Sanchin, and Gin and Tonics

 February 13, 2022

I want to write about today. But it feels like ‘so much’ in just one day that I don’t know if I can. 

 

This afternoon I sat and watched myself, watch four of my students – can I call them that – do dan gradings with Sensei Mistry online. 

 

I don’t know where to begin to express the myriad emotions I have been through in the day. 

 

It began on the first Sunday of 2022. No, it began in 2003. Or perhaps in 2014?

 

Phew! Deep breath. Let’s just start with sanchin, and gin and tonics…

 

It began this week. It all started to feel unreal and scary then. Sensei Mistry sent me the theory paper for the four who had been training with him on Sundays in January. I told him I was as nervous as them. An online dan grading—a first for our dojo.  And then there was this thing — that I didn’t quite identify as a teacher who could mentor her students towards dan gradings. I didn’t say that to him, but perhaps I didn’t have to. I had been his student, still was, and he knew me well, like i know my students perhaps. He said, Radhika relax, do sanchin and have a gin and tonic on me. 

 

But I am an imposter. Still swimming in this space of go-ju karate, struggling to find my identity and I mean not as a teacher but just a karateka. A person who Sensei Mistry had, rightly, not graded to her first stripe till she had been training for eight months — when most got it in three. 

 

Back to that time when Sensei Pete left Singapore. Back to trying to keep the dojo going when the other black belt quit training. Back to the year on Fort Canning Hill training with just two others, brown belts at that time. 2014 that was. 

 

Fast forward to today. I wanted to train too. I said I’d keep my camera off. But Sensei Mistry reminded me that I was their Sensei, and I should sit this one out. I should also get a grading sheet and make notes. Which I did. But like I said I was watching myself, watching the grading. 

 

And watch them I did from the edge of my seat. 

 

This week has been rich with memory. Of my first years in karate with Sensei Mistry. Of my first years in teaching these four. Particularly two who entered our dojo as white belts. I remembered the first contact, the first email, the first phone call, the first months with them. 

 

And the months of Sunday practice with them last year. Their efforts to grasp something intangible that the imperfect, inadequate me was trying to convey. I still can’t believe they trusted me — that I could lead them on this journey. 

 

But I think they got it. At least the first steps. They found their way for sure. And yes, they all passed and the Singy IOGKF dojo has three new shodans and one new nidan. I couldn’t be prouder. I broke into tears after Sensei announced the results.

 

A day of rest and reflection for me — with a vodka neat (as I had run out of gin). Perhaps a bit longer for them. But next weekend we will be back in the dojo trying to dig deeper —  into skill, technique, into form, and essence, of this amazing path. Where I am, maybe we all are, discovering more than just karate. Where we find ourselves in vivid, clear moments that may again be lost.

Am I too foolish to write about self-doubt? 

Black Lines in Thumbnails of Colour

February 8, 2022

 

Last week I felt light, like a falling snowflake, a spinning dancer. Last week I felt I’d walked a few steps forwards. I even tackled four of the six tasks on my financial stuff to-do list. It felt like a moment of victory—of being ‘productive’, efficient, useful—of conquering sloth, and fear. I don’t know how one gets from there to here in one swift slide.

 

Today I am, once again, acutely aware of the mountain of things under the concrete I walk on. The uncertainties, the things beyond my control—those things that I have understood are unresolvable, unpredictable in the current situation. I need visits to India to clear them. I choose to not give them mental space, so they creep under the ground I walk on making each step wobbly. They grow, stay stagnant, and grow more—never diminishing in size by even a cubic millimeter. I fall on them all lumpy and tired. I turn and turn like a dog trying to find a comfortable position. I feel like the princess, lying on a pea covered by a dozen mattresses. I finally doze. I dream of running away from assassins and all the undone things, the long list of them, begin falling on me like a rain of stones. I am sandwiched. Tired I give up. 

 

I read five books in January and barely ten pages in February. The inconsistency chomps at me. After every five or six days of good work, I drop into a ‘void’ day where nothing works, nothing feels right, nothing moves—or it does but in weighty backward way. I lie in bed at night glad that the day is over and worry, but what if tomorrow is the same. I’ve begun to cope by drawing these disturbances with a black fine liner in thumbnails of solid colour. It's soothing to pick a colour and block out a square in my journal. Expressing the disturbance within the box, frees me a bit from its grasp.  Yesterday I drew nine boxes—lime green, pale yellow, sky blue, leaf green, bright orange, eggplant purple, rose pink, sea blue, soft lilac. 

 

I crawled out of that yesterday into today and found that I began ticking my to-do list again. Relief. 

 

The inconsistency bothers me. It leaves gaps in what I can expect of myself. It obscures the full picture and that makes me nervous. It’s hard to keep doing when I don’t know where everything fits. 

 

But there is not much to do about it, I realize. Fighting it makes it worse. Planning a faffing day never works. The only thing that seems to work is to allow everything to collapse on such a day and trust that it will be one or two, not many. 

 

This is life right now. It’s not been this way before the dreaded C-thing happened. Again, I blame it. Will I ever stop? Will it ever stop? Will I ever adapt to this unnatural normal? 

 

It’s the same lesson as last week in a different form. The slow crawl, with moments of joyous leaping and others of content catnapping. Today I will also add Sanchin and gin and tonics to my coping strategies. Advise from one of my Sensei’s. This story I will tell another time.

 

People all over the world are doing kata and push-up challenges this month. Time to throw myself into that energy.