day 13

Last night I watched the double episode of Charmed from season 7 where the sisters agree to help the avatars to create 'Utopia' a world beyond the duality of good and evil. It's a world hard to imagine but the conceptualisation of it in that episode was a bit flawed I think. People's mindsets were changed and they were happy and did not feel difficult emotions and those that persisted in troubled states that led to conflict were eliminated by the avatars, the guardians of this created Utopia. Since grief and mourning had been eliminated those that disappeared were not missed much as they were said to have moved on to a better place.

I think the biggest flaw in this idea of Utopia was the perception of conflict as violent and something that needed to be eliminated to keep peace. Peace in the Chinese I-Ching is described by the hexagram of earth being above that of heaven and denotes a state where heaven is on earth. The opposite of peace in the I-Ching is not conflict but standstill where the two hexagrams are reversed and so heaven moves away from earth. The Utopia the avatars wanted was stagnant. It was built on repression and the loss of free will and even though it felt light and happy it was in its essence oppressive.

It troubles me that so often conflict and violence are used interchangeably by the media. Conflict simply is a sign that something needs to change. It is a call to transformation. Conflict need not turn violent but often does because we have not been taught the skills to resolve conflict within ourselves, in our relationships and in our world. We would not fear conflict and suppress it if we saw it as useful.  If anything is Utopia for me it would be a state where conflict and feeling were dealt with compassionately. 

Inner Utopia would perhaps be akin to a state of enlightenment. Daniel Brown and Jack Engler in Mindfulness Meditation write that enlightened practitioners are not without conflict they simply are less defensive in the awareness of inner conflict and their reactivity to it. Internally in all of us there are states and times of no conflict but I would not want that as a permanent state of being. Inner conflict no matter how difficult makes me feel alive. 

Yes, I have a positive bias towards conflict. It has been the driving force in me to change and grow. It's made my relationships richer and more dynamic. Of course my thinking might be flawed too and I look forward to it being challenged and finding ways to grow in a permanent conflict free state.

Today is day thirteen of my experiment. I have missed writing on four days so far and the quality of the writing has been inconsistent. I am sad and sometimes self-critica; about this but I am accepting that my body is more sensitive to the haze than many others and being compassionate towards myself, spacing out my activities and giving myself more downtime. Today is a sunday and my main conflict is wanting to stay quiet and write or doing something with my husband. 

day 10

Yesterday I had a restless fever. The days of haze seemed to have weakened my immune system and I felt ill. I was angry. I had enough low productivity days this year and I wanted to rush forward to meet the goals I had set for myself. I worked slowly through the morning but had a meeting later in the day that went on much longer than I had expected. I did not accomplish much and went to bed very frustrated. The worst part was waking up again this morning to disorientation and confusion. My body was still uneasy and that made my mind uncontrollably restless. Many of my inner critics were also around telling me that I did not know what I was doing and that I made all the wrong choices. For a while I tried to ignore them and get on with things but it was too tiring and finally I sat quietly with them.

Most days I deal with my inner critics quite well listening to and integrating the messages of those who have important lessons for me and telling the brutal ones to 'buzz off.' Most days they don't pull me down like  today.

I don't really know why they emerged with such force today. Over the last two days my ears have been particularly sensitive in picking up some critical comments directed at me and getting angry. I seem to have internalized those voices. In my writing I am hitting some barrier as memories are chaotic or inaccessible adding to the feeling that I don't know what I am doing. To give myself some respite from the inner voice my mind turns outwards.

Indonesia has made nine arrests related to the fires. These seem to be small time farmers who were clearing their land for planting. It is illegal in Indonesia to set these fires, punishable by a large fine and ten years in prison. But the large Palm Oil companies seem to have remained unscathed? The next days will be interesting - will those truly responsible for this environmental damage be named or will these farmers become scapegoats dissipating the rising heat among the three countries? The Indonesian President has made a public apology for the haze and come under criticism from many in his own country who think it is a sign of weakness. I disagree and feel that this apology will go a long way in setting a more co-operative tone in discussions. But i worry that in the interest of maintaining good neighbourly relationships this might be the end of the dispute. Token arrests while the real culprits get yet another year to continue their criminal burning? 

The Asean meeting is brought forward to mid-July. I am looking forward to following how this issue is handled. Hoping that there is a blend of some hard accountability and gentle co-operation. The world needs new models for conflict resolution and maybe Asia can model some.

Few years ago I had gone to a talk by someone from the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue. He said while a lot of foreign NGO's have been allowed into Africa to help with the conflicts there the Asian countries have resisted outside help preferring to struggle to find solutions themselves. He believed that this would prolong the conflict but I think there is much wisdom in looking within the region itself to resolve things.

The outward gaze has reduced the intensity of the inner critical voices. Now I can separate them into useful and mean and deal with them.

week 2 - day 8

I gave myself the day off yesterday. I needed it. I had stayed up all sunday night working on something that falls under the category of one of those things that's not my story to reveal. I had a few hours of restless sleep monday morning and then woke feverish and struggled to complete some work I had assigned to myself on my BF-memoir. But extreme fatigue made me slow and despite wanting to not miss a day of writing a post I really could find nothing to say. I began writing about my feelings around the two arrests Indonesia had made related to the fires. But after a few sentences I let it go.

Today too something in me rebels against writing a post. This is an experiment and to observe what happens to me while trying to complete it is the main purpose of it for me.

There is a part of me that strongly resists structure. Not just structure imposed from the outside but any that I create too. As a child this got me into a lot of trouble as I was constantly breaking out of the structures in the classroom or in my rigid traditional patriarchal family. This part makes it difficult for me to stay in full time jobs for more than a few years. I need my days to be ever changing. But, there is another part that likes structure and feels I need it to really move forward. For most of my life I have worked part time or free lance and if I didn't have some structures to hold me I would faff away my days. There have been times in my life I have done just that.

About fifteen years ago I was studying Dhrupad, a form of traditional Indian music. I was learning to play the sitar from an amazing young rudra veena player. Because music was so difficult for me I didn't rebel against the structures he imposed. Each raag has many rules that any player must conform to. The rules are related to the way notes can be combined and over the first two years all a new student does is play rigidly composed forms. Yet once the rules of the raag are understood one can improvise and create just about anything sometimes even breaking out of the box created by the rules.

It was while learning Dhrupad that I really understood the power of pre-determined structure and the necessity of having your basics down. Learning basics needs discipline, something that was then not very well developed in me. Everything I had done before I began studying Dhrupad had come fairly easily to me. Not having a natural inclination for music I found it extremely difficult and without structure and discipline I would have just drowned and let it go. There were long phases in the learning process where I felt I had plateaued out. My teacher would be excited by these phases. He said I would suddenly make great leaps in learning after a plateau and he was right.

I would never be an amazing sitar player that much was clear from the beginning. Yet I am glad I pursued it seriously for a while. It activated parts in me that were dormant and also taught me how to persevere. Something that had served me well now. I think everyone should learn something that is hard for them instead of just doing things that come easily.

Right now the hardest thing I do is karate. I have even less of a natural inclination for it than I had for music. I am movement and co-ordintaion challenged and have to work harder than most others who come to the dojo. Small achievements in it mean more to me than progress in things I do easily.

I guess writing too is hard for me and I think I might give myself a day off sometimes during this experiment but for the most part I want to persevere in it even when i plateau out.

day 6

I woke to clear skies but an inexplicable heaviness. Sometimes moods just drift in without warning. I decided to take advantage of the lowered psi and had a good workout in the gym giving space to the heaviness to unfold in the background. Only now after a shower I am beginning to know more about it. Its like a sad sense of loss but yet I don't know where it comes from.

Earlier in the day I had wanted to write but a paralysis seemed to have come over me. Some parts of my life are not my story to tell and I had been thinking of them. I saw how being in an inner conflict about what to share and what to keep private freezes me up. But some parts of my experience are really somebody else's choice to disclose or not. As I was thinking about this I realised so much of my life has been affected by something outside, often something related to people close to me but sometimes related to large scale events that are not directly related to me, have completely changed the course of my life. Plans and hopes just disappearing due to some force outside me. I know some people whose life seems to be much more their own. They seem to be masters of their own destiny and can escape the influence of outside events and continue on their path relatively undeviated. 

That's not my life path for sure and for a while I wondered if I would want my life to be like theirs and what could I do to change it? How could I be more independent of things outside? As I was thinking this the boundaries of inside and outside blurred. What really is outside me? Are my closest family and friends outside? Are not large events that effect people on the other side of the world also not just inside in some way? 

I do have porous boundaries. As I have grown I seem to have allowed people and the world to affect me more and more. But isn't this what an interdependent existence is about? Why should it not be like this? I have grown more from allowing things to really affect me than by sitting quietly and meditating - no, not really both have had their place. The meditation had allowed me to be able to stay a bit detached even when I am in the middle of the worst storms but if all I did was meditated on some solitary mountain I would probably never know whether the positive effects of the meditation would remain with me as I walked through this interdependent existence. 

There was a time when the mountains called me strongly. When I believed that by the age of 50 I would want to be sitting in a cave somewhere seeking the truths of life. But things changed and here I am now. 

I think part of the sense of loss are seeing the different lives I lost because of the choices I made at every fork in the path. There will always be 'what if' moments in our lives.

Yesterday I was able to organise the BF-memoir into some sort of a time line and that process showed me why I might have had the boiling frog dream this year. It is a call to a deeper healing and I give myself over to it. It could hold the key to unlocking some buried parts of my psyche. Last night I dreamt that I had opened up a large trunk which stored some of my old clothing. I was pulling out and trying on the strange almost futuristic outfits its held. It feels like a time to seek the future in my past.

day 5

Woke again to dropping visibility and a severe headache. I had thought being out but indoors yesterday would make me forget the haze but it didn't work. My eyeballs felt like they would pop out of my face and I was disoriented and dropped and broke some crockery at lunch. For a bit everything had become blurry in my head. Then I waited almost 2 hours to see a doc and be given antihistamines, eyedrops and medicated lozenges. The high point of the day was a conversation with a young engineer from my husbands firm who told me how she thinks of him as her godfather. It was touching to hear about their relating and how she seeks him out when she needs advice. She was handling the haze with resilient equanimity and like many Singaporeans felt indignant about Singapore being chided for behaving like a baby. The smog cleared for a couple of hours in the evening as we rode the bus back home and it felt really good to see hope filled blue skies.

Today I cringe when I think about going out.  

A friend pointed out to me that unlike what I had felt world media was reporting this haze and she is probably right. Yet I have the intense sense of the forests, wild life and this little red dot disappearing and nobody knowing or caring. World media does report more widely now but it still is selective about which parts of the world, which issues and species get more coverage. At international seminars I always seem to know more about the Western world than they know about my world and if I had not been a teacher of environmental studies for a few years I probably would know very little about the natural world. But with news online from sources other than mainstream ones it doesn't have to be that way. I have days when I want to know whats going on in the world and I diligently check out different online sources and then there are days I just go inward. 

The haze has this effect of sending me inwards and its been good for writing the memoir. Things I thought I had forgotten have emerged from my subconscious. On thursday I really began enjoying writing for I began looking at those events from a different perspective and began touching what others in that story might have felt. I guess that is why I am really writing it - to get some knowledge about myself in those foggy years and recover lost parts.

There is a part of me that wanted to move towards normalcy despite this disruptive smog. But there is nothing normal about it. I have begun reading Jeanette Winterson's memoir, 'Why be Happy when you could be Normal?' Jeanette Winterson's adoptive mother says this to her when she tells her mother that she is in a relationship with another woman and happy. I think the key to what I do during these haze days is find a way to be happy and forget about returning to normalcy.

I think my husband and I will stay home today and talk instead of going to a film. He has been reading my blog and also been remembering and talking about those foggy years. I think we can put the time we are stuck indoors to good use to bring fresh life to the relationship.