A Year From the Last Birthday

August 27, 2024

            Arrived at the day amid a terrible sinus attack, with aching forehead and congested ears. The plan was to go into the forest-park and sketch trees, but it’s been dark since I woke and began raining a while ago. The parched trees look a happy lush green! And perhaps it will clear later in the day.

            I keep telling the spouse that it doesn’t feel birthday-ish, whatever that means. It hasn’t felt all month, but there is a lightness there that I thought was missing last year. So I pulled out my journal #109 to check on the same time 2023. I see that all the external worries that were dragging me down, except one, still exist. But I am surprised how much feels shifted with just one worry being shed? Or is it something else entirely, because the lightness began post the Phuket holiday, the getting away from what was and allowing that to begin to re-configure my inner space. Often I go away for a trip taking everything with me and return not changed much. 

            I’m writing this within the dullness of the sinus pains and cannot muster up much bubble, but I’m celebrating myself today and my journey through life. 

Last week at a get-together with my writer’s coven, someone pointed out that my tendency type according to Gretchen Rubin’s classification is probably Rebel, and later the website quiz indeed led to Rebel. 

“You can’t make me, and neither can I”, is apparently the way I function. I resist both outer and inner expectations. During the reflections of the past weeks, I realized that indeed I had lived life on my own terms and if someone said I couldn’t do something or tried to put obstacles in my path I had gone ahead and done it. And this showed clearly in my karate journey, particularly here — perhaps because since I have moved to Singapore I have been deeper with it than many others threads in life.

I also realized that I need fluid identities, and I cannot bear to be stuck in one. When it solidifies, I need to shrug out of it and go on my way again. I have been feeling this with my karate identity. Since last year the urge to step back and re-define its existence within myself has been almost obsessive, for I felt that what at one time had made my spirit soar was now constraining it. But last year the time didn’t feel right to pull out, this year is different. I feel my seniors can and will keep the dojo going and I can step back a bit. The goal of having a self-sustaining dojo that I had since 2017 feels reached this year and I think this is where the lightness I am feeling comes from. 

It is the freedom to discover life paths anew having accomplished something meaningful to me. I feel other old identities calling and perhaps new ones waiting to be discovered. 

Besides getting away from the physical space what has helped is examining the inner space. For one’s karate to be strong one must have a strong body and in the past almost 90% of all training was building the body through exercises, with or without equipment, and with or without a partner. The rest 10% was about techniques and other practice — though outsiders mostly see this aspect of karate. A year ago I was watching a sketching video where I learnt that while making a sketch the importance of laying down of the form and shapes is 80%, while the details (which most people notice first) is 20%. I wondered what the basic foundation of writing is, and I though nobody has said this clearly, I think that it is the knowing of the self, the examination of the lived and un-lived lives. That forms at least 70% of the kind of writing i enjoy. And when that wavers and is lost, the writing is insipid. 

Life had been so busy, so tiring, so fast paced — from my last birthday — that until Phuket I had neglected this. Phuket and then the Japan trip slowed me immensely, and even while I was busy and spinning on the outside the still core existed. 

May I always re-find it whenever I lose it. 

Another Rape in the Vishwa-Guru.

August 20, 2024

It’s been one of those days where not much makes sense. The feeling probably began last week. 

I’m still happy to be writing again, but today particularly the feeling that the stories I am currently engaged in are meaningless is all-engulfing. Why write about personal journeys and failings and fears when so much is happening in the world. 

My heart, like the heart of many Indians and people of Indian origin, is repeatedly drawn to the vicious rape and murder of a young doctor in a Calcutta college, and what feels like a deep cover-up around it. 

Imagine… The woman is raped and killed after 36 hours of duty when she slips into a seminar room to get some rest. Imagine that her hip bone is shattered, and there is blood flowing from her eyes, besides other violent injuries. Imagine the parents being told that girl committed suicide, and her body being cremated suddenly, some say to destroy evidence (the same has been done before with another young woman in Hathraas). Imagine sudden unexplained renovation in the vicinity of the crime which might further destroy evidence. Imagine a night march organized by women doctors to reclaim the night, joined by men and women, doctors or otherwise, being overrun by a crazed mob that threatened the peaceful protestors and vandalized the hospital. Imagine the principal of the hospital, described as corrupt and involved in many rackets, not being dismissed by the government but being transferred to a good position in another hospital — which luckily was opposed by the students of that hospital who sent the man  packing. Imagine the courts having to come in at all this outrage since the police seemed ineffective or unwilling. Imagine further that the one rapist, who has been apprehended for committing this crime, going to some police barrack to sleep peacefully after committing the vicious rape and murder. What was he thinking? What made him feel so safe? Imagine not being able to even confirm that this could not have been the work of only that man and probably more were involved. Imagine the Bengal Government saying something as stupid as women should not be given night shifts to prevent such crimes. 

This isn’t dystopian gender fiction. It is reality. It happened last week. And now imagine how this is being used politically to try to bring in President’s rule or Governor’s rule in the city or the state, I don’t know if this rumour is true. 

India calls itself a Vishwa-guru, but cannot solve a crime like this. Cannot be transparent about it. Cannot provide security to women in its cities, and towns, and workplaces. This to me should be one of the indices for a Vishwa-guru. The Nirbhaya gang rape of 2012 was solved quickly. It happened in the night streets of Dehli, a city that once was considered safe for women. Soon after a woman was gang raped in Mumbai. The safest city for women in India at one time. The perpetrators there too were found quickly. But here there seems to be no movement towards solving the crime. I can't Imagine what the parents must be feeling, or I can but not completely. 

It astounds me, us, daily. I search for news of a breakthrough, of some more information about this, but the same old, same old is being recycled. 

In the midst of this I am writing stories about the personal. I am happy that a goal I set for karate around 2016 feels realized and I want to write about it. I know these stories too are important but I don’t wish to do just this. Yet the political, the global, feels so vast that I don’t know where to begin. Not yet.

I recently saw a video, made by a socio-political satirist, of people, Indian people, sitting in cars or trains, smiling as they scroll on their phones, and not looking at the ‘fires and storms’ outside the window. How do people do that? Wake up and smell the acridity and rot. India feels at the brink of something explosive, a bubbling volcano. Maybe I am wrong. 

Life

August 13, 2024

I have the picture of the ideal life that I would like to live, and I have the life I actually live.

In my ideal life I’d have a lot more energy and discipline but also know when I need to chill-out. I’d read more, especially in the evenings when I watch news or Netflix for four hours — I’d spend at least half of that time reading. I’d also have a retirement plan in place. I’d walk more in the hill park and sketch more. 

Today, I don’t have to write that I would write more as after my return, just as I hoped it would, my writing brain, which I had worried was dead and gone forever, has fired up. There was a huge amount of space in my head that was occupied with karate and anxieties around it that has freed up and my head is brimming with ideas, though actual writing is still slower than I wish it would be in my ideal life. It’s weird how the brain can soak up anxiety until there is no space for anything else in it, and it becomes sluggish, and doing anything feels like pushing through thick membranes that have draped themselves around the body and mind and constrict the self. 

I still haven’t found the one project I feel I should focus on as the six that I have been thinking about all have an equal pull on me. Sometimes I feel I should prioritize the one I can finish quickly, while at other times I feel I need to permit the self to move wherever it wants to go even though it can be frustrating and undisciplined. But I can live with this abundance after those long arid months. I think the writing mind is flitting about trying to find the ideal perch and it will settle into something in a bit. For now, I am allowing it to flow and following it without expectation. 

And after finally seeing a doc last week about the stomped-on toe and being told to not train for two-three weeks, I’m using the time to do things I haven’t been able to do in a while. 

Yesterday I met a friend I hadn’t seen in a couple of years. I have written about her. She’s fought, called me too negative to be around, and broken off with me three times and for long periods in our seventeen-year friendship. Yet it was so easy to slip into talking with her; no need to ‘catch-up’ and no awkwardness. We spoke of whatever came up in any sequence that it did. Since I moved to Singapore, she might be the only person who knows everything that has happened to me — good or bad — and remembers how I felt about it. Visa versa too. 

I’m not sure if she will break off with me again but I feel that we have matured as we have aged and know our triggers better. She said her main, primal-preverbal, issue is not feeling good enough but now she has better knowledge about how she overreacts when she feels someone is criticizing her. Same for me, but my issue is never having felt loved as a child and fear of abandonment. I guess the two form a pair that is matched to create the most hurt, but also almost the most learning, about ourselves and how we handle conflict in relationships — if we remain open to dialogue during those times. 

Meanwhile talking to a friend that knows me so well and can add observations to the insights I shared about myself, and visa-versa, was like slowly savouring a very delicious matcha, bitter chocolate cake. I enjoyed every bite of the day. It was a watering-hole moment. 

Watering-hole Moments

Monday, August 5, 2024

I’m back in Singapore, back in my dark-blue cave room, back on my desk near the windows that open into the hill-park with summer trees that have stripped off some of their leaves or dried to a yellow or pinkish hue while battling the heat. There is huge reluctance, resistance, to being back. Already my WhatsApp and email are buzzing with requests for group facilitations. Already a schedule is building itself, despite me wishing for more days of nothing. I wish I was back in Kyoto and since I can’t be, I wish I was lying on my sofa reading a book, instead to trying to find discipline to work on my personal projects. Projects I promised myself I would make a priority after the karate-holiday trip. 

The rest of the days in Kyoto were busy, hectic, tiring but fun. I immersed myself totally in each moment, feeling the texture, the quality or intensity, the emotional response to the moment, thoroughly. We walked, we talked — even sometimes just to say that we had nothing to say to each other, visited temples, ate, and even shopped. I saw sights that delighted and churned my core, which I wanted more of — like the paintings of Insho Domoto. But it was the immersion that was special. I forgot about all the serious, anxiety raising issues waiting back for us at home and immersed in each moment feeling the joy, the heat, the peace, the frustration, the exhilaration, the disappointment, the connection, the distance, of the moment — and there is no better relaxer or de-stressor than that. Immersion into the moment. 

The trip had two parts — and in both in some ways relationships were key. In Okinawa it was the larger and more general karate family, and more specifically our own dojo family. In Kyoto it was the spouse and me, and reconnection with a special Singaporean friend who has moved to Japan. But it was also all sorts of inner relationships forgotten or forged anew or just new, that still are being integrated.

In Naha itself the anxieties of our current year began to reveal themselves clearer. In fact what became clear is how burdened we both were with anxiety. They had been stuffed into a cupboard, almost like a black hole, anywhere there was a bit of space. It became clear that this cupboard would burst out if the door was even opened slightly. Over the days the cupboard got organized, shelves were built, and the anxieties sorted in different ways — ones that were on a scale of 1-10 almost at 100, the ones that were immediately urgent and ones that could be ignored for a bit, ones that we had control over and ones that others would determine the fate of, personal ones and ones that were collective — like the political situation in the world or environmental issues. But once they were neatly shelved, they did feel less daunting. Not sure how that will continue here in Singapore. 

One of the biggest learnings of this trip, which I have learnt before, or read before, or been told about before, was about using the watering-hole moments in a desert to survive the desert. These two stress free weeks have freed up inner space that will help manoeuver through the upcoming months. If you attend to these watering-hole moments in your own life and immerse yourself fully into them, laugh, cry, and relax, it will make something easier. I’m telling myself this, making a note I can check back into when I feel overwhelmed.