Mini Eureka Moment!

 September 5, 2023

 

Last Friday I hit a mini eureka moment. After having ‘What’s the theme?’ floating around in my head, at all times of day and night, I caught a glimmer and I think I have a ‘feeling’ for the organizing principle for the memoir, if I write it. Phew!

 

For a ‘nobody’, like me, even writing a memoir is edgy stuff. It’s like giving myself and my life an importance that it has no business having. Every life is unique, and I feel curious about most people I meet, but spending months excavating my memories to write a narrative about myself feels hugely narcissistic. 

 

This is not new. Many memoirists struggle with this but until this weird urge to explore and record my karate journey exists, I guess I will do it. 

 

But really there are so many more important issues in this world that I could spend time thinking and writing about, maybe even finding ways to act on, so why do this? Maybe many of us grapple with the conflict between the personal/family and the larger socio-political-environmental needs we have. I don’t know how you have done it but at different times in my life I have balanced these differently, neglecting one for the other, seldom finding phases of perfect balance. When one dominates there is depression and exhaustion and naturally the self moves to make space for the other? Maybe there are people within whom there is no conflict around this. Who know what, why, who, and how they exist around. I am not one of those and often I envy people who know. Or those people who don’t know but also don’t need to know. I don’t fall into that category either. So, I exist in this state of angsty unknowing for major parts of my life – it is exhausting at times, exhilarating at others. And perhaps many others do too?

 

Right now, I feel a lot of general anxiety about the state of the world, some unspecific fears about my personal life and choices. I wake and sleep with these yet when I am writing about this, the karate stuff, they fade and I feel happy — as I do when I am reading well written fiction or non-fiction, or something that makes me ponder, or absorbed in any kind of training, or of course picking an ink for a fountain pen, filling it, and writing on a blank sheet with it.  

 

It is nice to find the few things that shift that heavy mood. 

 

Oh, I am not going to reveal that organizing principle I thought I caught a glimpse of from the corner of my eye. It is too tiny, too vague, to name yet. I need to let it ripen within quietly.