Retreat -- day 1

 February 1, 2021

 

Today is the first day of the very mini retreat. I woke with excitement wondering what this immersion into Rilke’s Letters on Loss might lead to. My friend had picked the theme of loss for he had lost someone close to him a while ago. I went along with it despite not having lost a close one in the last years. The hugest loss for me, to death, was my father when I was ten. My friend had allowed me to pick whose words on loss we would read, hence Rilke

 

I wondered about the losses I wanted to keep in my mind when I read the texts. I thought of my hopes from this retreat. I made a list:

·      What I hope from this retreat is to understand the shape of my days and see if I can change it. 

·      The losses I feel are more about the loss of my life in India.

·      About the loss of India itself - the one i loved.

·      The loss of creativity and discipline in my life. 

·      The loss of control in this year of Covid.

·      Perhaps the loss of the one friendship which still lies un-understood within me.

·      My father’s passing when I was ten is the biggest loss to death for me, but it is quite far back in time and the intensity of it is low. When I think of it now I see that the consequences of that death also changed the course of life and there were more losses after. Loss of family connection completely for a very, very long time as we didn’t bear the separation of our father/spouse from us well and couldn’t process the grief. Loss of financial stability. Loss of a male protective force that led to further losses. Loss of a way of life.

·      But if one thinks of loss, one cannot help but think of gains... Hmm… 

 

I wanted to document my time during the day too. Already that intent changed what I did in the morning. I didn’t check the news but wrote down my dreams in my journal and focused my hopes for the day. I did chat with friends on WhatsApp but only till 9 am after which each moment I accounted for. The time included things that I needed to do – like prepare and eat food, shower, a nasal rinse.

 

I read eight letters, marking out passages that I wanted to think about or those whose texture I liked. After lunch I made notes from the read letters and added things I wanted to explore further. 

 

·      We must learn to die. That is all of Life.

I must learn to endure constant change. To allow the death that each change brings, mourn it all deeply and let it assimilate within my blood.

Like covid – the year 2020 is part of my past. How do I let it become part of me deeply? So I can be transformed by it.

·      She lived for others demands and there was an entire life within that was untouched by the others. She was the opposite of what she wanted to be… and both ‘she’s’ would be equally true, and equally unreal. 

To explore – what in me is like this? Create a character like this.

·      Only those can go away from us whom we never possessed. 

Possession (or double possession) flings us back into ourselves with such enormous force and demands such extremely solitary development that can keep us occupied forever. 

Not sure what I feel about this.

·      Does the person who passes away not leave all the things he has begun in hundreds of ways to be continued by those who outlive him… if they shared an inner bond.

Is this indeed so?

Also — make it a task of mourning to explore all that the person expected of you and hoped for you.

My dad and what he might have wanted? Explore that moment in time in 2001 before I flew away to the US, in his study that became my bedroom. What did he originally want of me and how did that shift?

·      Death presses us more evenly and deeply into life and places the utmost obligations on our slowly growing strengths.
Death fully felt has never remained an obstacle to life for a surviving individual since its innermost essence is more knowing about life.

What is the essence of death?

·      Experience pain in all its fullness – for it is the great life experience and leads everything back into life… as everything that reaches a certain degree of greatest strength must.

Deepest pain leads to greatest life? Also Yin and Yang?

A great weight with its tremendous pressure has the task of forcing us into a deeper, more intimate layer of life so we may grow out of it all the more vibrant and fertile. 
I seem to have lived by this a lot since the late 1990’s and gained by it, but has it failed me somewhat in the last years? Why?

·      Pain teaches us what intensity can be. Pain’s stubborn insistence of a specific location forces us to become one-sided. Pain seems to push out the soul from the place it usually occupies. 

Explore. Particularly the last.

·      Faith in (not God) but human beings. That every person is capable of the pure and the magnificent. 
Explore in terms of Hindutva and Ram and the dehumanization of life in the name of God and how contrary that is to the very essence of any religion.

·      Attach oneself somewhere to nature, with unconditional purpose to what is strong, striving and bright… Move forward even if it can only happen in the least important of daily tasks. 
Each time we tackle something with joy, we transform not only this and the next moment, but we also rearrange and gradually absorb the past within us.

·      Without this (nature and solitude) kind of support I do not think I will be able to muster the concentration that would reveal to me the quietest, most guarded spot of my inner nature where new sources well up.

What kind of supports might do the same for me?

 

Using bullet points in a blog post for the first time ever, I think. I feel a need to share even this raw content. For documenting this process is part of the journey of this retreat. And there is another part of me that wants to wait till I can mould this material into a form readier for consumption. Both are equally right and equally wrong. 

 

It is 2:57pm and time to take a breather by going to the gym. Will chat with my friend at 5:30 and see how his day unfolded. 

Unsettled things

 January 28, 2021

 

I began the day by making lists. Two lists only.

 

One of things unsettled. This one was needed as so little feels stable right now, and when a long list emerged, I made another of things settled enough to be feel stable — this one so I wouldn’t feel too unsettled.

 

In the second I included things like having a stable roof over my head and knowing where the next meal comes from etc. And even with all of that the list of unsettled things was twice as long as the settled. Just one of those times.

 

Yesterday I went to see the doc about my potassium report. The value was even higher than the previous two times, but the sample had homolysed so it was likely a false high. Yet the value had been high in November in a non-lysed sample and again in December. They poked me again and I left feeling unnerved. Enough already I thought, let’s just get on with this. 

 

Things happen, health issues multiply as we age, and they have to be dealt with. But chasing clarity on this potassium stuff has been so shifty. If it is high it can also be due to an error during the test where the platelets break up and potassium is released into the plasma, or if the sample is lysed then it is likely to be high. But if it indeed is high then one cannot ignore it as there might be underlying conditions. This is my fourth test in six weeks, so I wondered — when does the doc decide that it is not high but just error in the test and let it go, or high and needs further investigation? I guess the doc is unsure too.

 

But it feels so blurry that it left me quite unsettled and unable to focus on much. Particularly because this same thing has been going on, and on since late November. I felt I needed to get out of that repetitive circling urgently.

 

I don’t know about you but when something doesn’t resolve for a while, something that needs follow-up or action, then I find it hard to keep waiting for clarity. 

 

My mind kind of dissolves easily and increasing effort is needed to do focused tasks. The forehead starts tightening and the heart beats in a way that I become very aware of it. Old injuries feel recent and I feel listless. I want to curl up in a ball and withdraw, shut out time and the world, until I have some answers. 

 

I could, of course, call a friend and talk it through, or just be distracted from it for a while by healthy (meditation, drawing or training) or unhealthy (wine or tv binging) means. But since I have been reading Rilke’s Letters I have decided to follow his belief…

The more fully we experience what is difficult, the more it pulls and drives us with its weight toward the center of life. And life’s gravitational field is oriented so centripetally that only if someone makes himself light by artificial means could he become estranged from it. 

…and stay with it, in solitary, let it develop and assimilate within. 

 

To some, from the outside, this process which I seem to prefer to process my difficulties may seem like brooding, and sometimes when it takes very long to move beyond heavy and into the feeling of being-part-of-the-whole, that ultimately does happen, I too wonder if I am merely brooding and brewing instead of finding easier ways of letting it be? Question unanswered right now.

 

So, though my list of unsettled things is considerably longer than the stable list, for now I remain in the realm of the unsettled. 

 

My laptop visited the apple doc this week and needs a thorough check-up. I have decided to let it just go for as long as it needs too without a replacement. Disorienting it will be, to the unsettledness it will add, but it is something to feel and perhaps write about the next time I meet it again. 

Dreads, funks and good friends

 January 25, 2021

 

I woke today with a feeling of dread. It has been coming on often recently but today’s was very paralysing. I felt a steel band being wrapped around my face and pulled tighter. One of the things I’ve been doing to dissipate the dread is to go off to the gym or take a walk. But today, even as I felt suffocated and trapped, I felt a need to get deeper into it as it seemed to connect to several life dilemmas. 

 

So, I let it whirl its debilitating dance within me.

 

I’ve been in a phase of wanting to let go of things. I haven’t actually left anything yet, but I have this strong urge to let go, and let go, and let go — teaching karate, volunteering, social media, WhatsApp groups and more. I feel like I have a very crowded life space right now and I think the urge has been to empty it out. I have felt the need for new things but the fullness of the current days, have no gaps for anything to slip in.

 

I have also been in a creative funk. Yes I still am, blocked and grasping. The writing is going badly, verging on non-existent. I go into my cave three times a week sharpen my pencils, fill my inks and lay out my notebooks but that’s all I seem to do. I also am not drawing or doing anything else and after my allotted time I leave and sweat out the frustration that has replaced the anticipation I had begun the work with. I read somewhere, ‘Sometimes when you are in a bad mental place it doesn’t matter what work you put in. You have bigger things to fix in your life than writing.’

 

I do have bigger things to fix. Many things have been going badly — personally and collectively — not all of them are fixable. The only thing that has been going swimmingly well is karate. The pandemic has seen its practice needing to be changed, and changed again, but the restricted (due to covid) slots in the classes are full and more seem to be inquiring about classes. 

 

Yet, all I’ve wanted to do is let go. Leave it and walk away - from the teaching at least – the self-practice will continue till death. The urge has been strong, but I have resisted it, wanting to get to the roots of it. 

 

A friend — who is also in a creative funk, about drawing — and I decided to create a mini retreat for ourselves. Just three days as both were struggling with other time commitments. We decided to read the same text, stay in our caves, write or draw or do whatever, talk to no-one else during the day, and have a conversation each evening. We picked Rilke’s Letters on Loss as our text and reserved a copy each from the library. Mine had become available on Friday and I was/am desperate to start. 

 

I WhatsApp-ed him, have you got your book yet? I’m in a panicky funk today. He replied, Want to talk it out, and I said, yes.

 

We face-timed and I immediately began talking about karate. Whining -- I never wanted to teach... then I got used to it and even enjoyed it... but now the class has got huge... and I have to think of finding spaces to use... and book them in advance, months in advance... and blah, blah, blah... It feels less like the energising-relaxing passion that it used to be and more like a weight dragging me down into dark dry well. Slowly the rant became an exploration, and I came to the realization that for me teaching has always involved forming some sort of relationship with my students, getting to know them a bit, listening to them talk about whatever they were willing to share. As the number of students goes up, I feel I cannot maintain those connections and that is upsetting to me. Having two classes back-to-back means that I barely chat with the first lot and I miss that. I don’t know what I will do about it all but it’s good to know exactly ‘what’ I wanted to let go off, and so know also what I want to keep.

 

We spoke of other things, financial messes and political angst and much ‘stuff’ all smooshed up together in the murkiness began revealing shape, details, emotions — and though nothing has clarified, things are perhaps clearer now. 

 

Thank the Universe for good friends!

The honest beating of my heart

 January 18, 2021

 

I feel, for a while now, that I am in the midst of a profound and heavy emptiness. The only time I remember feeling this deep a hole was in the year 1997. It was at this time that the fourth friend that I wrote about in the previous post — the one whose friendship I botched —introduced me to Rilke. He was an answer to a question I didn’t know I was even asking. A path to a search that I hadn’t named at that point. Slowly he walked with me through the next several years — which were slow and fast, and full of stops and starts as well as long easy sprints — deepening my life and work. 

 

So naturally today when again, I find myself feeling that long, that lost, that difficult emptiness I turn to his words again. I pull out his ‘Letters on Life’ and begin reading the section On Work.

 

As it always happens, I get completely pulled into the words. I read, I stop, I walk, I read some more. At the end of the section, I go back and read some passages that felt particularly relevant – I see that the ones that catch my attention are about my ‘true work’, the life tasks I recognize deeply as mine. I want to, so badly, be someone, ‘who resides in his own stillness or simply in the midst of his melody, close to the honest beating of his heart.’

 

It is painful to recognize how lost from this I am today. How I don’t feel I know my life tasks, and stillness and being close to the honest beating of my heart feel so far away. But being reminded that this is what is missing is also exhilarating and an internal bell has begun ringing and its reverberations flow through my blood and muscles. I know that all that matters right now, what really matters, is to find those honest beatings of my heart.

I feel like I have forgotten how to do it. I can start by making a list of the things I feel are my tasks and mine alone. I can take one of those things on that list and write more about it. I can let it be in the background as I go about my daily tasks. I can discover the songs it wants to unfold within me. 

 

I can go back to 1997 and think of the things that might have worked. Slow, quiet days staying with the heaviness that felt like it would kill. Conversations with others seeking beyond the material and the known. Reading the words of those gone before and long, long walks to assimilate those words. 

 

I am not the same person I was in 1997. Somewhat wiser, somewhat more jaded; somewhat busier, much busier; somewhat more scared, somewhat more sure that ultimately I will know something, like I had once, or perhaps even twice, before in my life. I feel like parts of me have been chipped away by life, leaving holes in me. I feel like I donned many armours over the years but in 2020 dropped them, and so feel at once light and very vulnerable. 

 

And because the not knowing of ‘how’ makes me feel too fuzzy. I need to list things I can do…   Like stay with the heaviness and rejoice when it lifts for a bit... Like voice my doubts and desires, the places I feel torn, and the things I miss… Like say what I feel even when it doesn’t want to be heard and show my fragile places… Like name the tensions I feel around me and inquire about them… And I also know these are the things I know how to do, and I look and long for the things I don’t yet know too. 

Losing a friendship

 Jan 14, 2021

 

I feel like I am mourning the loss of a friendship. But immediately I wonder if I can mourn when I don’t yet know if it has ended – permanently or temporarily. What I do know is that I have been preoccupied with wondering what state it is in and why it is in that state.

 

To put it simply my friend seems to have dumped me. Suddenly and slowly both at once. Suddenly because one day, in June, she stopped talking to me saying she needed space and slowly because when I asked to talk about it, she said, ‘yes, but not now,’ and she continued to reply to and send me WhatsApp messages until one day that too stopped — from both sides. Me because it became sort of meaningless for me to continue those, ‘how are you’, ‘I am fine’ typey things when my requests to meet and talk about things were not reciprocated. 

 

I did several things to make sense for myself this happening. I created characters who would represent her and me and had conversations between them. I journaled about my cycle of feelings — pain, anger, confusion and back. This person has done this twice before to me and I looked up old journals to understand what had happened then. I also had conversations with another friend she had ghosted around the same time in 2020. She was important to both of us and we wanted to make sense of what we were feeling, and why she did it, and think of ways we could be there for her if she was in some crisis. 

 

Later I began thinking of friendship in more general terms, reading articles, thinking of great friendships in books and my own friendships, particularly the ones I had botched. I took four of these botched relationships, which I had ended or done something that lead to them ending and searched my memories about them. Three of them had hurt me emotionally at a time I was particularly fragile because of the chaos in my life. Two had tried to apologize but I was so stuck in pain that I pushed them further away even after. The thought of them hurting me again was unbearable. I felt by ending the relationships I was in control and I was taking care of myself. One didn’t ever apologize, and I find he faded out from me as I must have from him. 

 

After this lapse of time, I can clearly see my own part in it. The immaturity of my reactions and how I continued to blame them despite their attempt at explanation. A few years ago, I reached out to two. I was terrified they would be too angry to respond but they both did, and now with one I feel even closer.

 

The fourth is more complex and needs more thought. There were unspoken judgments from that person about me that I could not unpack at that time as they were mixed up in the judgments I had about myself. But she was also a person I wasn’t ready for, and I rejected her, and her way of life, in a way that must have hurt her. She was a ‘secondary process’ I couldn’t yet welcome in. I regret that  but don’t yet know how to repair the gap. 

 

Meanwhile so much else is happening in the world. The US capitol was stormed, the president impeached. In India the farmer's protest has reached day 49 (I think) and the Supreme Court passed a controversial order about it. Hindutva groups, in the name of Rama, damaged mosques and homes of Muslims and when Muslims retaliated the cops arrested them while leaving the ones who had started the violence to roam free. A vaccine without phase 3 efficacy data was rolled out for ‘emergency’ use making people wonder if they were being used as guinea pigs without any consent or monitoring. People debated the new WhatsApp privacy policy endlessly and many stayed on WhatsApp because when things are free one pays a price in one way or the other. Each of these, and more happenings, I thought of endlessly too. 

 

I miss being able to talk to my friend about some of it, or all of it. I don’t have a ton of friends but the ones I do are really important to me. She is not dead just unreachable and that makes it even harder in some ways to find closure. But this going back and reflecting on the other botched friendships has been good. Friendships have no rules and no contracts but developing an internal ethical compass to negotiate them does develop. I just don’t want to sit at a desk ten years from now and regret more loss because of something I did or didn’t do. 

Anything can happen

 January 4, 2021

 

It’s the first working day of the year. Besides karate on Sunday, it’s been a loungey few days. The picnic our dojo had planned on New Year’s Day rained out. I was bummed but the lazy me was glad to stay on our new sofa, a day bed really, and read. 

 

I started the new year with 'A Burning' and 'The Vanishing Half'. Two very differently paced books. When the quick short chapters of Majumdar get to me I sink into Vanishing Half. And when my mind needs time to process the rolling circular forward motion of Vanishing Half, I run along quickly with A Burning while allowing that to happen in the background. The mix feels good.

 

In the first week of December, I impulsively ordered a new sofa. We had been thinking about it for a while as the old one was tired and torn - can blame the fur babes for the latter. We knew what we wanted next, but I feared that getting a new sofa would necessitate further furniture changes, as the new light and sleek design would look ‘random’ in the mish mash of oddments from Ikea that we have acquired in the living space over the years. The change felt too huge and unsettling to make and I kept putting it off. 

 

But on that day in early December, as I was waiting to see the doctor at Suntec, I went recklessly into Scanteak and ordered the new one. Then panicked later that evening.

 

The sofa was delivered on December 29^th and as it turned out the change to this new something, much more suitable than the old, wasn’t so hard. Three pieces in the living room will have to go and two new ones bought. 

 

On New Years Eve, on the edge between 2020 and 2021, I sat cross-legged on this new sofa and stared at the night sky lit up by Singapore’s CBD. The new year felt like the depths of the sky further up, a vast and empty void. I felt trepidation and hope and expectation but complete uncertainty and not knowing. I had never thought this way about a new year before. Often, I had vague or definite plans for the year. This year there are none. Often, I had desires and resolutions, this year, besides one to cook more often, there are none. There is nothing at all in the year, but strangely it does not feel scary. 

 

And the new sofa is infinitely more comfortable than the old one. 

 

I think this sofa changing exercise has given me courage to allow change. To follow the impulses, I may have instead of planning and worrying. To simply let things be at times and shake them up at others while also letting them be. The whole previous year has been a practice of that. I may have done it badly on most days and well on a few, but it has forced me to live in the present and put aside thoughts of the vast unknowns of the future. It strengthened me even as it wore me down to my core, forcing me once again to discover true north. I don’t have words to describe this direction yet, but I feel like my bones and cells have grown a new compass. 

 

As the year ended, I had written about the shift within from heaviness to unexpected lightness. Over the weekend I felt energy, to do some of the things I had given up due to mental exhaustion last year, return. Even if I am hurtling with the rest of the world towards an unspecifiable tomorrow I feel I am doing it with renewed awareness. Anything can happen.