, and from cover to cover–on the day I got it, staying up until 4 am to do so. It was exactly what I needed to comprehend my life until that point and going forward. The second stayed on my shelf unread–not unspoken about, not unheard of, not unthought, but just unread–until two days after my mother died. I was waiting on zoom for a doctor’s appointment that started late, and in that waiting, the book caught my eye and somehow I knew it was time. It was, and the book, like almost everything else I’ve read this year, was revelatory .
I’m in the process of writing a memoir–about science, trauma, healing, and solidarity–and from time to time I get so overwhelmed when I think about how to connect them all in a way that says what I want to say, conjures the feelings I hope to conjure, spurs the action I hope it will spur. But then I read a book that does exactly some crucial part of the work I want to do in my book, and so I know I’m not alone in this fight. I can write in conversation with others, thank god. I’d been stuck in my writing for weeks, but then suddenly I picked up Thupten Jinpa’s A Fearless Heart (on my shelf since July) and Sarah Schulman’s Conflict is Not Abuse (on hold at the library for literally forever, until it was my turn on Monday!) and the two have coalesced beautifully into showing me what I need to write now and how.
In our jobs as academics, I suppose ostensibly we are meant to write in conversation with others, but as a scientist, I find that actual opportunities to do so explicitly, and actual examples of such work, aren’t necessarily commonplace. Scientific journals tend to get annoyed, or at least surprised, when I quote other papers in my papers. My current hot take is that present day science may not do enough of this (and on a further limb, present day humanities and social sciences do too much, or in too codified a way? spur of the moment thought, take what you like and leave the rest). This strong urge to be in conversation may explain my slight obsession with academic back-and-forths. Part of what I’m loving about memoir writing, at least at this early stage before the prose is to be wrangled and tamed, is that I can be in conversation with whoever I want, in whatever way I want.
All of this is to disjointedly say that we live our lives in conversation, of which saying something is only a small part. The other parts include listening. Which means receiving with an open heart, when one is ready. Which means feeling one’s feelings so that one is ready. And this gets at the seed of an answer I’ve been searching for, to the question of the difference between words as saying and words as doing. I’ll write more when this seed germinates, grows, blooms.
Until then <3.
Ambika Kamath 
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