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.