A Long Personal Winter

March 27, 2025

            The last two weeks have passed in a blur. The previous one very heavy, because of health-related turbulence that my cat and human family and I were going through, accentuated by strong political happenings at many levels — including the impending Singapore elections. This week the blur has been due to busyness and attempts to un-crease last week’s anxieties. Within the hectic schedule though there were two emotionally intimate lunches with friends, one that I have known for twenty-seven years and the other for seventeen. Both strong women that have made tough life choices and whose search to be true to themselves has been the driving factor for the choices they made, particularly in their forties and beyond.

            The late thirties or early forties is the time that many of us begin to look at our lives and contemplate if we are where we want to be and if we are who we want to be. For me it was the early thirties when feelings of being in the wrong life, the wrong body, began to disturb my everyday normalcy. Then a severe bout of pneumonia that overlapped with nation altering religio-political events opened doors into new paths. Perhaps those doors would have opened and closed without me noticing them if it hadn’t been for the pneumonia that had halted the life that was then. Stepping through the door was like stepping into a new being. What of the old did I keep I am not sure, but because I took risks and allowed the disturbances to amplify rather than attempt to suppress them I emerged from chrysalis to adult. And the changes, exhilarating and scary kept coming at a pace perhaps too quick to properly integrate. While some might say I polished my facets and got to know each side, others might say I became a rolling stone that proverbially gathers no moss. 

Well, who wants moss, right. I just looked up the meaning of that idiom — a rolling stone gathers no moss — and an explanation tells me that a person who doesn’t have roots in one place will not gather wealth or status or responsibilities or commitments. Hmm… It is true that I haven’t gathered the first two, because I rolled and rolled with every change — whether it was to do with change of country or career, but I do have plenty of the second two. I wish I could take those — feeling responsible and committed to the lives of others — less seriously. A chapter and meditation in the Kornfield book did focus on recognizing that you are not responsible for the choices and life somebody else leads. But I am a human, deeply tied to this world, while aching to be free of it, and this kind of compassionate detachment is hard.

Moss makes rocks slippery, it can look pretty in some places, but it can also feel like neglect and stagnation. So, I don’t want moss. I truly don’t care about accumulating wealth though it would be nice to feel secure about some things. I don’t care about status because when I look around, I see the crazy things a person does to retain it. That feels like prison to me.

I am bored with myself right now. From the thirties until a few years ago I had become very good at listening to myself and following the changes that wanted to surface. Since 2022 I have felt an increasing dampening of the voice within and have struggled to know where the next door is. I covered up the pain of this separation with my inner voice with busyness — like moving homes — but I understood over these last two weeks of heaviness, blur, and a couple of clear afternoon conversations where this inability to see the next doors might have begun. 

In 2022 a huge external event split me. The karate organization I belong to split, and I made a choice that felt like amputating some of my limbs. I process emotional pain by writing but I didn’t write about it fully, afraid of betraying something, someone, myself, if I wrote — even if I didn’t show the work to anyone else. And as I closed the door to examining that part of my life deeply, I seemed to have also shut of my ability to examine everything I did deeply. Closing of sensitivity to one side of yourself sometimes chokes off everything, doesn’t it? And so, my life force stagnated and my ability to listen to that within me that points me towards new inner seeds dulled and disappeared until life was a continuous freeze, a winter of sorts for too many things.  

Though every season has its own purpose, and the retreat and dormancy of winter is needed for restoration, one cannot endure any one season continuously and must know when to allow the thaw. Winter is cold, mono-toned, and time may pass slower during it. Nature has the wisdom to hibernate and be ready, but I passed the time restless, expending more energy than I needed to. I know I am at another edge or threshold of life, maybe one that many go through in their sixties, but due to temporary snow blindness I am unable to sense the path beyond. I am beginning to write about that time, 2022, now and face the unpleasant emotions that have swirled around creating a prison of sorts. May that facilitate a new spring.

The Sleepy Sweet Shop

March 13, 2025

Last night I had a dream which probably describes an inner conflict I didn’t realize I was grappling with. 

I was in a sleepy little store on a planet in the far corner of the universe, carrying a woven basket to the checkout counter. The shelves in the store were wooden and filled with few choices but still had everything I needed. A muscly grey haired man was following me around urging me to reconsider my decision. He was dressed in a tightly fitted outfit (read like superman or batman or ironman) with some military insignia. We were both trained warriors and my decision in response to a crisis where some rich and powerful megalomaniac was planning a takeover of the world, was to stay on my sleepy in little planet, in my sleepy little town, with its sleepy stores and let the Universe go on. The muscly man was going to board a spaceship to take him to the heart of the war.

The sleepy store reminded me of a store in the city of Poona which was a town compared to bustling Bombay when I was growing up. We had a family home there and my cousins and I spent many weeks of the summer there, chaperoned by an elderly aunt or uncle while our parents visited occasionally. Once a week we were driven to Dorabji’s in what was called the ‘camp’ area and were allowed to buy a bag of sweets. We chose from jars on shelves behind a counter filled with store made hard-boiled sweets without wrappers, or factory made ones with wrappers, toffees, and little bars of chocolate. I looked long and hard at the jars but always picked out lemon drops and bullseyes though the man behind the counter would add a few cherry sours into my bag. I don’t know why we were never taken to such a shop in Bombay then? That memory put a smile on my face and I had to write it here though it doesn’t have anything to do with the topic of this post. Except sweet memories do help compensate for the difficult times some of us are going through. 

Actually of course all the world is going through the changing and uncertain times, some of us like the woman in the sleepy store have found ways to continue our lives and let the drama play out. I can imagine her saying, anyway what can I do about it. It depresses me and I don’t want to feel so helpless, it’s nicer just living out my cozy small life and not thinking about the bigger things I cannot possibly influence.

I have been feeling that helplessness though my spirit has been more akin to that of the man ready to do battle and fight for the Universe he wants to live in and leave behind for his grandchildren. He too knows not much of what he does will make a difference but then he remembers all the films he grew up with, and all the stories his grandparents told him about the times when a seemingly insignificant bunch of rebels challenged the imperial forces. (Ya, I’ve read and watched too many such stories )

But, last night’s dream had that quality and so does the world at times. Can’t you see Darth Vader walking to greet the Emperor, hear the music, feel the sentiment?

Recently I was called an armchair warrior by a rightwing fanatic, one of those convinced that all India needs to do to solve its problems is dominate the Muslims, make their lives unlivable because Mughal emperor Aurangzeb made the lives of his ancestors miserable. I say ‘his’ because many of these creepy troller-types have a male profile. Often with names like Shiva, or Krishna, but also Jiten and Vineet’s exist in that spectrum. The term was meant to hurt me, but I don’t mind being called an armchair warrior. What are they too anyway? Lately though my secret life of being an armchair warrior has taken over more sane aspects of me and that is concerning. Yet in some tiny way it helps me feel less helpless so it is a release.

Yet truly I don’t know how to respond to, how to stem the feelings of helplessness as India rolls over backwards and hands itself over to forces like Trusk. Other countries are resisting, are making changes to make themselves independent as quickly as they can even as they to feel it a gigantic and sometimes impossible task. But India is rolling over and handing over the country to not only its own rich and powerful but also the rich and powerful Trusk, while reshaping the narrative people get to hear through controlled mainstream media or simply diverting it so that all their hordes talk about is Muslims and the ghosts of Aurangzeb and Nehru. I wonder what factors keep our iron-man Modi from even making one little squeak when Trump has insulted India over and over.

Ya, I seem to be in a loop repeating the same things I felt last week and the week before and before that. Yesterday though when I heard that Musk’s Starlink was coming to India I felt a different level of low. Today is a new day though and like the man in my dream I will keep resisting, though I suppose I need a day off, or an hour off, to visit the sleepy sweet shop occasionally. I do still want to soothe my low with a sweet treat or a stub nibbed pen, but I have better control over this urge now and instead watch cooking competitions. And the book I had begun reading a few weeks ago, Light in the Darkness, is helpful in finding equanimity in these times. But it is extremely satisfying to shut one right-winger up, to take apart his logic and render him unable to respond except by calling me names. 

And lately when they can’t stop us by calling us anti-Hindu, anti-India, sickular, liberandu, they move on to abusing our daughters and wives and even mothers. A different anger arises when women and their honour is brought into the equation. One that is unstoppable. 

Back, And A Dim Lamp Appears

March 3, 2025

My Bombay visit was an interesting trip with one question that I did ask myself during the uneasy and uncomfortable days in Bombay. And a friend here asked me the same as soon as I told her I was back and had spent my days resting, drawing in my graphic journal, watching art videos, and eating home cooked food because of my respiratory illness and my leg jamming up. She asked, did you need to stop and rest, and eat?

Of course I did. That is the only way to step back out of the same routines that have stagnated life and give them time to re-set. I guess like a circuit/habit breaker. But I was reluctant to say yes to her which surprised me. Maybe because I currently feel that I haven’t had any very deep insights, nor have I changed several of the habits I wanted to. Either I need a longer circuit breaker or?

So, a circuit breaker is an electrical switch designed to protect an electrical circuit from damage caused by overcurrent/overload or short circuit. Its basic function is to interrupt current flow after protective relays detect a fault.

And so this was one. There is a fault. I’ve been feeling ‘off the path’, lost, scattered, and unable to see beyond the fogs in front of me. I discussed this with the same friend a few days before I left for Bombay. I told her about my frustrations with a lack of creative thought, with the lack of beauty when I write, the lack of words themselves. That suddenly I felt like I didn’t know what to do with the rest of my life. That the things I thought I wanted could be things that I thought I wanted out of habit and that I had lost touch with what I really wanted. I said I wanted to do karate but wondered what my body was telling me — I didn’t think it was to stop training but it definitely was to change something.  I asked her, what do I do? She had gone through this same dilemma for years earlier, at a time when I had felt happy sitting for hours and writing (I notice it gives me less joy now). In those days I would listen to her and see her efforts to try different things until perhaps a year or two ago she hit upon what she wanted to do. And now, the roles had shifted and she listened to me.

The other thing that is a ‘fault’ is the state of my ankle and knee. I had my first physio back here on Friday. She was good, asked a lot of questions no other physio had asked, and one of the first things she said to me is that I had to start noticing pain again. That I was so used to training through pain that I didn’t know it anymore. This truth hit me hard. She stressed that rehab with the tears I had, would be slow and unless I did the boring basic exercises and allowed the muscle to build, I would continue having these issues. My body, my ankle particularly had to relearn many things. 

This is true of the body and of the mind. Relearning, noticing, patience. It is also true that the last two years have been those with mind numbing stress. Even in the days when I was preparing to return here, our white cat got violently ill and the day after I returned the vet said it might be cancer. I can’t live without Yoda, my daughter said on a call to me. None of us can, I replied. 

Maybe when things feel the darkest one does get help in different forms and the wisdom is to see it when it comes. This time it came as a book. I was searching the library app for a book, and I don’t recall which words were similar but what popped up was Kornfield’s book, A Lamp in the Darkness. In the introduction he tells a story about a nomad family where the youngest daughter keeps asking, are we there yet. And the father replies, stop asking that, we’re nomads. And then the next paragraph…

“Every life is filled with change and insecurity, every life includes loss and suffering and difficulties that arise regularly. We are all nomads in this ever-changing world, and we need ways to ground ourselves and remain centered no matter what happens.”

Sometimes just the right entry path back into ‘Dharma’ or ‘faith’ and a re-introduction to the self appears. It has happened to me many times in the past particularly at times of deep crisis. But it hadn’t happened in a long time until yesterday when the book flirted with me, and I borrowed it. People who know me know that I am not religious. We were brought up to be so by my parents and the rest of my family are practicing Hindus. But when my country leaders began using religion to create hate and oppress other religions, I turned away from it, though I always tread some path of ‘Dharma’ from the spiritual or mystical traditions of many religions including Hinduism, but mostly Buddhism. I had lost that connection to faith a few years ago. The question when and why does hover within but I cannot answer those right now but when I saw the book I instantly knew that the emptiness I have been feeling which intensified in September last year came from this loss. Unexpectedly a door has opened, a dim lamp beckons.