Befriending the Dragon

June 8

Two days in a row I woke feeling not anxious or depressed. Yesterday I had attributed it to looking forward to our zoom training. But today it was just wide-eyed pleasure for no reason at all. I didn’t know where the heaviness had gone but I was going to enjoy the lightness while it lasted. 

I have been shedding my armour since I wrote about it a few days ago. It has felt raw and uncomfortable, but I have been selective about whom I reveal my bare state to. Last evening, I chatted with a friend who has been listening to Thich Nhat Hanh to find calm through this pandemic. She’d been trying to allow herself to do nothing, to not plan, to not even think. She said she realized how much staying busy was a way to feel worthwhile for her. She wanted to just feel she had worth even if she did nothing. She was also listening to him talk about anxiety. Something she too wakes up with. She told me how he connects it to family/ancestral anxiety. She spoke of anxiety patterns in her family.

My mother was a very anxious person. Her life in our family home was quite suffocating. Widowed young and with a fairly dominating patriarchal joint family around, she wasn’t connected to her power or inner-being. And being the most difficult of her three children, I often bore the brunt of her unhappiness. I got my anxious self from her, and unfortunately I transmitted it to my daughter too. 

Memories of my dad on the other hand were of a chilled out person, who insisted on taking time off to enjoy sports, to listen to live music, and take the kids on Sunday picnics. I told my friend that he reminded me of the dragon figure I had found within. The dragon had lived thousands of years, seen history, slept through a lot of it, and to him even covid was a just a blip, a blink, that would be soon gone. 

I borrowed Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Unaccustomed Earth’ from NLB and read all afternoon. But last night I got into an anxious state again. I was reminded of some financial emails I had to sort through. I managed to sleep but woke with the task on my mind. The task that is made harder because I had not been able to make my trip to Bombay in April as planned. Suddenly I asked myself what my dragon would do and say. And then it was all easy. I had to make a couple of phone calls but it got sorted to the extent it could without me being in Bombay – something that will not happen until October at least. Yesterday leaving things undone till then was agony, but four months are merely four breaths when seen from the dragon’s perspective. 

Later this morning I began writing my memories of the first days of the 2019 anti-CAA protests. At lunch time I ordered and ate a sea-food pad thai, something I hadn’t eaten since 2016 when I discovered minor heart issues, and high cholesterol and triglycerides. 

After lunch I drew the dragon and will check in with him when anxious. Momentarily tranquil.