i asked a lonely tree, what do you want? - a poem

A couple of years ago, I was sitting with my housemates in the lounge of our shared apartment when one of them said, "How beautiful life would be without anyone having any expectations of me." I'm not sure he realized what he'd said, or even remembers saying it, but the sentence has stayed with me ever since.

What would it feel like to live a life without anyone expecting anything of you? Almost every action we take is rooted in some expectation. I go to work because I expect to feed myself, to contribute to my household, to make the change I care about, among many other things. Some of these expectations are mine, some were handed to me, and by now I can barely tell which is which.

In trying to meet all of them, I often forget to look at the world around me… and I forget to look at myself. Everything and everyone needs a witness to acknowledge that it exists. The heather on the window sill of my room (whom I named Hyder Ali, after Tipu Sultan's father) was kept alive by my noticing it every day. It expected me to keep looking, to keep it alive, literally and in memory. Then one day it died. I was a little bummed, since it was a gift from one of our lab interns. But it still sits on the sill, and I still see it. Dead but still alive, I guess?

So yeah, one reason I can't notice the small idiosyncrasies my life offers me is that something else (my work, for example) expects more of me than these non-human things do.

But is it even possible to live without anyone expecting anything of you? I don't think so. Still, there are stages in life when we stop caring what anyone expects of us, like when we are grieving or going through heartbreak. We want to be left alone, with zero bandwidth to give anyone or anything space in our lives.

These are the thoughts that led me to write this nazm (or poem).