weighty wishing and woes

In one of my favorite movies of all time, Bruce Almighty, the main character – Bruce – says this, “Be careful what you wish for, punk!” shortly after… spoiler alert… God grants Bruce divine powers. Predictably, towards the end of the movie, Bruce’s life is worse than it had been before and he asks God to take away these powers so that he could go back to simply being human. Despite having watched this movie an abashed number of times, this line has always stood out to me, so much so that I’ve found myself reciting it at some key turning points in my life. Yet when I first heard that line (sometime in 2005 or 2006), I wondered to myself, “Why in the world would you want to be careful with your wishes?”, “Shouldn’t you dream as big as you can and hope as much as your heart lets you?” As it turns out, sometimes, getting what you want resembles a curse more than a blessing. In some sense, one becomes the very genesis of one’s misfortune. This entry is a record of some such episodes in my own life. Here goes the story: 

Last year, I prayed for rain. I told the stars to speak to the moon, so that she could tell the sun to be so kind as to let the clouds gather. “No, they won’t conspire against you”, I told the sun, “They’ll only speak for a brief moment, share their pain for always having to hang about in the sky, shed a tear or three, and then disperse”.

“I promise it’ll be quick”, I concluded. 

So, the sun shone upon the earth with mercy and in a few months, I got lots of rain. I dreamt about the floods before they happened. In my dream, it had rained so much that the water came all the way up to my apartment’s window. I lived on the sixth floor, you see, so I hoped that when the “real” rain came, it wouldn’t be as endless as the one in my nightmare. And it wasn’t. Sure, a couple of houses were waterlogged, inter-emirate roads collapsed, and the elevators in both my apartment and office buildings broke, but… at least my prayer had been answered.  

Rain wasn’t the only thing I had wished for.

If you must know, in the same month I prayed for rain – November, which is my birth month –, I had also prayed for laughter. I told my senses to speak to my hormones, so that they could convince my brain to be so kind as to cheer up a little. “Life’s not as grim as you paint it out to be”, I preached to my cranial nerves, “Sure, you have no idea why you exist, but neither does everyone else. Yet you can eat a bowl of fresh pho, re-binge your favorite tv shows, and sleep to your heart’s desire”.

“I promise all of this will end someday”, I said assuredly. 

And so, I woke up on one random morning – the very day that I was late to work for the first time – and everything was bizarrely amusing to me. I left my oats on the stove for too long and the milk overflowed onto the counter and almost caused a fire; a comedic masterpiece. I couldn’t go home for Christmas or the new year celebrations; if this is not humorous, what is? I met a guy the morning after Valentine’s day: what a joke ‘lil ‘ol cupid must have taken me for. But… in all this, at least my brain could spot life’s absurdity and convert it into cachinnation.  

Yet if you’re still curious, in the same month I had prayed for rain and laughter, I prayed (read: pleaded) for intelligence. “I just want to feel like I can think critically again”, I told myself, “I used to feel so alive when I sang while solving mathematical challenges or spent afternoons balancing chemistry equations, or reciting history like I was there in the flesh.” 

“I promise it’s purely for myself”, I lied. But… did I?

I thought to myself today why it is exactly that I wished all these things to come true. Because is it ever possible to want things for one reason alone? No. The act of wishing is an act of collecting evidence that there are indeed a myriad of reasons to bring something into being. In other words – and I suppose some Greek man must have already proposed this – there are multiple versions of one collectively desiring a particular outcome. And that in itself must be a sufficient reason, right? No. Wanting to get something simply because one wants something is the stuff of toddlers. Yes, it leads to tantrums. So I asked myself again today, why did I pray for rain, laughter, and intelligence? 

There were parts of me that missed sleeping to the sound of wet air and the smell of damp earth. I took the stairs on the first afternoon it rained… and I went outside to watch the rain in person, and not from my window. It was terribly windy, but it was the wind that came with the rain I prayed for. And maybe this is why one needs to take care when wishing upon stars, wells, candles, and dandelions… that because one can never be specific enough, one is wise to remember that with each prayer comes a contingency. It’s like praying for food, then having to chew it (and later on excrete it – and then pray for food again). Or praying for a job and then having to wake up early to catch the metro to go sit at a desk for forty hours a week. Praying for friendship and having to sacrifice secrets. Praying for a degree and having to sit in a lecture hall for two hours while daydreaming about saving the world. 

So maybe Bruce was right. Yet – like Bruce, I find myself wanting to go back to the time before God answered some of my most recent prayers. And here’s something you might like to know… in the movie, Bruce’s wife’s name is ‘Grace.’ I know this is a stretch, but you made it this far, so... let me humor you. The simplest definition I ever heard for ‘grace’ was that it is getting undeserved favor. See, the punishment for boldness and the nerve to pray is to have your prayers answered, and the cure is pure, undeserved merit. Perhaps that’s why prayers can feel like both blessings and curses: it’s not about what we deserve, but what we’re given. That’s the essence of grace—not having control over every outcome, but finding some sort of "okay-ness" in what’s granted, no matter how unexpected or undeserved it seems.