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.