I learned a new word.

Gurfa. An Arabic noun, it roughly translates to all the water you can hold in the palm of your hand. And, I love it.

Because when would one ever need such a metric? It seems like it was written for the purpose of art and theory more than the practicalities of life itself. But then, maybe that kind of thinking is the problem.

UNDER THE FIG TREE

I always find myself trying to cup more water than can ever be held.

When you’re a kid, you’re held back behind the starting line, told to wait. There is a sense of both safety and frustration that fills the air in those days, where you are stuck waiting, but also dreaming. Dreaming of things you know nothing of yet. And then, one day, the gun sounds and the race begins. You’re off. You’re running. And while you can never actually see it, you know that there is a clock hanging over your head, right there next to the sun, melting the years into ever-widening pools of candle wax behind you. Each dream becomes a thing to devour. But unlike when you were held behind the starting line, reality has now reached it’s bony hand into the game.

One of my favorite metaphors for explaining what that bony hand feels like is the iconic fig tree metaphor in The Bell Jar, where Sylvia Plath writes:

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

I read this for the first time when I was seventeen and it has only grown to mean more and more as the years have ticked on. I have always known what I want to do, but now that I am there, trying to do it, I am seeing all the endless branches that any one given field or dream has. There is so much. I want so much. I feel like I am running around under the tree with a basket over my head with one eye on the hot sun and another on the falling figs as they ripen all at once.

And then I found this word.

WHAT YOU CAN HOLD

Gurfa. All the water you can hold in the palm of your hand.

And I thought about it. I thought about what a beautiful, humbling reminder it is and how fervently it strikes against any and every ideology that America indoctrinates us into for the continuity of capitalism at the careless expense of the soul. I grew up in a society that praised productivity and exhaustion as metrics of success. Stress and multitasking as signs of a promising career. In other words, a world that would never be satisfied with the inefficient and ephemeral concept of cupping water in your hands. A world that has built machines and made whole businesses out of extracting and containing as much water as possible. Greed is mistaken for ambition, gluttony for success. The humble grace of gurfa is a thing long lost to us.

So it’s no wonder that I am sitting here at the end of twenty-one, dreaming of holding the ocean when I only have two hands.

SLOW DOWN YOU CRAZY CHILD

And then, the other morning, I woke up with Billy Joel’s “Vienna” stuck in my head. I went about the morning absentmindedly singing it, when at some point I stopped cold. Wait. Listen. I listened to the words that my brain was perhaps trying to tell me.

Where’s the fire, what’s the hurry about?
You better cool it off before you burn it out
You got so much to do and only
So many hours in a day

You’re gonna kick off before you even get halfway through (Oooh)
When will you realize, Vienna waits for you?
Slow down you’re doing fine
You can’t be everything you want to be before your time

You got your passion, you got your pride
But don’t you know that only fools are satisfied?
Dream on, but don’t imagine they’ll all come true
When will you realize, Vienna waits for you?

Slow down you crazy child
Take the phone off the hook and disappear for a while
It’s alright, you can afford to lose a day or two
When will you realize, Vienna waits for you?

DEBUNKING THE FIG TREE METAPHOR

Vienna waits for you. The figs will not all rot tomorrow.

There will be more because you don’t get just one tree. There are figs waiting for you on branches that are still just saplings in the ground. You can’t see them yet, but you have to believe they are there like you believe that the sun will rise tomorrow. Sylvia stuck her head in an oven because she could not believe in them any more. And so, they died before they could ever break through the earth. But they would have been there for her. Acres of them. I think we have to believe that.

I was texting a friend back in California about all of my various dreams—graduate school, literary professor, editor, staff writer, memoirist, etc.–when she told me that there is no rush. That graduate school will always be there. That it is okay to try other things first. Living in New York City, land of time and money and success, her words tasted so slow and sweet. Like California. I needed them. I needed to be reminded of my childhood spent cupping the Pacific in my hands, watching it fall through my fingers. And of the grace that facing such massive entities of possibility requires of us.

Gurfa.

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