Greatest Loves

May 7, 2024

It is the kind of afternoon to stay in and drink hot tea. A strong steady rain, not yet a raging torrent, falls outside on a darkening day. Sometimes I love not bright—dull doesn’t fit—days like this, especially when I am indoors. But unfortunately, hot tea is now confined only to breakfast time because of issues like being sleep deprived if I drink caffeine past noon and suffering from acid reflux. 

I feel content, peaceful, sleepy today. Also able to work.

Yesterday was lovely sunny day with a blue sky and fluffy clouds. Such days also makes me happy most times, but yesterday my body was wracked with pain – shoulder/neck sprain from training, left leg/hip/back pain which is on a high every Monday after two days of morning training, and gastrointestinal upheaval. I found it hard to focus on the work at hand, which was an assignment for my memoir class, as my attention continuously shifted to one of those pains. I felt gloomy and stormy in body and mind. 

A creeping realization that is growing while participating in the memoir class also was agitating me. The realization that I am so distant from my desires that I don’t know them anymore. The realization that the project I thought I could work on during the class was not a project at all — it might be but not in the way I had envisioned. The project was my journey through karate but participating in discussions and doing the assignments I saw that karate was not the deep love of my life. I mean I always knew it, but I also went along with some narrative that it might be since that was what I had spent so much of my life over the last sixteen years, here in Singapore, doing.

I tried to unsee this. The truth was clear that if I had never moved to Singapore, I would never have wanted to have my own dojo and I would never have been country representative with all its responsibilities. I would be a happy student, who could come and go as I pleased, rest during times of bodily distress or busy times in my life. This seeing left me extremely unsettled. My thoughts strayed into the life I missed out on, and I began mourning it and wondering who else could I have been if I had followed my deepest passions? I do know what my deepest loves were and likely still are though so many years later I probably need to rediscover them. 

But here, I had contented myself with smaller loves. This is something to feel loss and grief about, but since life moves forward and I cannot change the past I need to allow it space to be mourned and then move on. Where I don’t yet know. But it is good to have seen what I guess I was trying not to look at. The question also is when did I become this person who looked away from uncomfortable truths of herself and her life?

Ya, but nice to be in this space of recognition right now. What will unfold further who knows, as I can’t see the future. I couldn’t see who I would become after I moved here and so many things before that and before that. At every choice and fork, I had the chance to be someone else. 

Third phase of voting in Indian elections today. PM’s speeches have become even more disgusting, and I see many saying that they are ashamed to be Indians right now — for those who don’t know let me share that the PM had said in his first year of office that Indians now were proud to be Indians whereas before when the Congress ruled, they/we cursed themselves for being born in this beautiful land. I hope this disgust with his divisive and untruths translates into votes, but the drowning BJP is resorting to very undemocratic means, threats and more, to scare election candidates away so their candidates get a walkover. And they might still win the election by hook or by crook and very likely more the latter. 

I’ll leave you with another thought today. I was reading a book in which the author said — ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’, is a category error. I have always felt this and me and my artist friend have often disagreed on the above. What do you think? 

And what are the greatest loves of your life? Have you been able to live them, or have you strayed from them? Do you have regrets, or you feel that where you are is just right?