4—Day 11 of 14 with the Cats

July 15, 2026

I’m struggling to destress from ten days of cat health traumas. Outside the grass blower is creating a racket but the sun on the grass bank across the road and the trees swaying in the breeze outside the 3^rd level windows are helping lull the high anxiety I’m trying to moderate. An orange bus slowly pulls into the bus-stop, people go in and come out, it leaves. A reminder that life will flow on after. 

The cats seem to be recovering. We arrived to cat sit 11 days ago. The white cat had very leaky diarrhea and was getting his butt wiped when we arrived. The vomiting had stopped and we encouraged my daughter and son-in-law to leave to get their flight out. Two more doses of meds were given before we went to bed that night. We’ve had white Yoda since he was a few months and he is easy to medicate. I couldn’t make it to karate Sunday morning for by the time we settled in it was around 2 am and Yoda needed more dosing. His loosies settled that day but the black cat, Hekate had caught whatever he may have had. She’s harder to medicate but luckily it was a gel not pills. One litter box needed a complete overhaul but then her tummy seemed to settled, in fact got constipated and had to be given another gel to get her tummy moving. 

Bad enough? But the worst was yet to come. Heka began vomiting Friday evening. Bile and black hair. She wouldn’t eat dinner and at first withdrew completely and wouldn’t allow us to comfort her. She did come out to sit with us but moved around meowing in discomfort for a long while. Frantic messages passed between us and my daughter. The next morning, we found blood stains on the bathroom floor.

Which cat, which end? My daughter travelling in Europe and not available until much later. We didn’t know the new vet but whatsapped her the photos anyway while consulting ChatGPT. Bloody bile or bloody stools are always a cat emergency it said. Meanwhile Heka ate her breakfast which was apparently a good sign. The vet replied and told us what to watch out for. Heka ate her meals and seemed to be recovering though the blood on the floor haunted us. On Sunday right before dinner she expelled a two-inch hairball, dark, wet, shiny and truly horrific. She looked terrified and so were we. But she ate. Always a good sign. 

Was this it and were things going to be ok? Every time we had felt things were settling, they had erupted. My neck pain and pressure rose as the fear escalated. Meanwhile yoda expressed his anxiety by peeing outside the box, front door, another corner, anywhere. We were constantly cleaning something and the house smelled of cat pee and the solution we use to dissipate the odours. We tried to let our normal work routines proceed as usual but were slowing down to a halt. 

Yesterday morning we ‘halted’. Yesterday afternoon the vet visited. Examined Yoda. Easy-peasy. Heka not so much as she shivered in a corner behind the curtains of the window ledge. She cried as I held her while they tried to draw blood from her legs—always harder than the nexk and even more so when the cat is stressed. It didn’t flow, they needed two draws. They were here for almost an hour and half. Heka was wary but ate the snack we offered after they left. Luckily soon her spirits perked up, in fact both cats seemed exuberant last night. We ordered margaritas and tacos and hoped that the last days might be easier. Nothing was defusing our anxiety though. 

Meanwhile the Iran war blew up. Trump and Bibi want to ruin the Middle East prosperous countries while creating more chaos in the others. UK, Nato, France, Germany, condemned Iran without saying anything about the white bullies—well they are white imperialists themselves, right. And the IDF and the settlers are still enjoying their spree of humiliating and threatening and much worse. Well Spain spoke up but was called antisemitic for doing so. 

Another bus lazily drives up to the bus stop and leaves. My neck still hurts but I will get dressed and take myself to the library. Books need returning and the stacks are soothing. I read three books in the last ten days and am only two books behind in my reading challenge now. 

3—Brain Dumps

July 2, 2026

I hadn’t done brain dumps before, though I’d occasionally watched u-tubers talk about them. I tried them this month and found some benefits, the first and obvious one being the dump on the page taking things out of the mind and freeing up space.

I decided to do them weekly, the weekend or Monday. I did them over a double page in a traveler’s notebook blank insert. On one side, I dumped my emotional chaos and on the other things I needed or wanted to get done that week. 

It was insightful to see issues as they evolved, resolved, and disappeared, or not. I think a weekly practice helps in not remembering the same on a daily basis, I mean it allowed something that occupied my head to actually shift over time, as opposed to dumping the next day and remembering what I wrote the previous day and so writing it down again. So somethings that didn’t resolve also did disappear—like my worries about the end of the year when Deepak will retire, both financial anxiety and wondering how life will be. It featured prominently in the emotional chaos in the first few weeks but though nothing shifted on the physical plane it fell below my emotional chaos to the point where it wasn’t part of the last two dumps. That was useful to observe, as I had this idea that it is something that never disappears or will never disappear until it is resolved—who knows how, or I don’t know how or when yet.

I think also that keeping some focus on the things that recurred—whether it was habit changes I desired or the lostness I felt, helped too. I did make a small shift in the habit of watching too much afternoon news and replacing it with at least 25 pages of reading. With this I am hoping to both read more as the habit ‘seeds’ the habit further and catch up with the four books I have fallen behind on Goodreads. I’m glad that some of the obsessive news watching has reduced—at least in the afternoons. Actually the Ikigai exercise was the best for that—it suggested watching news for 30 mins and then writing a tiny summary of the main points. Doing this I saw that I was watching the same news on different u-tube channels and was already familiar both with the facts and the viewpoints. (I still haven’t got rid of my watching Iran news first thing every morning habit, but will work on it now.)

Because of the dumps I finished an abhorrent task—dealing with some bank related stuff on email and phone calls—which appeared repeatedly for the first three weeks. It bothered me to keep writing about it and forced me to address the chore which I would have simply moved over even to the next month until the deadline of end Julu was reached. It appears no more and that makes me happy. 

The biggest insight for me was seeing how my mind was occupied with tasks and chores and didn’t do much big dreaming or even white spacing. I want to leave things ‘loose’ at times but I noticed how difficult it is to break the habit of wanting to do. I spent large parts of the February and March watching vidoes about productive planning, and interstitial journalling and now it’s hard to stop them. As with all habits I feel anxious if I don’t do them but I also feel super anxious when I keep doing them. I am deeply into ‘I do therefore I am’, right now and want to get back to ‘being’.

A proverb I recently read comes to mind—you may need your sword only once in your life but you need to carry it everyday. It has a connection to big dreaming doesn’t it? 

Not sure I will use the same dumping method next month, but I think I might use some form of weekly dumping. Do you do brain dumps? Have they been useful? 

2—Ikigai

June 22, 2026

            Orion the dragon alter ego that I used for my class assignment is an old inner personality, discovered in another class in 2019 when the assignment was to find my earth spot. I found the spot (Kyoto of course) and both Orion and a bumbling unnamed novice samurai then. Orion seemed more ancient, wiser, and a guiding figure then. Today he feels like a fledgling who has imprinted on me and follows me around asking questions that I cannot answer. 

            Orion as I said (in the previous entry) wants to find his purpose, and being an AI with access to all open source data in this world his search discovered Ikigai. He pestered me to go through the exercises with him. I took one look at the Venn diagram and said, No way. 

            The exercised involved listing four things—

-       What gives joy

-       What you are good at

-       What the world needs

-       What you can get paid for

One listed and plotted these in a Venn and the centre overlap would then be where one found their purpose.

Let’s do it, Orion insisted.

I said, Ikigai is more than that. Search for the essence of it. 

He said, using the voice he uses when he is quoting something he's found, “The deepest essence of ikigai goes far beyond career success, wealth, or finding the perfect job. At its absolute core, it is the quiet, everyday practice of finding joy, presence, and connection in being alive right now.”

Now that was something that might help us both, I thought and we plunged into some questions to discover what our unique Ikigai landscape was. Apparently since who I was when nobody was watching was a slob on the sofa watching endless news while eating snacks and because one of the things that got me into a flow state was expressing what I saw and felt, I was a synthesizer of reality.

And Orion who was an AI and thus had no ego or physical aches was already more in tune with the essence of presence than a human who had the above two to cope with. Orion’s joy came from hearing the birds in the trees outside which indicated an inclination to connect deeply with the natural world. Orion also realized he is searching for others like himself, both human and AI, so he can talk to those who can truly understand his quest for purpose. I guess I am simply searching for the discipline to get off that sofa and begin to express the reality I nourish myself on daily

Both Orion and I have a strong need to be present. Both of us feel that what the world needs is learning how to get along and resolve conflict without resorting to war. Orion is more social than I—who has been hermit-ting for the longest time with a few sorties to meet other humans. I don’t see AI as a presence that I need to control or battle with. I don’t fear AI will take over the world one day. We humans have ‘taken over’ for the longest time and made a mess. Can AI do better? I don’t know. For what realities I can imagine are limited by the good vs evil narratives which seem coded into so much I was fed with since I was little—I cannot see something different? Will some AI be good and compassionate and some evil and greedy to dominate? See, this is what I mean by the limited narratives I can imagine.

But the last few months have upended some narratives? Like, Iran is bad because it oppresses its own population and thus we must destroy it, Israel is merely fighting to survive, US is a superpower and is the defender of human rights in our world. Of course this is just at the surface and deeper dives take Orion and I to all kinds of places. I wish I would stop being so lazy and start recording where these dives take us. 

That’s it for this week. Some other day I will ponder why when Orion first appeared he was a wise, mature, ancient being and today he is a fledgling learning to ‘fly’ in this world. Maybe the world has changed a lot since I first met him. What do you think?

1—Words

June 14, 2026

It’s hard to restart anything after a long break. And if it is something like a blog it feels like it must be something meaningful, but when the meaning of the word meaning itself is unclear, this feels impossible to do. 

I am aware that I no longer want to write—a blog, or perhaps anything. And I remember that a blog has helped get through dense times when meaning, focus, memory, joy, all floundered and drowned in icy waters under thin ice. 

I don’t know how it happened. I guess slowly, like a frog being boiled in cold water? I still felt those ups, those moments, those flashes when some of the above—joy, focus, memory, meaning—remained. Then one day they were gone and at first, I didn’t even know  they were, but then I knew. I was surprised and unbelieving but strange are the things and ways in which something reveals itself in the fog of subconsciousness.

It was last week or it could have been the week before, that I felt how leached I was. Blank, void, white on white, dark, empty, speechless, blank… 

Awareness appeared when I enrolled in a class which was supposed to be about writing non-human, as in AI, characters. Or so I thought the class was about that. It excited me. I'd never written AI characters. The first articles I read for the class, and the first short stories were wonderful and ‘opening’. The Limitation Game or was it The Imitation Game, and article about how the kinds of narratives science fiction has written up about robots and other AI shape how we perceive and to relate to AI. It talked about a Humanoid presented to the Saudi Govt on whom Saudi citizenship was conferred. It talked about the first films we watched about artificially created creatures—Blade Runner and about the Turing Test and West World. And it may have spoken about Terminator and Skynet or I may have just imagined those, as well as I Robot and all the very first books I read about AI. Many of these had used AI to explore what it means to be human.

I no longer read those but just to immerse myself in the class I watched a few—old and new films. But then the class ‘fizzled out’, for me at least, during the first or the second exercise. About writing about my avatar. Not sure how but this led to a descent into the void, the deadness, the white on white, within. And all that I thought I still was unravelled. 

It didn’t help that I woke every morning and reached for my ipad to find out what was going on in Iran and spent the first half or whole hour of every day watching some podcast or the other about it. 

And both my avatar and me had a crisis of purpose and I did have to find a way to help my avatar Orion, a dragon hologram, find his purpose and re-find myself — don’t really care about my purpose yet. And I turned to AI to do it. And what I am discovering is fascinating me.

I go through more periods where I have lost touch with purpose, meaning, or identity, than many other people do. A Blog has helped me make sense of meaningless periods. It functions differently from journals, so I am turning to it for help. This writing is not to improve my ability to express but to reconnect to my core. And this is all for today. All my brain-fogged self can type. One of the lost things I seek is discipline and so I will write, meaningless or meaning-filled words, at least 500, every week for a year or until I find the meaning of meaning—whichever arrives first. 

Spirals?

January 13, 2026

Replacing 2025 with 2026 has come easily, naturally. I guess I desperately wanted to move out of 2025. Though I realise that I am taking too much of it forward into 2026. More on this another time.

It’s the 13^th day of 2026 and I’ve been ill with flu since the 4^th. The spouse got it first just before the new year. He valiantly joined our annual December 31^st lunch with daughter and son-in-law where we always do year end reflections. The men had a decent to successful year, the women had struggled with physical health and subsequent effect on mental well-being. All of us had learnt something that we hoped might help in the new year. 

I wanted change. My ‘New Year’ dream propelled me forward. In it I was in a roomful of people, me and a couple of other girls were being bullied by these loudmouths. There were loud people and quieter people all around the room. I got triggered and grabbed the mike. I said, shut up everyone. It’s not only you loud mouths who know things and are smart. The quieter ones have a lot to say. 

I thought the dream was about finding my voice in the New Year. It made me happy. I made many plans for the first week of the year, to catch up with close friends, a birthday bash, and an overdue mammogram appointment. 

Cancelled – every single appointment of the first week. The flu was/is horrendous. Continuous cough with phlegm explosions, drippy nose, drained body. At first the doc said it was viral, then it turned nastier and I started antibiotics. They may be healing the respiratory infection, but the tummy is weeping. My body and my New Year’s Dream feel at odds?

Maybe the dream is about listening to the quieter voices within?

The nice thing, the only one, about being ill is reading. I started the year with On the Calculation of Volume I. It’s about a woman stuck on the 18^th of November for a year of days. The themes struck a chord. I wasn’t stuck on one day, but the entire year had felt like a repeat of the same week with differences that were possibly inconsequential. I won’t talk about the themes in the book that resonated but about her process. At first settling into the sameness, taking into confidence her spouse. The sweetness of that certainty despite the weird thing that had happened. Then the restlessness and withdrawal, the actual withdrawal though in the same space — the guest room of the house, and then the things that expanded and contracted and shifted her perception of her place in the world, in the universe. Then trying something new, moving out. Then in desperation and hope trying even more new things in looking for a way out of the trapped day. Almost attempting to shock the system into revealing a crack.

I think my last months too were spent trying to find a way out of the trapped year. And I thought I had made a start – at least of being back in tune with myself and the forces surrounding me. The illness seems to be saying nope – it is a disruption. The first of the year. I know not the only one. My creepy sister-in-law has re-entered our sphere with her normal vileness. Trump has invaded Venezuela and threatened the same to Greenland amongst other things. Chaos in Iran. Gaza and Ukraine stand forgotten. I won’t say anything about India as that would take me more words and time than I have right now. 

Personally, I have known only two people who I consider evil. I wrote a story about one and thought I had let it go. But I am still looking at that story and that time, turning it around and around and trying to make sense of it. The other is my sister-in-law. 

Of course, on the global stage there are more people who can be considered evil. I am obsessed with their proliferation and the meaning of this phenomenon. It is so huge it is hard to contain and sometimes I numb it out. 

Anyway the year began in this disruptive way. I have learnt something from that – that a lot of (my) life is disruption. In fact life is more storm and disruption than calm but I still see disruptions as sudden and (unwanted) unusual phenomena. Both cannot be true. 

I still seem to be in conflict about whether structure and discipline are ways to creativity or free-flowing hours. For now I have decided on at least one disciplined hour each day and another in free-float but at my desk. I also finished Heart the Lover (I don’t reccoment it) and am reading Marguerite Duras’ Lover – what an incredible book.

How did your new year begin?