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!
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