“Sanjay”

“Sanjay” is the name my parents gave me after two weeks of bickering. It was just one in a seemingly endless series of frustrated compromises in their semi-arranged marriage. Anyway, I’ve always liked the name and, of course, must be identified for practical purposes such as driver’s licenses, passports, and answering to the call of a barista at Starbucks. However, in the seat of awareness, “Sanjay” is an ever fluctuating amalgam of social roles and increasingly uncomfortable mixtures of thoughts and emotions. Somewhere, in the core of it all, is an atemporal, non-spatial, unchangeable, uncreated stillness and peace that “Sanjay” intuits is shared by all sentient beings to some extent.

On a more practical level, “Sanjay” is a man, a devoted father, an alienated son, an ex-husband who is trying his best to co-parent a child with special needs, a medical doctor, a criminal forensic psychiatrist, a friend, a persona that tries to be kind in all situations (and often fails), a cartoonist, a writer, and an explorer of the long shadows that are cast behind every image or mask that we are forced to present to others through social requirement and habit.

In some foundational way, “Sanjay” in the flesh is about as ridiculous as the cartoon to your left. Within the absurdity, though, are anguish, laughter, grief, pockets of contentment, and the myriad other aspects of the human experience that appear and disappear like clouds passing through the sky on a wind blown evening.