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.