Still troubled

July 2, 2020

Feeling so much. Having trouble grounding myself in the here and now – here in Singy. My mind, my heart and more is pulled and pulled elsewhere. 

Here in Singy, we are opening up cautiously. Some people feel it’s too soon and are staying in still. Some people are rushing out and going back to their pre-covid behaviour. But we are opening up and there will be elections soon. Everyone is talking about that. There is a sense of life, of hope, of moving forward. 

In Bombay the death toll keeps rising, there is a sense that the plot has run away with itself, that there is absolutely no control left. I hear of people I know losing their elders to covid, other friends worried because there have been covid cases in the building they are living in, my aunt is in hospital and her diabetes is out of control. Ketoacidosis has her family hanging on the edge. My sister who has been coping without any help and caring for our mother alone has body symptoms. People are dying, jobless, hungry and scared. I worry, worry, worry. I am there and not here. 

I find myself feeling helpless, longing, longing so much for some news of relief. Some sign of let up in the relentless covid spread in India, which is now 4^th place, but by tomorrow will be at 3^rd place, in the worldometer coronavirus stats. I feel angry – at this nasty, invisible, all powerful thing. God is invisible and all powerful too, and though I was brought up in a religious family, I have never really had a sense of God as benevolent and caring. I feel apprehensive as I write this – I don’t want to offend anyone. I also don’t want to be judged for what I feel -- that God plays dice with the Universe and he needs to be reported to social services for the havoc/abuse wreaked on much of humanity. 

Two days ago, I listened to Ravish Kumar. He was talking about the custodial death of the two men in Tamil Nadu. He reconstructed the events in a sort of story board. I found it hard to watch the unfolding of the around twelve hours of torture the father and son went through. Then the forced medical certificate of wellness and the magistrate signing the remand request without even seeing the men. All this because the men allegedly refused to shut down their shop during lockdown hours. 

The men were beaten relentlessly, they were stripped and allegedly sexually tortured by the police. What gave the Police the right or reason to do this? I just could not connect the degree of torture to their supposed crime -- they didn’t shut down their shop. I mean police are not allowed to punish anyone even for worse crimes, are they? Courts and processes are required. But I kept wondering if I would be able to torture anyone – for anything – in the way the police tortured these two? What internal inhibitions, controls, moral codes, compassion would I need to drop to do something so horrific? What conditions allow one to lose all humanity? Even if extreme trauma might push someone to this – the policemen had experienced no such events, had they?

It feels like a lot of people who occupy positions of power lose their compassion, their humility and capacity to connect to the life and right to life of others. They feel entitled to the things and actions, that are detrimental to others. And knowing you can get away with it – that nobody can touch you – makes it even more easy to be uncaring. There seems to be a thrill in destroying another that I don’t really understand. 

I thought of the times I have been mean and got away with it – the only things I suffered were pangs of my conscience and deep regret. But it stopped me from behaving in that way again. Who would I be, I wondered, if instead getting away with meanness gave me a high and I wanted to do it again and again?

It feels like I hear of fewer instances where misuse of power is punished and more where such people continue to flourish. It is very satisfying to feel that indeed, ‘what goes around comes around.’ But don’t see much of that. 

Police atrocities in India seem on the rise. Or maybe more are being recorded now. Ravish interviewed a man who analyses these atrocities – by religion, by economics, gender etc. The man said that we have these stats and we will continue collecting them but no reform, no change is anywhere in sight.

And God is all powerful. Has power gone to his head? Who monitors and ‘punishes’ God? This feels blasphemous enough and I will stop this thought here.  

Desperate right now – just to hear a story of someone getting their just dues. It is very satisfying to see this happen, and though in fiction I see this I haven’t seen real justice in a long time, particularly in India. Deeply troubled and finding it hard to stay in my body.

Here too as things open up, I find new challenges. Very tiny ones compared to much of the world. I went to the physio on Monday because my ankle, an old recurring injury, had swollen up humongously. When she asked me to lie down for my treatment, I had a panic attack – dizziness, nausea, increased heartbeat. It felt so abnormal. I wanted to tear off the mask and take in long gasps of air. But instead I kept a calm facade and worried how I would manage my body and mind till I got home with it on my face. Today I fear putting on a mask – and I have to go out and will have one on for five hours.

Feeling too much. I don't want to be here or in Bombay. I want to curl into a cocoon and be woken up when covid is gone. 

More questions and one answer

June 25, 2020

Just made a pot using the last of the ‘lucky lychee’ green tea. The subtle lychee flavours on a hot afternoon like today feel energizing. I am not thinking of rushing to get more, like I would have before, but instead want to use up all the teas I have before acquiring more. There is a need to pare down things that I only noticed this week as we are opening up again.

The libraries will open on July 1^st, not yet for sitting, but borrowing and returning books. I had been waiting for this. I hadn’t been reading much during the lockdown and have fallen two books behind in my Goodreads challenge of fifty books a year. I told myself it was because e-books didn’t hold my attention, but I did have unread print books on my shelves and I didn’t read them either. Surprisingly, now I want to read them. Earlier I would go the library, wander through the stacks and walk away with far more books than I could read in the allowed six weeks, and ignore the ones on my shelf that I  told myself I could read anytime. But I want to read them before borrowing more. Hmm…

Ok, I am rambling, and I don’t do that in these posts. Here I have a vague set of related thoughts I focus my mind on, while in my journal I follow wherever the mind goes. 

I wrote a story during the time I wasn’t writing the blog, I started collecting the things I need to send to the accountant for my taxes in India, I did lessons in my online drawing course, and I trained for the first time in an online gasshuku with Sensei Bakkies in South Africa. It felt very strange to put on a gi and train long hours alone in the living room. But I emerged glowing, something that happens each time I can transit from the role of teacher to student.

Learning karate is where I want to be permanently. So, when I had these months, since March 23^rd, of solitary training I was heavenly happy. It felt right to have the time to re-establish my relationship to karate – doing whatever I needed and wanted to do just for myself. It took me back to the state of mind I had about karate when I first joined it in 2004. Something very personal, spiritual and something that kept me anchored into the present moment like nothing else was doing at that point. 

In our dojo we do a lot of partner work. A student who had trained in other dojo’s that taught traditional karate had remarked that to me, and I had replied -- because we can, and should be, doing a lot of basics and kata on our own, I like to use our time together to learn other skills that supplement that. Nothing keeps you present like partner work where the consequence of your mind wandering could be a whack to the head. 

Somewhere in these three months of self-training I found I pared down my training to the very basics again. For the first month I didn’t even do any kata except Sanchin. It felt good and right. I do enjoy learning more than teaching. Teaching brings in angst and complicates my relationship to karate which is otherwise pure pleasure. Which brings up many questions – Why is it this way? Why do I continue teaching? How can I keep the angst out of the equation while teaching?

For now, I am going to follow Rilke’s advise about these questions

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

One question – why am I writing this blog and will it help – did find some answers. The one story I wrote after months of a dry spell came from thoughts and explorations begun in this blog. It was a story of tension between hope and hopelessness and how in the latter state you can lose all touch with the former, and visa versa perhaps. So, I plan to continue writing, but it might be less frequent as my tasks are increasing as the lockdown eases. 

Process

June 19, 2020

I haven’t written here in more than a week. I started writing a post on June 16^th but didn’t finish it. It was about Singapore easing restrictions and the feelings that emerged around that. The first one for most – though not me I think – was relief. A friend texted, liberation is nigh.

That night I slept 7 hours and 17 mins, much more than the 5 hours, I had been sleeping most nights. Some part of me had relaxed. Something did believe that this could be over someday. But I also felt a tightness in my forehead, tension in my neck, and continued anxiety. Bombay was still doing so badly. My sister and mother were still cooped up. I knew that I wouldn’t really relax till things began improving there. 

The next morning I had sat on the sofa and sipped my perfect cup of assam tea. I felt empty. So many I knew had done so much in these three months. Some had written the first drafts of books; many more had finished on-line courses. I had nothing visible, nothing tangible -- nothing I could talk to anyone about to show-case these three months. Part of me had hoped that one of the dozen or so agents I had sent out my book query, for Boiling Frogs, would reply. I wanted to emerge from the lockdown with hope of my book being published before the end of the year. I had hoped to start another and be halfway through the first draft. If I had been a character in a film or book these are things that would have happened for sure. But i am not and nothing happened and I feel like I have done absolutely nothing. Nothing that I could talk about anyway.

I knew I had confronted a ton of inner demons and inadequacies and understood myself better. I had listened to many others while they grappled with their own increased anxieties and fears that amplified through the months of lockdown and isolation. I had trained 5 days a week in the confines of my home with nothing but a chi-ishi and I still had decent muscle tone. But none of this was something tangible that I could talk about to anyone. Did it make it less valuable? 

In some part of me it did. The pressures of product rather than process still affect me deeply. Out of the many conversations I had with people during this time very few actually focused on process and I love hearing about process in all its dimenions.

On Wednesday a friend talked about his completed dissertation. One of the things he said was that it started as a journey, a personal query about race, personal identity and society, and more, but that journey does not appear in the document and that made him wonder if he wanted to just withdraw from the academic process of defending it and completing his PhD. There were big feelings in the process and the product felt sort of less than. Yet the final product would be valued much more than the process in the academic world, in the outside world. So, if he didn’t defend and finish and in that sense not have a product would the process not matter?  And so often it just doesn’t. It doesn’t matter that you put in the effort to do that work – what matters if only if you have something to show. You will have the same knowledge and skills you had if you didn’t finish, yet if you did you would be valued more. If you didn't finish you certainly would be valued less than the person who had the final product. 

I keep getting interrupted while writing this. First on the 16^th by something else I just had to write and then twice today since the morning by practical things -- dealing with filing taxes in India and washing the lunch dishes. Hard to get back to the things I wanted to say, especially since there is a peculiar melancholy in my mind today. Another day perhaps. Today I am going to contemplate for a bit my state of mind that is trying to deal with the easing of restrictions. The government now says it is safe to do certain things from today, Friday June 19. Was it really less safe yesterday? What anxieties and sanitizing behaviours can I drop that are associated with lockdown mind? My head is still in it and I think letting it go will be a process for me. 

I do know that now I have to face the world with my patchy poorly clippered hair. I hope it grows out soon.

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.