A mash of thoughts and things...

July 17, 2020

This week I found myself making daily to-do lists. It has been exceptionally busy so that made sense, but I found myself listing things like, ‘eat fruit’ or ‘shower’ besides important tasks – not that those things are not important. But it is also absurd to list these things, isn’t it? I felt a particular satisfaction at the end of the day when I had ticked most of the items off the really long list. 

I had a follow up for my ear infection on Monday, saw the physio for my ankle on Tuesday, and had a dental appointment for a painful tooth on Wednesday. Of course, I had to rush into the shower after I returned home from each outside visit. I am still operating from those messages that say practice good personal hygiene, sanitize, sanitize, sanitize. I wonder when that will shift.

Large chunks of my morning, all week, were occupied in collecting my daughter’s tax documents to send to our accountant in India. I decided to do hers as I had just done mine over the previous weeks and was familiar with what had to be done. It took only three days. She will do mine next year. But through all this I made a visit to Tokyu Hands and bought a few drawing pens: two black liners and purple, light blue and green, water colour markers. How wonderful it felt to browse through racks of pens – all those colours and types – gel, markers, brush pens etc. etc. etc. It was the high spot of this week, along with yesterday afternoon with my book from the library J  Yes, I have a book from the National Library which has opened up by slot-appointment now. 

But today I woke with another toothache and felt really awful. I had just been to the dentist two days ago. I felt adrift. Like I was flying face up in a darkening sky. Paralysed, except for my eyeballs. Other objects were flying around me but I couldn’t move my limbs to push them away or to avoid them. At first, I felt a panic at the total helplessness. Then suddenly the fear disappeared and there was this curiosity. I seemed to have surrendered to the lack of control. I shift between these two states.

Covid too hits me in waves. At times it feels surreal to see people outside with masks. At times it feels things are ok. We are adapting. Then I hear some news, or something shifts and the panic hits again. USA, Brazil and India are just not able to control their infections. They rise and rise and rise. It scares me. Then there is a spike elsewhere but with some restrictions it is controlled and I feel hope again. Yet it feels we are at the beginning of this, not in the middle or the end, that we have a long way to go with Covid. Wonder how we will cope? A lot of people have slipped into poverty and others are on the brink. Children with low access to the net are deprived of education and will fall further behind than their advantaged peers. It is the most economically disadvantaged that have been affected the most but the voices we hear, the problems we hear, are those of the privileged. And many of those have benefitted from the pandemic, many do not want the world to change from the way it is, while others see Covid as a message for change. The rich have the power, the 'others' have the numbers -- where will we emerge?

While I have been grappling for meaning during these days, while writing these words in fact, I had a WhatsApp exchange with a co-journeyer in karate, a kyu grade in the dojo. He talked about how kata was changing him – developing character, attitude and more. He is one of the several who work hard at perfecting their moves in the dojo. It makes me happy to be part of his journey. 

My co-teacher in the dojo has a bad injury and will be out of training for a bit. I feel some panic about how to manage the classes with the restriction of not more than five training together, how to teach both groups. But then I also go back to the sense – yes, we, as a dojo, will figure it out. We will adapt. 

On a slightly different note -- earlier this week I browsed through a book on writing and life, and read this, ‘...all serious writers, private and public, are engaged in a common task: to see something as it is and to reveal it without distortion...’ I think it applies to all seekers, whatever the medium of our searching and our expression, that we want to know things as they are and reveal them without distortion. Will ponder this as I munch on my mid-day meal. 

Karate with Covid Restrictions

July 11, 2020

Here at a not ‘normal’ time for writing. A friend introduced me to a zoom writing retreat starting 10:30am UK time and I decided that since I was floundering with my writing it would be wise to join. So here I am at my low dining table desk in our spare room, at almost 6pm, with a view of the roofs of Dunman School just below; Mountbatten HDB’s to my right, and further back to the left the Stadium Dome. I’ve had an early start to my day with teaching a karate class on just 5 hours sleep. But I am a week into my ear infection meds, and the ear pain is reduced, and living with the side-effects of anti-biotics is much easier now. I am feeling ok. 

I’ve been grappling with organising my karate classes. 

When everything shutdown we were cut off from training together. It came at a right time for me, as I was feeling a bit of fatigue at the sameness of things – many things, not just karate – and needed an inward focus. The fatigue was more to do with not being able to write at all, even though three days a week I stared at my screen for a couple of hours before giving up in frustration. It was the driest spell I’d experienced since I started writing about seven years ago. I thought not having to focus on training would free up time to kick-start my writing. 

But that didn’t happen. 

The world was grappling with coronavirus and many countries had shut down much before Singapore had. Dojos everywhere were wrestling with this change. To help us, our Chief instructor began creating online training videos and sharing them. Though I had planned to slow down my karate training for a bit those videos were too precious to resist, and I began training with them first twice a week and then more often – creating my own lessons when I didn’t have a video to train with. Someone in our dojo asked for zoom lessons and within weeks of the shutdown I was self-training five days and teaching one lesson a week. Though it was a big adjustment that process felt natural and easy. 

Martial arts teaches you many things and one is to adapt and I/we did to the changed circumstances. Luckily, it is not my business and I didn’t suffer financial hardships the way many teachers did and still are. 

But now that we are opening up, I’m finding it very hard to organise. Everyone wants to train together again but we are not allowed to train in groups larger than five and with safe distance measures. Using an outdoor space means that we can break into two groups of five in the same area, and I have a senior black belt who loves teaching with whom I can rotate the groups. But outdoor spaces are not easy to find – particularly with the uncertainty of rain in this season. We did find what we thought was an ideal covered public spot but were told it is attached to a community centre and we would have to leave if they had a class that clashed with ours. 

Our old gym, where 8-10 would train easily, now only accommodates five. And it is much too expensive to hire another indoor space with the restriction of not having more than five people in the room. 

And then there is the lack of contact. Without training with a partner, practicing attack defence drills, without kakie (push hands) how does one know what techniques work and against whom? Which ones won’t work at all with a larger, stronger attacker and what to do instead? How would one learn about distancing and timing without close range partner training? Will the practice of moving basics and kata help with those? Maybe after this time is done, we will be able to see how effective these have been.

Those are the practical issues of training with covid restrictions – the where, what and how of things. 

But there is also another issue that lies underneath the practical challenge. In a sense the why of it. Why do I teach? It definitely is not just to help build strength and stamina, impart technique, to improve a person’s response to attack. How many fights will my students get into in their lifetime? There is another reason for it – a move towards perfection, towards becoming a more whole and more aware person, more caring even. The teaching of traditional karate involves a lot of basics, repetition and kata, along with body conditioning. Being a slow leaner who has severe issues with body co-ordination I have benefitted from this way of learning. On the physical level I have more strength and stamina and improved technique. Kata a repeated set of movements, which emulates fighting against imaginary opponents, has been challenging to learn, but it has helped me learn to move, to change direction quickly, to control my legs and hands, co-ordinate, react and most importantly become absorbed. On another level the essence of what I have learnt has seeped into other aspects of my life. I find myself able to endure more, have more resilience when challenged, have staying power, especially when going through those dry spells when nothing seems to work. Like right now with my writing and some other aspects of life. 

The way I learnt is the way I want to teach. Karate and life intermingling. My co-teacher and I have very different ideas and values about karate and his relationship to karate is different from mine. I have worried that this would confuse what I want to transmit in the dojo. Also not sticking around and chatting post class stops those conversations that pop up around the underlying aspects of martial arts -- why we learn and what we want to do with it. 

I don’t know what it is about writing which resolves things as words appear on paper or a screen. I think I’ve had a ‘Eureka’ moment, a realisation. Behind this dilemma is a need to control the outcome. I believe in the benefits of traditional karate and some part of me wants my students to believe in them too and I fear that splitting the teaching might shift their thinking in a different direction. But I see that I need not worry, just teach and transmit what I can and let each person find his/her own way and relationship to karate. 

I need to just trust the process and let go. 

So now I am back to grappling with the practical aspects again. How to use the inside space, how to split the class – juniors and seniors, or mixed, where to find an outdoor space where there is shelter to run to in case of rain. What type of training can replace the benefits of partner training.

The sky has now lost its brightness, dusk is here. Over in the distance in the direction of the stadium dome I see a pinkish glowing streak in the grey cloudy sky. It is my favourite time of day. We will have a lunch/dinner break soon and then a few more writing hours. Not sure what I will write in the second half of this retreat. The arid spell with writing is less dry but like sand in a windy desert, it still is wandering, scattered and not able to find a form or focus. 

Monday Afternoon

July 6, 2020

My head is a mess of pressure and denseness. Feels like it is being compressed inwards around the eyes, cheekbones and ears, while something is simultaneously trying to break outwards. There is a band just above my eyebrows till my hair line, that is liquid filled and each time I move even a bit, it sloshes around like a liquid in a glass cylinder, moving one way and then the other.  I try very hard to be still. On Saturday I visited the doctor and was told I had a severe ear infection – might explain the vertigo from last week – along with congested sinus. Came back with a bag of meds and nasal sprays. They mess up the insides even more than the original symptoms did.

I continue to not be able to be present here in Singy. Most of my head, most of the time, is in Bombay with family and friends there. The spouse yelled at me for being so withdrawn and I yelled back. But I feel helpless to control it. Only while practicing karate I enter my body, I hear the words others speak, I control my movements. Something holds me still even as the limbs, my torso, move through space. But I can't be doing karate 24/7, especially when unwell. India’s covid situation is worsening and I wish so badly for some good news. 

I read an article this weekend about what writers were writing during the pandemic. Some were chugging along with their projects, many -- were unable to write fiction during a time that feels like fiction and were -- journaling, others not writing at all but observing the poems forming around them. In some way they were recording in their minds, the events and feelings of this time. 

I find myself still stuck in another time. The time between December and March. When the anti-CAA protests had erupted, in India, and the authorities had begun cracking down. So much has happened since then that those stories are being lost. The only writing I have done besides journaling are a few sketches – character sketches. A policeman, who reluctantly at first, engages in violence in a Muslim locality, destroying property and striking down residents in their homes. At first he is following orders but by the end of it all he is convinced he is doing the right thing, ‘To Make India Great’. Another sketch of a RSS trained youth, at dusk, who is one of the masked perpetrators of the JNU violence. His first taste of the power of terror he knows he can get away with, and by the following dawn he wants more. He too knows he is doing this to make India great. Another, a woman who chillingly convinces her friends to poison a woman just because of a political war of words on fb. Of course, to make India great. The last of a low income man barely on the edge of survival, part of a whatsapp group generated by the BJP IT cell, who is convinced that he must burn down the house of an anti-CAA activist on the eve of Holi to purify the land and yes, make India great again.

I didn’t realise the pattern in these sketches -- how the inner reasoning of these characters was connected to one idea -- till I wrote about them here. I only wondered why I was exploring the ‘other’ in my writing rather than my own experience through those months. I just wanting to get to know the inner states of these characters and wasn't sure where the exploration would go. 

While I was writing this an artist friend sent me a quote -- “I think that one wants from painting a sense of life, the final suggestion, the final statemen has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can’t avoid saying, not what you want to say.’’

Going to read a few more quotes by this painter as the antibiotic fogs my body and brain.

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.