rooms

Posted on October 4, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #155: Chiang Mai: Home is three rooms on the third floor in a condominium. Arrived in the evening, up in the elevator, unlock the door and enter. Lights on, blinded for a moment, drop everything, close door. It’s airless, windows closed – how long was I away? Must have been the end of August? A scatter of things left at the doorway as I stumble around absorbing the environment, trying to recreate the last time I was here, searching for familiarity in the furniture… things, objects which carry meaning. Anjali to the Buddha statue, books on shelves… and I find the memory of it all is displaced by present experience, as I step into a new time. Sensory data, the smell of detergent products (the cleaners came). It’s so quiet here, open curtains with a great sweep, sliding back screens, open the windows with a bang (unintentional), birds outside flutter and chirp and there’s the mountain air. Crash around the apartment, disturbing the space held by these rooms, what is contained is squeezed outside and new air enters. My shoes are lying in the hallway as if the owner has flown away, bathroom door flung open. It’s like a catastrophe in reverse – everything is suddenly peopled, inhabited, okay, this is where I live.

Router is flickering green lights, switch on laptop, available networks… okay I’m online. What else is here? Clothes hanging in the closet, whose are these? Looks like they fit me, must have been ‘me’ in a former life. Case lying on the bed, its cover open so wide it looks like the extended mouth of an opera singer reaching the high note… the emotionality of arriving at the final destination. All my clothes coming out, folded to a flatness like envelopes and layered, they feel cold from the aircraft. Flat-pack systems, I have to reassemble according to numbered diagrams and the hologram arises like magic; a sense of ‘self’ in these surroundings, clothed and cloaked in suitable disguise; everything needed for this temporary mode of being.

Head spinning with the varying ear-popping air pressures and momentum of the great storm that brought me here, the travel industry, largest network in the world. Taxis, escalators, miles of corridors, two planes, Delhi/ Bangkok/ Chiang Mai, everything is linked with everything else. Who runs it all? … is there a God? Inappropriate question right now, the spinning flow of it is just moving along by itself, I jump on as it’s going past, join the other passengers already there, get my seat, fasten seat belts and we’re all swept away like flotsam and jestam taken by river currents.

So now I’m here, j’arrive! Let’s see now, what’s in the fridge? Onions with long shoots growing in the darkness. Soy milk not yet past its sell-by-date and some dry oats that seem to be okay. Plenty coffee. Good! I can do grocery shopping tomorrow. Time to reverse in, switch off engine, lights flash in acknowledgement, and be horizontal for 8 hours…

“As wave is driven by wave
And each, pursued, pursues the wave ahead,
So time flies on and follows, flies, and follows,
Always, for ever and new. What was before
Is left behind; what never was is now;
And every passing moment is renewed.”
[Ovid, Metamorphoses]

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stowaway

Posted on September 30, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #154: Delhi: For a few days now my bag has been lying on the bed while I search around for the clothes I’m taking with me on the trip to Thailand. The lid is hinged back, wide open like the beak of a baby bird in the nest. When the bag is filled to capacity (cases are always filled to capacity) it’ll close its mouth turn over on to its upright position and be wheeled away to the car, off to the airport, the check-in desk and into the cargo of the plane… a capacity inside a capacity.

At this time though, the case is still unpacked and maybe I should not leave the cover of it open like this in case there are small creatures in the air that decide to fly into the bag and come with me to Thailand – like the time we were living in Switzerland and Jiab came back from a long trip to South America and the last stop was Peru. From Jorge Chávez Airport in Lima, she had three connecting flights, many delays and more than 24 hours travelling before she was back in Switzerland in the evening. Totally exhausted, she opened her in-flight bag to take a few things out and went to sleep immediately. I didn’t move the bag, left there lying open and went to sleep too – if I had closed the bag, then the stowaway wouldn’t have escaped into the room, or when it did, there’s a chance we’d have seen it….

In the morning I woke up to this blat-blat-blat sound coming from the mezzanine upstairs, so I went up to have a look. Step by step and cautiously, there was a table light that had been on all night. Something was inside the shade – a very strange winged insect banging itself against the light bulb. When it stopped and lay resting on the inside of the shade I could see it was a hard shelled beetle-like creature that folded its wings up inside its shell… hmmm this thing didn’t come from Europe, I’d seen something like it in India. I went down to the kitchen and found an empty glass jar with a screw lid and came back upstairs; it was flying at the light bulb again, blat-blat-blat. When it stopped for a rest, I manouvered it into the jar, got the lid on and took it downstairs. A kind of greenish square-shaped thing with a pointy end, about three quarters of an inch in size and sort of flat, like a spade.

I tried to get Jiab to wake up to look at it, but she was not interested in that, totally asleep and it wasn’t easy. A very bleary-eyed, jetlagged look at what I held up in the jar for her to see brought only puzzled silence. After some consideration she said: Insects should not be in the house, and collapsed back on the pillow. So that was it, much later we discussed how it could have got here and decided it must have come in through an open window on her last day in the hotel in Lima and landed on the contents of the open bag. She closed the lid on it unknowingly, went to the airport and thus it stowed away on the flight to Europe.

I studied the insect in the jar for a while then took it to the balcony, unscrewed the lid and gave it its freedom in the warm spring air. Watched it fly off down to the bushes and grass below. Who knows? Maybe it found distant members of a species once related, twice removed, reproduced and now there’s a hybrid genus developing in that part of Europe waiting to be discovered.

“The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.” [Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss]

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Photo by M, showing her bag (upper left, light blue with pattern) being loaded on a domestic flight from Chiang Mai to Bangkok

immediacy

Posted on August 26, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD 146: Delhi: The early flight from Bangkok arrives in Delhi mid-morning local time. It feels like everything that brought me here has vanished; a curious missing piece of time, the four hours of travelling, and before that the Thai departures, the check-in desk, and before that the taxi that took me to the airport from my house in the darkness of very early morning, more like the middle of the night – all that has gone, the past is like a half-remembered dream.

I suddenly wake up in the middle of a Delhi traffic jam and it’s really confusing to be in this bright daylight after the darkness of the aircraft cabin. The transition into this reality so rapid, the split-second required for it to take form is… missing, yet an awareness of it having taken place remains – or the feeling that something just happened, whatever, and having to allow for the curious delay in the time it takes to recognize what’s going on. Suddenly there’s the blare of car horns from behind and vehicles overtaking as the driver adjusts to avoid a motorbike coming towards us on the nearside (why’s that man driving on the wrong side of the road?).

There’s an alertness, anticipated danger, preparedness… the car is buffeted around, rock-and-roll, accelerated, braked, jerked, vibrated and three lines of speed bumps one meter apart cause the vehicle to jolt six times. Then it stops. There’s an obstruction up front. Horns continue to blare and protest. What to do? The one-way system in Delhi is unrelenting; it can take a very long time to get back to where you want to be. So when the driver sees a gap in the flow and makes a smooth wide U-turn straight across four lanes of traffic, I feel like breaking into applause as we speed away in the opposite direction.

A few short turns through streets I’ve never been in before and we arrive at the house. Me and my suitcase of compressed, flat-pack clothing, ‘self’ assembly; get into the bathroom, shower, put on new clothes, and become someone else, an assumed identity. Step into the room: So, how was the flight? Yes okay not too crowded. Suddenly aware of having to speak in codes, chunks of language created by air forced through vocal cords squeaks like the reed of a wind instrument, and rolling articulated back throat cavities, deep volumes of sound, gasp and split bits of wet air that whistle and chirp for an instant in tongue, teeth and lip. Thought associates words which insist on naming things, integrate pieces of the jigsaw puzzle; a picture emerging as I speak, yet changing constantly according to the way the parts fit together.

Objects have that strange familiarity, rush towards me like old acquaintances… remember me? There’s a book on the desk, open it at the page where the marker was left the last time I visited. Return to that place but can’t recognize anything. The ‘now’ moment is here and in all other locations at the same time. All I can do is dig up a few artifacts from recent history before I have to go on again; the point of origin is so distant, I’d never find the way back to the beginning …

“The intimacy and immediacy of the now… is our only security. It is utterly vulnerable and completely secure. No harm can come to us in the now, no sorrow and no death. All our longing longs only for this.” [The Intimacy and Immediacy of the Now, by Rupert Spira]

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looking out and looking in

Posted on August 14, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD 143: Delhi-Bangkok-Chiang Mai flight: The flight from Delhi arrives at Bangkok a bit behind schedule so we have to move along quickly to the transit desk and transfer to the domestic terminal for the next flight to Chiang Mai. In-flight bags on a small trolley, and we’re zooming along on the moving walkways in this celestial structure of steel and glass. As yet, passports are unstamped, les frontaliers, the no-man’s land between country borders. We’re unregistered, no identity, invisible data.

It’s always the journey to get there… after I get to where I think is ‘there’, there’s another ‘there’ to get to, and all of it leads back to ‘here’, an ‘everywhere’ place made up of everywhere else… then it’s extending away again. It can only be the journey itself, not the destination – the Path is the goal, this is where we live. Isolated scenes from parts of the surroundings seen flashing by as we’re soaring along the high speed walkways; smooth as swans gliding on the surface of a lake. Two thousand miles of transportation corridors from Delhi to here, flight corridors connected end-to-end, through which we travel in the sensory cloud of transient ‘now’ consciousness looking out and looking in. There is nowhere that consciousness isn’t present. Consciousness is everywhere, so vast – indeed everywhere is included in consciousness, “And the deep lane insists on the direction”, an extended corridor projected out towards the designated destination where everything in the perspective it creates seems to disappear in a vanishing point.

An incidental episode of familiarity comes along… the déjà vu of cups of coffee taken at these restaurants, bars where they have wifi. Have I been here before? Must be the last time I came through, or was it the time before that? Was I going – or was I coming back, transit to New Delhi? I spoke with some people there, if I happened to meet them now, I wouldn’t remember. No time this time, we’re at immigration, passport stamp thump! through to security, take off my belt, shoes, my watch. Laptops out of bags and put them into the tray together with my phone to go through the X-ray machine.

Just then, the phone rings… reflex movement to reach for it, but it’s too far and the security officer shakes her head… let it go through. Phone ringing happily as it rumbles on its rollers into the machine. I pass through the X-ray, muffled ringtone continues then lovely ascending increased volume as it comes out the other side. I want to pick it up but people are waiting, a bit harrassed; there’s the putting-on-of-the-belt and shoes. Security officials seem unmoved by the tremendous ascending 4D heavenly ringtone, probably happens all the time… eventually I get the phone. Hello?’ It’s M, my Thai niece: Where are you now Toong Ting? I tell her we are boarding the plane in a minute and will be in Chiang Mai in about one hour. Silence for a moment, then she says: I make choc-o-late-cake. Clearly punctuated percussive articulation, she speaks English as a second language. I tell her, oh nice! and try to explain how the phone got X-rayed as she was calling me, but she can’t find anything to say to that… attempting to find a link with something else it could be related to, mind travels away with this information. No time to discuss, we have to go now, bye. Speedwalking through to the Departure gate and they’re boarding just as we get there; processed, find seats, strapped in and ready for take-off… engines roar, climbing again up into higher altitudes.

You hide me in your cloak of Nothingness
Reflect my ghost in your glass of Being
I am nothing, yet appear: transparent dream
Where your eternity briefly trembles [Rumi]

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before the beginning

Posted on August 12, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD 142: Delhi-Bangkok flight: We are reading the newspaper, sharing parts of the Bangkok Post. Jiab also has the Thai newspaper and other pages spread over the seats and folded into the magazine pocket. Comfortable environment; the aircraft furniture, cushions, colourful papers and books. It’s a pleasing, at-home feeling; this is our space – looks like a hotel room, not an aircraft. There’s the hmmmm sound of the engines and shhhhh of the air, not unpleasant. Soft pale daylight coming in through the window, and out there, the blue sky above the clouds stretching on and on, curvature of the planet… it all seems so strangely still.

Stewardesses come with the drinks trolley, five or ten minutes go by and the sky, the horizon of clouds remain the same. It feels like the aircraft is stationary, suspended in space, no landmarks, no indicators of time, no beginning and no end. If I say there is a beginning, I create linear time. Encapsulated inside this aircraft there’s the duration of time – there was a beginning (we got on this plane at Delhi), and there will be an end (we get off the plane at Bangkok). But outside the cabin window there’s only the vast present time – the continuing ‘now’ phenomenon enfolding and unfolding, transforming from the past into future in one continuous surging-through movement that cannot be explained. What a strange mystery it is; future time slides into present time, tomorrow becomes today, ‘now’ falls back into yesterday… something ‘remembered’ because it’s gone now.

Mind creates a structure to explain time, otherwise how could we understand the enigma of how the past has ‘gone’ and the future has not arrived yet? Hovering on the brink of the smallest pause before it gets here; the empty space of not-knowing what it is, and held like this for an instant. We are time itself – how to understand that? It’s as if I were standing at the bow of a small sailing boat floating with the current flow, the sense of moving forwards but no shoreline, nothing to judge which direction the boat is going in, or the distance from (or to) something or anything – nothing to say where we’re going or where we are.

I glance down the aisle at my fellow passengers; Japanese staff based in India, they’ll transit at Bangkok and go on to Tokyo. Wealthy Indian tourists heading for a shopping experience in Bangkok… are they aware we’re presently suspended in timelessness? Probably choosing to not think about it – never arriving, always on the way to get ‘there’ (but where are we going?). Mostly choosing to focus on whatever is happening ‘now’, and creating a story about that. Focus on my presence here in a seat contoured to fit the human body, tight squeeze, enough space for legs and knees with an inch of space from the seat in front – beyond that I can see into the business class section… always the grass is greener. I am one of perhaps 300 passengers receiving services from the staff; a baby bird, beak wide open, help… feed me, please.

Before the beginning there were no beginnings or endings; there was only the eternal Always, which is still there – and always shall be. There was only an awareness of unflawed oneness, and this oneness was so complete, so awe-striking and unlimited in its joyous extension that it would be impossible for anything to be aware of something else that was not Itself.” [Disappearance of the Universe page 122]

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Excerpts from an earlier post: flying time

multiplicity

Posted on July 23, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD 138: London/Delhi flight: Travelling by plane at night is a directionless experience, an invisible route that leads to the destination without any sense of the journey, just the sound of the engines and hiss of the air. I fall deeply asleep and wake up to daylight coming in through the cabin windows. We’re here, missed breakfast, no time for anything, quickly gather up my things, ready to leave the plane. Next thing is I’m in the huge emptiness of Indira Gandhi airport, miles of ochre carpeting, and zooming along moving walkways towards the queue at immigration. Get in line with everyone else, get comfortable with this, it could take some time.

Hello Delhi, nice to be back here, mid-morning in a different time zone, and just the ongoing continuity of it, as if I’d never been away… familiarity of bearded men, turbans, a mysterious woman with exotic nose rings, gold bangles jangle and flick of movement that adjusts folds of sari, consoling tired children with nanny; the whole clan goes everywhere together. In this place I’m glanced at, averted gaze slips away, a foreigner travelling alone, a partially visible stranger from a place of no sunlight, colorless eyes, pale pigmentation, like those creatures who live deep below the surface at the bottom of the sea.

The uncompromisingly here-and-now of it, no disappearing from or disappearing into – a dream and yet not a dream. Letting go of the experience in the North, only the memory of that extraordinary feeling there during the retreat in Scotland. The feeling I’d connected with something specific but now I forget what it was exactly. A scrap of paper in my pocket with somebody’s email on it, remembering… there was the old house, the people who were already there and the sadness when they left before I did. Then the others who came after me – I remember them all – and how they were the ones who said goodbye when it was my turn to leave.

Each one carrying this ghostly sense of familiarity, archetypal resemblance, the uniformity of distinct types. Faces I think I’ve seen before… there was a man who looked so much like Larry King (from Larry King Live), at first I believed it was him. Others reminded me of family members – I recognized Great Aunt B. from East Anglia, passed away long ago… wonderful to ‘see’ her again. And someone exactly like my old Uncle D. Everywhere I looked I saw the elders, all dead and gone now. So good to return to the memory that they were here once like me, I was inclined to think of them as being real. “Who am I? Am I you? Him? He, she, it? We, you, they?” So much of a multiplicity, sometimes it’s just seen… we are all of a oneness.

Thump! Passport stamped, out through the crowds and sudden heat, intense light switched on like a television studio. Shym is waiting with the car, bags in and we’re off into the noise and blare of Delhi traffic, reversed mirror image of the world I just left. Changing the sim card in my phone, changing channels, watching a different movie.

As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.
As some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking.
So it was when love slipped inside us.
As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
The heart’s actions
are neither the sentence nor its reprieve.
Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite.
One bird singing back to another because it can’t not

[Jane Hirshfield, Come, Thief]

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Note: This post was created partly as a result of keying in the term ‘multiplicity of faces’ in Google and finding the pdf in: perceptionweb.com. Check out the exercise of flickering faces in the picture of the girl’s face at the end.
Note2: Many thanks to Mindful Balance for the poem.
Photo: light switches in a corridor at the back of a government building in New Delhi

directionality

Posted on July 20, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD 137: The Edinburgh Road: For a moment I’m conscious of the present moment contained inside this moving vehicle following the white line marked in the centre of the tarmac, captivated by the directionality of the journey hurtling through a kind of wormhole in space/time, and plunging towards a vanishing point that never arrives. Pieces of a picture landscape, like a giant jigsaw, fly up and pass through the windscreen of the car, through the transparency of self and a new picture is forming. Left-hand bend approaching, steer around that, attention caught by a constant continuity of looped overhead cables on the right that continually sweep upwards and fall away like waves ebb and flow. Into a right-hand curve… tilt and rising with the camber of the road on the left side then level out and down into the next one. More curves and bends, dizzy and bewildering, winding down these slopes and (ear-popping) altitude drops on the way that leads to the coast.

This must be an old drovers’ road to the markets in the town, it’s foundations laid by the hooves of herds of animals following a path through ancient forests that once were here, and finding a route around swamps and boulders; obstacles long since filled in and cleared away. Now there are just fields of sheep and grass and crops, featureless hillsides – only the road remains, it’s twists and turns carry no meaning. Land owners’ properties claimed on either side have trapped it in its original form, a skeleton from the past, a craggy old branch of a tree, its shape created by historical circumstance.

The outer world becomes neutral, non-intrusive random thought mechanisms that function at the edge of a dream pull me into the gentle whirr and flicker of thinking-about-things, just as we’re coming into Edinburgh. Drop some people here at the train station, then on to drop the rest of us at the airport. Strange to suddenly be in the centre of a town, held by the traffic lights and see people crossing over – reverse culture shock; I’m not used to seeing Europeans, dark-haired, golden, Asian faces with almond shaped eyes fill my world. Memory of a former life, strange familiarity, déjà vu… this pavement, these streetlights, have I been here before? But it’s just somewhere on the way. No, wait… was it here that an event took place, long since forgotten? But no explanation seems to fit – it’s just what’s happening – the world, doing its thing. All that is here is a reflection of me passing through. It appears in present time, and then it’s gone.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” [Heraclitus]

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it can happen any time

Posted on May 6, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #125: Delhi: Taxi at Bangkok 5 am to the airport, first flight to Delhi. Travelling with Jiab who’s busy with meetings about the Nepal earthquake. I came along to Delhi because M is busy in Chiang Mai, and it’s a high stress situation, not only the earthquake but also my BP is still high and I thought the Indian doctors might provide a second opinion. The Delhi doc was very nice, so good that everyone speaks English here, and he put me on a new set of medication; let’s see what happens. So it’s back to the snarl of traffic further complicated by the construction of an overhead metro and underground train system – enough to give anyone high blood pressure. You go through a very crowded place, with lots of people you don’t know, so you tend to close in a little bit; lots of things going on and you can’t process it all. You can imagine taking a horse into a railway station and it would go crazy because horses have feeling and impression and there’s just the overwhelm. Somehow we’ve gotten used to this; the world we create. I am a theatre of processes, transitions… going along with what is assumed to be true. The construct is everywhere, staring back at us. And yet it can simply disappear in a matter of days – as in the Nepal earthquake. The media, TV and newspapers, a filter through which we see things… is this the received wisdom of hundreds of thousands of years? Self-evident; something we can see. There’s no mystery about it. Maya is a beguiling concealment – a kind of enslavement… the world as duality. Necessary to decontaminate ourselves from the media, move away from that noise. Looking for the karma that uncreates all bad karma… when this is, that is. When this is not, that is not. Jiab will be busy with Kathmandu plans for the whole of May and to allow time for other work to go on. Then she will go there for June; organize labor, seek out ‘the bare-foot technician’. Rebuild the construct, the world we live in. I’m going to be stuck in Delhi for the hot season, waiting for an extension to my Indian Visa. Then I have to apply for a new UK passport (no pages left). I shall mostly be pacing the rooms, outside temperature 40°+C (hopefully air-conditioned if the electricity holds out) Time for considering the construct, I need to have a project, maybe collating the posts into a book. A friend told me his father was in ICU for 17 days then expired last night… it can happen any time. ‘… we have no way of knowing from within the waking state, whether or not it is a dream, just as we have no way of knowing from within the dream itself, whether or not the dream is real. However, we are not in the waking state any more than we are in a dream. We are Awareness and the waking state appears in us as does the dream state.’ [Rupert Spira] ————————-

This post contains excerpts of a talk by Ajahn Succito. Also excerpts from a video sent by SeeingM

~ G R A T I T U D E ~

change in plan

Posted on May 3, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #124: Bangkok: Ah well, life’s like that, we made a last minute booking after M went to Koh Krabi and Jiab and I got a flight to Bangkok. No traffic on Sunday so we were at the house before we knew it. The plan is Jiab goes to the Bangkok office on Monday, leaves for Delhi Tuesday and goes to Kathmandhu in a few days to organize the rebuilding, after the earthquake, using local staff. ‘Bare-foot technicians’, on-the-job training, they get paid quite well, mostly clearing rubble and then re-establishing infrastructural stuff. It could take a long time. For a more up-to-date account of how things are check out garyhorvitz’s blog: Kathmandu Komment, Everything is Everything and more recent posts.

I’ll go back to Ch’Mai and continue with care-taking duties of M until 16th May then back to Delhi. If I stop and think about it, I find I’m starting to take a position against it, locked into the suffering and looking for some kind of punishing way to develop the problem – a grasping reaction, I have the cause but no effect. Let the mind unstick from it, the karma of cause/effect/ flowing like a torrents in a river. Present time contained in the here-and-now of where I am, as if it were contained in a book I’m reading… open at the page where I was, re-enter at the same place and time when I was last here. I am a character in a story about a world seen through clouds of thoughts thinking thoughts embedded in this self I recognise as ‘me’.

How am I to inhabit what remains of this lifetime, feels like I’m at the end of the railway track, can’t go any further, step down from the train and there’s this open view out to sea.

“Lal Shabaz was wandering through the desert with a friend as evening began to fall. The desert was terribly cold, so the two pilgrims began to gather wood for a fire. With their pyre neatly constructed, they realized they had no way of igniting it. Lal Shahbaz’s friend suggested that he transform himself into a great bird and fly down into hell to collect coals for a fire. Lal Shahbaz considered this a wise suggestion and flew away. After many cold hours Lal Shahbaz returned to his friend empty-handed. Puzzled, he asked why he had not returned with fire to keep them warm. Lal Shahbaz replied, “There is no fire in hell. Everyone who goes there brings their own fire, their own pain, from this world.” [William Dalrymple]

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upper photo: a Thai mythological creature guarding the gates of a Buddhist temple.

lower photo: a Buddha Rupa unharmed in the Nepal earthquake

With thanks to Gary Horvitz ~ G R A T I T U D E ~

‘return to go’

Posted on April 25, 2015 by tiramit

POSTCARD #121: Chiang Mai: I have an appointment with the doc about my blood pressure. It goes all right, arm placed in the tightening strap, BP is reduced slightly, get more pills and come back in 10 days. Downstairs and out; we have a slightly complex schedule today and I have to say there’s a small anxiety in me that’s saying maybe we can’t get it all done; M’s mommy is coming to pick me up in the car outside the clinic, then we’re going to the airport to meet Jiab coming from India. I get a call from M: How are you feeling Toong Ting? And I say yes I’m fine, where are you now? There’s a silence then M says: I’m in the car. I keep forgetting she doesn’t know locations… I ask, are you near? There’s a dialogue with mommy in Thai then: about 10 minutes from where you are. Okay I’m waiting outside the clinic bye-bye! Anxiety again about waiting there for an unknown period

Car arrives and I get into the back seat with M, mommy in the front, driving. I always have to get in the back with M – she insists. Jumps past the large arm rest in the ‘down’ position that divides the back seat to make space for my large body mass. A small smile as if to say you’re welcome, then the shuffling of play objects out of the way and debris of food wrappers on the floor and lately ‘the book’ she’s reading placed on the armrest. It’s her world, it’s where she spends a number of hours of every day going to and from school, and then stopping at restaurants to get fast food because Mommy has to work every day – there’s nobody at home to cook. I get in the back seat and there’s a sense that this is where M lives.

We get to the airport and have to drive around and around because there’s just nowhere to park. Anxiety returns. When it’s near the time I get out and meet Jiab, help her with her bags, car comes by and we’re in. Jiab has to sit in the front with mommy because M doesn’t allow her in the back – in fact there’s an immediate small resentment when Jiab speaks to me with some affection. Same thing when we stop at a Japanese restaurant Oishi Shabushi, I have to sit next to M. This is a place where there’s a moving belt of small plates of food and you have about an hour to eat as much as you want for a set price. The haste and urgency of it encourages M to eat a lot. The rest of us are required to show enthusiasm. So, once again I eat too much and we stagger out to the car park and drive back to the condo.

It’s obvious to me, with this high BP and expanding waistline I have to overcome this anxiety and try to get back to normality, the middle way, the Path; ‘return to go’ as they say in the monopoly game. Get back there and start again.

To be able to be unhurried when hurried;
To be able not to slack off when relaxed;
To be able not to be frightened
And at a loss for what to do,
When frightened and at a loss;
This is the learning that returns us
To our natural state and transforms our lives.
[Liu Wemin, 16th Century]

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