A walk in the clouds

A walk in the clouds. I re-discovered the heartwarming and eye- and mind- opening experience that this can be.  As I wrote in my journal, two kinds of people who would totally and especially get much from such an experience, came to mind. (Obviously, anyone would find a walk in the clouds joyful) Read on to find out more.  

Are you one of those people who can’t seem to discover an iota of interest in getting your limbs to move?  Would you rather grow roots under your couch and have the world delivered there?  Pilates: "What’s that?" Yoga: "Those convoluted positions? No thank you, I’m already happy!" Ok, the gym: (whispering) "Do you know they sweat in those room? What if I get dehydrated?" Would you say, "Look, I am not obese; I love all of me including my body and don't want to change it just because people who love me are telling me to hit the gym. I dont want to do anything just because others are telling me to."  

Alright, what if your body is telling you to? Have you listened to your body lately? Do you feel breathless and weak if you walk up the stairs? Or fatigued if you walk at all? Or does your heart start racing? You heart is also a muscle which needs exercise and so it has to do double work even for a little bit of movement if you have not given it enough (exercise). In a series of studies published in a medical journal a few years back, it said that there are as many deaths in the world because of not exercising as smoking! One of the other important signs is the "heavy cloud inside your head". Do you feel listless and disinclined? Do you feel like a dark cloud has taken residence in your head and heart? There are many ways in which your body talks to you, warns you, coaxes you and even shocks you to get you to truly notice it, but we don't want to wait until the shock, do we? 

Or, are you one of those driven people, who have an ultra-disciplined and regimented day, and you drive yourself at work and at play? You want to give better than your best on the shop floor, at the gym and at home with your family.  You sweat it out with your cardios, push yourself with the weight-training and gorge on salads and low-carb, protein-rich diets. Would you say that you are a go-getter, success is your mantra and one of your non-negotiable goals is to keep yourself healthy and fit? And others call you superwoman or superman? 

It sounds just the thing. However the question here as well is: have you listened to your body lately? What is it trying to tell you? Do you return from the gym sore and weak, and then return the next day for more strength training? Have you been dropping the stretches from your routines to make more time for the cardios and resistance training?  Are you fresh and flexible when you get up in the morning, or stiff and unyieldy? Do you rarely feel that you have accomplished anything, or have had time to spend hanging out with friends?  Do the people closest to you find you hasty and / or irritable? 

For both these types of people on extreme ends, the pendulum needs to swing back to a dynamic balance.  The body and mind cannot hold extreme positions against natural rhythm and gravity for long without showing the wear and tear and ultimately giving up. What you are doing is forcefully holding the pendulum up at its farthest ends, not allowing for its native movement.  

What I recommend to you is a walk in the clouds. By which, I mean a simple, no-strings attached walk. One that doesn't have to go anywhere and do anything. One that doesn't have any goals.  One that is not measured by any parameters. The only thing that could give it a boundary (if you choose) is time.  You simply walk. You see the sky above, a mountain and hills, the crows perched on a window sill, trees and shrubs looking clean, the heavy and hanging clothesline, a line of scurrying ants on the ground that you carefully avoid, puddles, a couple of cycles and motorbikes, a car, and an autorickshaw, school kids returning home and an assortment of adults including vendors.  You smell mud after the rains, dampness, smoke and grease, flowers, urine, and some others that you can't identify. You hear bird calls and particularly crows cawing, children's giggles and chatter, vehicles honking, one of them braking, vendors' shouts, dogs barking somewhere, water splashing in a puddle, the slapping of your slippers once you reach the road. You taste your saliva along with faint coffee just as you swallow.  You feel your slippers very differently on squishy ground, the slippery edges of puddles, on grass and on the road; you feel the wind raising the fine hairs on your arms and touching the skin in-between, the insides of your loose pants when it billows out this way and that from the wind, and a welcome chill after all the heat.  And you feel free. 

With your senses alive and awakened to what you are experiencing, you will find yourself returned to the here and now. Your mind opens up to new possibilities; you may find puzzling situations falling into place, the cloud in your head lifting, gifts worth celebrating, and meaning to life.  You see a whole new canvas, or a different canvas, or your old one from a different angle at the very least.  Your heart may expand with love*.  You wouldn't need further recommendations.  You would find them all within.  At least for now! ;)  Which means that this is also a muscle to be exercised, it would be good for me and the world, to do this now and then. 

Go on, get up and take that walk.  Just concentrate on putting this one leg in front of the other.  I dare you to.  
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* My post is not based on the movie, A Walk in the Clouds.  It is coincidental that I titled this post by the same name. Or perhaps, "There are no accidents"  (Will have to watch the movie again to find out, I dont remember much except that it is a love story) 

The Importance of Role Playing

I started out thinking how important role play is in a child's life. This has been a constant experience and exploration for some time now because my daughter (who is nearly 5 years old now) cannot let an hour go by without engaging in some sort of a role play game / activity. 

She plays "Housing" with her friend, wherein she is the mother, and A, her friend, is the father, and they together make and keep a home, filling it with all the activities that they see their adults do. 

She plays with her dolls, assigning them different characters and enacts stories / scenarios of her own making. (She has a weird variety of soft toys that includes a dinosaur, frog, rat, elephant, dog, reindeer, rabbit, rag dolls, and of course, a couple of teddy bears. None of which we bought!)

She dances to music and at various times, with different kinds of music, assumes different characters and roles. 

She masquerades as a mother, to a little red doll that she carries around.  She feeds it, sometimes from a bottle, or from her hand, sometimes breastfeeds it; plays with it, puts it to bed, scolds it, cuddles it, gives it a bath, combs its hair and is oh-so-protective.  Then suddenly she throws it up in the air, and when I look at her with shock, she says, "Amma, it's a doll, a non-living thing, and I am K! okay?" Oops! Okay. 

She talks to her imaginary friends.  These are sometimes created out of her imagination, are characters from the stories she hears at other times, and at times real-time friends or family or relatives, but who are imagined to be there at that point. 

This list can go on for pages.  Her latest favourite is that she is our dog's wife and she goes about on all fours, woofs at him, howls at the sky, nudges and rubs against him, and then gets up to announce that she is his wife. 

I was seeing, enjoying and experiencing with delight what I have known in theory and seen glimpses of.  That children process so much of their lives, their emotions, their joys and insecurities and so on through their role playing. I was seeing how formative and vital these stories and role play are to her image of herself and the world around her.  She is building stories about herself, about the people around her, about things, and all the emerging relationships.  

What followed this initial delight was also a lot of conflict, guilt many times, much joy of course, and also intense struggle for me.  Sometimes I would pick up a fear that I was sensing, some other time it would be a want or need.  Once she clearly communicated through her mother play that she felt I had no business doing some particular activity.  I felt completely in quandary about what I should do with all this rich data that I was receiving. I would sift through many options and try to see how am I to use what she just expressed , to do the right thing. And I sank deeper and deeper into this quicksand of action. 

And then it all fell into place as I started writing this piece. Role playing is important, not just for a child, for my daughter.  It is as, or more important, for adults, for me.  True that we discover, and develop if allowed to, this art / skill when we are children.  But it is so vital to nourish this and even "use" it perhaps as adults as well, in order for us to process our emotions and gain stable ground. I recognised that along with her, I had also been engaging in all the role playing, until I started analysing it and trying to use it. I had been feeling, experiencing, enacting, myriad things right along with her through the stories and the playing. And much was happening in the play.  So much healing.  So many stories were getting told.  Old ones discarded, new ones born, Old ones re-told.  New understandings. Insights.  Emotions were filling us and then draining away.  Without us getting drained in this process.  It was all happening in the lyrical and mystical language of stories and role playing.  It can continue to do so.  I don't have to "do" anything about it.  I am simply going to sit back and enjoy the ride! 

How can the Ordinary be Extraordinary?

How can the ordinary be extraordinary as well? Simply by the quality of one's attention.  I tried to immerse myself in it, when I encountered such an attentive quality recently. 

Scene: A moderately-big^ photocopying / DTP works-binding-printing establishment in the city.

At the outset, he was yet another young guy from a small town, come to the city for work. He looked it.  I waited for a while by the photocopier machine before he came to attend to me.  I had two entire books to be photocopied and he finished with two others before he came to me, although I had come earlier.  Some typical leg-tapping had begun at my end.  I had also by then slotted him, "he attended to the men first; he is so young, looks barely 20, he's going to mess up my photocopies; he's got a cell phone that he is constantly checking on, how usual!"  I realised later that although my initial impression of him being from a small town was correct, that was also a stereotyping that I'd indulged in.  

So initially when he started the machine for my work, I kept shifting from one foot to the other and checking my phone (to look at the time of course!). After about less than a minute of this, he turned to me and smiled and said (in Tamil*), "those two people had only a couple of papers each and so I finished theirs first."  

I was arrested by two things.  First, I was ashamed that I hadn't noticed this myself because I had been too caught up in my own typecasting.  Second, his eyes.  He looked right into my eyes, directly and openly.  He had such clear eyes, such depth and stillness in them. By this time, he had already tuned into his task again, and I tuned into him.  Really looked at him. And was thoroughly mesmerised by how he was doing what he was doing. He had in the beginning itself punched some keys on the keypad to indicate standard number of copies and page dimensions and so on.  (And I realised at this point that I had been watching all this like a hawk for any mistakes!).  Now I just started to simply watch. 

Since it was not a completely automated process, he had to key in something after the machine spit out the required number of copies of each page.  He had to turn to the next page, put it face down on the fibreglass top, and adjust its orientation before closing the lid and punching the keypad. This went on continuously.  After every few pages that were copied, the screen would have moved and changed angle because of the way he was tapping the keypad (on the touch-screen), and he would move the screen back to its original position.  In a while I saw that it was exactly after 10 pages that he did this.  (I dont know whether he kept count)  Every 2-3 pages, he would check the page number of the photocopies that had just come out and the page number on the original before flipping to the next page.  Open-flip-place-adjust-close-punch, Open-flip-place-adjust-close-punch, Check-Open-flip-place-adjust-close-punch... If ever I've seen mechanical work done in style, it was this instance.  He executed that whole sequence so gracefully, that the yoga practitioner in me saw a perfect, smooth, seamless and flowing vinyasa krama** in action.  It was utterly rhythmic and hypnotic. 

This was not all.

The pictures have been taken and put up here
with his consent

In the middle of this steady pulse, there was a stream of phone calls that he attended to.  I realised by and by that he was in charge of the shop's cell phone and he was handling enquiries!  He answered an irate caller who didn't know the location of the shop; I could hear the irritated voice asking for directions, standing more than 2 feet away.  He gave some rates and tariffs to another person. and so on.  Without missing a beat - in his hands, or his eyes or his voice and smile.  I mean, he was obviously not in the middle of a toothpaste commercial - he was not smiling actively, and yet his face was a restful smile.  

This was not all.  

He also seemed to be in charge of other things in the shop. He seemed to have in his purview, two new boys handling other machines in the shop, and he was instructing someone else to go and check up on one of them who has not had the requisite training yet.  He also at some point, asked the person at the neighbouring machine, to go sit on some computer and handle work there since that person had taken leave today.  I have no clue how he knew what was happening right behind him (maybe he was listening to everything happening around him), but just as a customer was going to go to that empty computer station, asking for some particular service, he turned and redirected her to someone else.  He was also completely aware of what was happening at the delivery counter and the finished jobs that were coming there to be stapled and handed over to the right person, after the payment was made. (The payment counter was exactly behind him and I was also sort of standing there). 

Some things that came to me later: I believe now that his eyes and how he looked at me the first time changed the quality of attention I was giving to the present moment, the task at hand and the people in the present moment (because of his own attentive quality). I also realised that early on, he had pointed out the obvious without any judgement of me, or any resentment, or chip-on-the-shoulder attitude; just a clear, non-attached statement. 

I had to take his autograph

His attention was everywhere in the shop I realised, and yet his attention was also on the minutest detail of the task in his hand.  How did he catch it otherwise - that one time when he flipped two pages together, he paused and corrected it. He continued his open-flip rhythm through to the end without losing himself to any one task or phone call or person.  He attended to all of it with a quiet confidence. What is yoga if not this? 

An ordinary day turned extraordinary for me, gave me a demonstration of Attention that I will carry with me for a long time to come, if not always. And transformed me in some inexplicable way. 

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* Our conversation happened in Tamil 

** Vinyasa krama in asana-pranayama practice is an intelligent, step by step progression / sequence, with synchronising breath and movement, towards a particular goal

^ What is moderately-big though? Beats me.