Knee Pain Sucks and A Few Other Thoughts

January 30, 2025

            Except for a day or two over the last tenday my mind has been occupied 80% of the time with knee pain. The pain began on the first Sunday in January after our second karate training of the year and has gone up and down since. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that the pain has taken over 50% of my thoughts for the entire month; I’m constantly worrying about the cause and long-term effects of the pain. 

            In between life has gone on but the quality of it has felt diminished. I have heard people with chronic pain say this.

            Every morning as I sit on my cluttered desk, I have been thinking about the fascist mindset I mentioned last week. I have spent a fair amount of my faffing time reading comments by Hindu right extremists on articles by independent media. I got pulled into in two conversations. One about how patriarchal, hierarchical, exclusionist, anti-women and minorities, the extreme right ideology is. Well, the conversation wasn’t framed that way. It was more a debate about the constitution and the religious book that fascists would want to adopt instead of the constitution. I wanted to know what followers of the ideology felt was good about the book they wanted to base the running of India on. Of course, none of them could answer. The only responses were denial about parts of it (who says the book is anti-women), that it was part of the golden age of Hindu culture and we need to bring that back, or the person would suddenly begin talking about Sharia law or the way the Taliban treat women and ask me to defend it—why I don’t know since I only was talking about the values enshrined in our constitution. The second conversation was about the current need of right-wing Hindus to dig under all the mosques in India which were supposedly built over temples the Mughal invaders destroyed. It meant challenging The Places of Worship Act which was put in place to prevent this sort of endless quest to squabble about whether a mosque should be demolished to establish a temple—doing this of course is a way of showing Muslims their true place in our supposed democracy.  The main arguments there were that Hindus felt a violence was done to them 1000 years ago that has prevented them from expressing their culture even today (this in a country that is 80% Hindu), and that I was self-loathing (I was called that three times by the same person) because I didn’t want to dig up most of India to find temples instead of progressing forward. For them there was no forward progress without this digging. There were no answers to my question about other ways to strengthen our culture besides breaking down mosques and building temples. No answers at all to the fact how this kind of violence would affect both harmony and socio-economic progress. 

            So, I hit walls but what I did understand is that extremism works on the idea of inequality, not just between one group and another but also within the favoured group in which was easy for me (an outsider) to see that there are a few leaders and millions of followers, and that the followers do not know that they are mere minions but feel powerful mouthing the ideas of the few leaders. I don’t understand how they cannot see that they are worshippers and not creators of original thought. I see these dynamics in conversations on fb posts of my American friends—it is the same even when it might seem different. Maybe this attempt to study it is for me a way of staying detached from the pain it brings. For it brings an immense feeling that this is not the world I want to wake up to daily.

            This week after the knee pain got to a 15+++ level I frantically sought help. I met an orthopedic surgeon and got an MRI. Surprisingly on the day I got the MRI my pain level was down to a 3 and I joked that it was a variation of Murphy’s law that once one takes steps to MRI the painful joint it makes you doubt your decision by being almost normal. Anyway, the pain is back at an 8 today so I am glad I got that MRI. This time the weird noises of the MRI lulled me into calm, it felt like ‘me time’ to lie there—the last time I had an MRI the noise was a racket that drove me insane and all I could think of was, when will it stop, when will it stop. This time I had the insight that the need to know this pain came from something I often threw around, sometimes in deep seriousness and sometimes flippantly, that I want to do karate until the day I die. I realized I do, and I want to know how to care for my joints well, and to know the stupid things I should avoid as I age so that they will support my wish to do karate until my dying day. This from a person who still doesn’t identity as a martial arts nerd makes me wonder where it comes from. It is things like this that make me feel like I don't know who I am anymore.

            I am contemplating what else I want to do until I die. What do you want to do until the day you die? 

Lying with my legs under the domed tunnel with displays flashing I also began pondering—is it better to live like you have only one year to live, which means you complete your bucket list, and be spontaneous as you live in the moment not necessarily thinking of the state of the world, or is it better to live like you might live forever, which to me meant focus more on growth and learning, and building better relationships, and structures.

I seem to have swung from being too hermit-ty to overfilling my calendar and am suffering from the overexposure to the external that is so exhausting to introverts. Balance.

I see the ortho later today to hear what he thinks of the state of my right knee and ankle. Wish me luck!