Decent?

June 11, 2020

I couldn't sleep last night. In fact, I had a restless evening -- pacing the length of my living room. Ten steps in one direction and then ten in the other. My fitbit recorded almost 4000 steps in that hour. 

Two things happened yesterday that I found difficult to process. 

I attended a discussion through ISAS on Modi 1.0 and 2.0. The panellists spoke on three different areas of governance – foreign policy, economics and politics. It felt like they were disconnected from the reality on the ground in India. They spoke as if it was business as usual, not as if India was facing its biggest crisis since Independence. As I listened I did understand the enormity of the economic issues at a level that was mind boggling. I could see how there were absolutely no quick fixes. At the same time what I was hearing was the same formulae based on trickle-down economics. And the actions of the BJP of focusing on politicking rather than the pressing issues also seemed even more horrendous, though the speakers barely mentioned it. At one time I wondered if I was a bit crazy to be feeling this so intensely while the speakers were so cool. But then I read the questions from the audience and found echoes of myself in them. They seemed as irritated as me about what the panellists were completely ignoring.

Soon after I read an email, by a friend in the email chat we had set up to just talk about our lives during covid times. She had attached a link of an article with an excerpt from ‘Humankind: A Hopeful History’, by the Dutch author Rutger Bregman. Basically the article talked about how humans were at heart decent and during disasters they acted from their best selves. 

I feel no doubt about either – that people are decent rather than evil and that during face to face interactions with someone vulnerable most of us act from our best selves. Yet the word decent didn’t fit with what I had been feeling ever since I watched the migrant labour in India on the roads -- no longer hidden and invisible in their inhuman dwellings and lives. Their faces, young and old; their dead bodies, their hunger is etched deep in my psyche now. I have always known they exist. I have managed to blank them out in the past. Turn away from the bony ragged man selling trinkets at traffic lights. Read a book, watch some tv. I did that for a while last evening too, but the disturbance was still there this morning. 

Anne Frank wrote in her diary, "I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."

I don’t know how I keep my ideals or what they are. I have been grappling with my own lack of 'decency'. I can't call myself decent when I am only reacting to this reality of the life of the slum dweller or unorganised labour only when it suits me. At other times I remain caught up in my own little problems and dreams. 

The article also quoted Rebecca Solnit, from her book, A Paradise Built in Hell. “My own impression is that elite panic comes from powerful people who see all humanity in their own image…. Dictators and despots, governors and generals – they all too often resort to brute force to prevent scenarios that exist only in their own heads, on the assumption that the average Joe is ruled by self- interest, just like them.” I think we need to withdraw our projections on dictators and despots and explore our own brute force and self-interest responses to things. I also know that I don’t need to read books that define humanity as good or bad. At some point in the past I needed answers to those questions. But now I’d rather deal with each case on its on merit and not say usually, they all, generally, broadly etc.

My questions now are about my own decency, about how I live my life, how I reconcile the relative ease of it, while also feeling the hopelessness of increasingly larger sections of this world. Nothing new in these questions. A lot of people have grappled with them, written about them. I need to just connect to them daily and feel through, change my life as possible answers appear.

Befriending the Dragon

June 8

Two days in a row I woke feeling not anxious or depressed. Yesterday I had attributed it to looking forward to our zoom training. But today it was just wide-eyed pleasure for no reason at all. I didn’t know where the heaviness had gone but I was going to enjoy the lightness while it lasted. 

I have been shedding my armour since I wrote about it a few days ago. It has felt raw and uncomfortable, but I have been selective about whom I reveal my bare state to. Last evening, I chatted with a friend who has been listening to Thich Nhat Hanh to find calm through this pandemic. She’d been trying to allow herself to do nothing, to not plan, to not even think. She said she realized how much staying busy was a way to feel worthwhile for her. She wanted to just feel she had worth even if she did nothing. She was also listening to him talk about anxiety. Something she too wakes up with. She told me how he connects it to family/ancestral anxiety. She spoke of anxiety patterns in her family.

My mother was a very anxious person. Her life in our family home was quite suffocating. Widowed young and with a fairly dominating patriarchal joint family around, she wasn’t connected to her power or inner-being. And being the most difficult of her three children, I often bore the brunt of her unhappiness. I got my anxious self from her, and unfortunately I transmitted it to my daughter too. 

Memories of my dad on the other hand were of a chilled out person, who insisted on taking time off to enjoy sports, to listen to live music, and take the kids on Sunday picnics. I told my friend that he reminded me of the dragon figure I had found within. The dragon had lived thousands of years, seen history, slept through a lot of it, and to him even covid was a just a blip, a blink, that would be soon gone. 

I borrowed Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Unaccustomed Earth’ from NLB and read all afternoon. But last night I got into an anxious state again. I was reminded of some financial emails I had to sort through. I managed to sleep but woke with the task on my mind. The task that is made harder because I had not been able to make my trip to Bombay in April as planned. Suddenly I asked myself what my dragon would do and say. And then it was all easy. I had to make a couple of phone calls but it got sorted to the extent it could without me being in Bombay – something that will not happen until October at least. Yesterday leaving things undone till then was agony, but four months are merely four breaths when seen from the dragon’s perspective. 

Later this morning I began writing my memories of the first days of the 2019 anti-CAA protests. At lunch time I ordered and ate a sea-food pad thai, something I hadn’t eaten since 2016 when I discovered minor heart issues, and high cholesterol and triglycerides. 

After lunch I drew the dragon and will check in with him when anxious. Momentarily tranquil.

Crisis, desperation, opportunity

June 7, 2020

Just finished a zoom training with our Singy karatekas, followed by some solitary kata practice. Always feel a bit optimistic after. Good time to write perhaps J

Yesterday I saw this fb ad for education, ‘Turn crisis into opportunity,’ it said. Learn new skills etc. etc. I felt like hitting something. I had skyped with my friend in Utah on Friday and we had spoken of ourselves and how heavy and unmotivated we were feeling about doing anything. It was uncanny how similar our inner states were and our behaviour too. I felt good, as I could laugh about the terrible habits and patterns I had developed during the pandemic. We also spoke of George Floyd and racism, and the migrant labour in India, and of course about Modi and Trump. We had talked about how both had sneaked in projects that would harm the environment during this time when people were dazed and in lockdown. Both were consolidating their power, both had very active fake news sites, and the followers of both believed in them even more than before. I thought the US was better off than India as the opposition was more credible but she didn’t agree. We spoke of how we were sponges to the field around – soaking in emotions from the surrounding which often made us feel limp. We ended the conversation talking about our hair, very short cuts and the shape of our heads. 

After I saw the ad about Crisis into Opportunity I went back to this conversation. Millionaires had managed to increase their net worth. Authoritarian political leaders had managed to grab more control. Opportunity in Crisis. I thought the real opportunities should be about seeing the fault lines in our way of life -- environmental damage, excessive consumption, disparity and extreme poverty and malnutrition -- and correcting those. We weren’t moving in those directions though activists were screaming about them. So yes, I wanted to hit something. 

The emotion I had been feeling all week was best described by desperation. It totally engulfed me. It was so intense that I couldn’t write about it here, so I wrote with pen on paper. Stone grey ink on soft beige paper. After the first two sentences about my personal desperation the rest were stories I had seen or heard. The one I had heard that morning was about men, who had college degrees, that they could not afford to have paid for, now doing farm labour – just to feed their families. Desperation. More and more sinking into poverty. I doubt if any of them saw opportunity in the crisis.

After his attempts to help me, emerge a bit from the ferocity of the feelings that were making me say that I couldn’t find any meaning in life, failed, my spouse googled ‘how to deal with desperation’. Three things were common in several articles – gratitude, abundance and seeing it as a choice not to feel it. I had tried the first two – lists of things I was grateful for were scattered all over my journal during these weeks, as were all the things I had abundance of (many I didn’t need at all). But they were just lists, experienced by my intellect and not by the body and heart, and choice – no I couldn’t feel that yet. Desperation holds every cell of the body and soul in an unbreakable grip. 

After I spoke with my friend in Utah, I took clippers and worked them through my hair. The result is patchy, a ton of bald spots – especially on the left -- and the back is longer than the front as my spouse didn’t have the heart to clip it off as close to the scalp as I had in the front. It looks truly terrible. But I can see the shape of my head. I like it and I do feel better. 

Is it working?

June 5, 2020

I feel this blog experiment may not be working. Unsure whether to continue or not. I suppose if I were to logically evaluate its efficacy, I would have to first define what the expectations were. 

1. I hoped that the blog writing would kickstart other writing. 

2. I hoped it would help clarify my confusions and states and show a path ahead. I hoped it would make me more ‘productive’. I was feeling envious of those absorbed in productive projects. I felt a pain about my own empty state. 

3. I wanted to be able to write authentically about my inner states. 

It has not kickstarted other writing yet – because I am still flexing my writing muscles and am slow? Once I finish the blog post I feel depleted of writing energy and move on to other things. But I have more ideas than I had before I began writing -- which I sometimes jot down. One particular one – the happenings in Delhi between December 2019 and end-February keep coming up. But the writing has not yet clarified my confusions and that is mostly because of #3.

I don’t feel I am able to share authentically about everything I am experiencing. Some feelings are very, very unstable and dark and I feel fearful about sharing them. I feel like I will be judged for being weak, for spiraling out of control, for grieving too long, for not going with the flow and adapting, or whatever. As I mentioned before I have been labelled as ‘one who stays too long on the dark side’. So, I write through a filter and that makes the blog completely ineffective as the tool I want it to be. 

Last year I discovered two new inner energies. I was grappling with a choice about whether or not to continue teaching karate, as the feelings of being inadequate as a sensei were huge. I wanted to continue training but not teaching. I discovered an ancient, wise, chilled out dragon and a bumbling, apprentice samurai who had no clue about what she was doing. Daily dialogues with them, drawings and writing, lead me to a place of confident choice I was previously unaware of. One of the themes that emerged while I was playing with these two figures was about armour. The dragon had his own natural impenetrable scales, while the samurai wore external metal. She was finding it too heavy and wanted to shed it. But it made her vulnerable as a warrior. I need to go back and read those pages to see exactly what happened but there was a learning there about ‘innate’ protections and discovering them, so I could shed the external armours. That my strength lay in being able to be absolutely comfortable with vulnerability. 

I will go back and read those pages but some of the questions I need to ask are apparent – about vulnerability and strength. What armours do I need to shed? And which ones may be useful to hang on to? 

Perhaps re-connecting with the inner dragon will help me see the next steps. Feeling more like the bumbling Samurai right now. 

not saying anything really

June 3, 2020,

Today I am sitting on my bed. It’s getting harder for me to bring the body tension down after going out for the weekly grocery trail – Cedele, Cold Storage, Marks, Fair Price. Fair Price is normally a nightmare. No distancing especially in the fruit and veggie section and today there were dozens of filled carts just sitting alone blocking aisles. I waited patiently for my turn to pick out fruit but masked faces breathed into my ear as arms reached over my shoulder impatiently. People were pushing past everywhere, making physical contact, not really careful anymore. 

But ya, the circuit breaker is supposedly easing and there are no fines for not safe distancing in public transport, where the seats one cannot sit on are no longer crossed out -- which actually feels a bit scary rather than 'eased'. My brain is having a hard time finding its way around things. All the things I love are still restricted. Most people are still working from home, libraries are closed indefinitely, no meetings allowed with friends, I cannot go see our cats, and the seats along the river are still taped up. Infection numbers in the community are low, and I should feel safe, but the messaging through the govt around masks and distancing in work places has increased, so the combination of signals makes me uneasy. I still come home and rush into the shower and then spend a good part of an hour sanitizing the purchases. Sigh.

Small woes compared to the huge issues in the world. But today it seems endless and I feel a long tiredness. I don’t want to do it anymore. I see the posters at the protests, ‘I can’t breathe’. The last words of George Floyd.

I can’t breathe too. My sinuses are now perennially blocked. It's another day where thoughts are too scattered to gather into a bunch that I can arrange into words on a page. In our email group one day we spoke of how the small griefs, and difficulties and depressions we felt around the lockdown even though we were safe in our homes were as valid as the huge traumas faced by those homeless,  hungry, walking on roads, far from family etc. If we can't feel our own pains how can we truly feel those of others. 

I am listening to some experts talking about the cyclone in Bombay. They haven’t had one in 100 years and the experts are saying that with Climate Change there might be more. A bit earlier I heard political leaders discussing it. It sounded like they didn’t understand that this might not be a one time thing. They didn’t get Climate Change. Like they don’t really get that there are protests all over the world not just because one man from a marginalized group was killed by another with more social rank and power, but because there are deeper un-eases coalescing. 

Waiting. Sensing something different will unfold. We need a different kind of political leadership now. Earlier in my Wednesday afternoon chat, we had talked of the unease, the unhappiness of people with the current socio-political order. Not sure if the overlying covid-19 situations will facilitate the changes we need or the fear around it will just help maintain the status quo. One of us felt that the inversion has to happen, another felt that fear will prevent people from voting differently and the third was undecided, observing and waiting. 

More than ever we need to have conversations about everything. Listen, discuss, churn.