Let's Watch...

Imagine stories. Expressions from the heart. Words with feelings. Narratives with softness of sensitivity and the depth of human experience.

What happens when you want to play these stories out? What happens when you take a teller's tale and use your body to show how it all felt? Use your voice to capture its essence. With no preparation. All improvised. Play it back to them with honesty and commitment.

Playback theatre is all about enacting our life's stories...again. Sometimes as a fluid sculpture with voice and movement, sometimes as an image frozen in time, sometimes as vignettes unfolding magically and sometimes as stories acted out in a narrow corridor. So many ways to reach out and share. 

But what Playback theatre does is more than a re-telling. It heals. As we watch our own stories played out by an ensemble of actors, there is a part in us which witnesses and somehow puts it back in a different perspective. Almost as if the contents of our memory are re-shuffled. The pain that some of these tales are soaked in begins to subside. The joy these stories contain infects others. We feel better. Much better.

As an actor, I loved playing the stories out. I read somewhere that if we delve deep within, we realize that our feelings are replenished by the same source. Acting required me to dig in and drink from that source. No planning and preparation. Being totally there. Beautiful to feel so connected.

As a teller, I saw my own stories replayed and yet transformed magically. A short frail boy who hit three sixes again became a hero. His joy reaching out and embalming the souls of even those who had never seen him.

As a conductor, I had the opportunity to sometimes hold the threads of the teller's story together so that the actors could always make out its essence. I had to make sure that the art form fit the story. A fragmented story, for example, would be done justice to in the playback form of corridors. So much invisible work that binds the whole performance together.

As a watcher, I had the time of my life. Listening and watching as the human drama enfolded every day and I felt being tugged by invisible strings which reached out from the words of the teller and the expressions of the actors. The Me became a We.

My journey with Playback is new. And like all new journeys there is an overarching sense of excitement and a niggling sense of uncertainty. Who knows where it will go. 

Let's watch.

The price of freedom...

The mind wants certainty. Make no bones about it. It wants to know, to make sure, to cling to certainty.  And since it is a part of us, we can be pushed into this deep craving for certainty. Like knowing where exactly a road leads to and how bumpy is it going to be.

But life does not offer any such solidity. No guarantees. Now, either we can accept it or we can fight it. And believe me how good a fighter you believe you may be, you cannot defeat reality. 

But, we live on, in the midst of this make believe. Hoping that tomorrow will be better than today. Hoping that the house on which you have made your down payment will be ready, that the child you have so carefully helped grow older will think of you fondly, that you will get a better job soon, that your friends will last... Some of it comes true and you begin to believe that you have actually cracked it. Done what was impossible for others. Got certainty in your grasp and life will listen to and honour your wishes.

It won't.

No, I am not trying to be a kill-joy and drive fear into you or push you into one of those "what would you do if it were your last day blah..." statements. I am just saying that being an adult is to accept this uncertainty and live with it. With joy if possible. 

Do all you can and accept whatever happens, seems like a good way to be, to live and to love. It is not a better way to live- it is, in my view, the only way to LIVE. Any other way means numbing your fear of something going wrong. 

And it can be very uncomfortable living this way. The mind resists it, at first. It cant build a story anymore of how things will actually turn out -whether bad or good. It will exaggerate your fears. Play with your anxiety. But you must plod on. Slowly lean into the discomfort. Keep at it. And then one day the spell is broken. 

You are free...only to fight a bigger battle this time. Only to help those who are ready. To respect yourself enough and to love yourself deeply. Because you see that you are not alone, the whole universe resides within. And it takes hard work of a lifetime to feel that connection.

But then, there are no guarantees!

Adult Vs Child

So, what is the difference in being a child and being an adult? My answer is choice. Deliberate choice.

To the unobserved eye, the actions of an adult and child might look just the same. But their intention and level of awareness are on completely different levels. 

How?

Its 6 am. You are doing your daily jog when you see a 5 year old and a 40 year old (dad) enter the park. The child runs towards the flower beds. The dad runs behind him. Playfully. They chase each other, the child cackling with laughter and the adult with a big wide grin till he finally catches the kid. A great start to the day- for both of them, you wonder.

But lets go back an hour. 

Its 5 am. Dad hasnt slept much last night. The new boss has been giving him a lot of grief - giving him stiff deadlines to achieve sales targets. At this time, leaving the job is not an option. Jobs are difficult to come by. And then there is the pain in the heels that refuses to go away. He has been planning to get to the doc for the last 4 days but the only appointment available is 2 days later.  And he has to be there for dad's surgery this weekend that has been freaking him out. Right now, life  is hard. He wishes he could just sleep away the troubles and wake up to a boss-free and pain-free day. But that is just wishful magic thinking. Not gonna happen. So, he talks to himself, reminds how important it is for him to spend these 45 minute with his son in the morning, and begins to get ready.

The kid had a good night's sleep. He looks forward to every morning when he can catch up and play with dad. He is groggy when dad wakes him up, but then he has the whole day to sleep since it is still summer vacation. He does not think too much. 

So, here they are, an hour later. Running around the park. But the adult made a choice. He accepted that life, right now, was hard. But that was ok. He knows that there never will be a perfect care-free morning. Something or the other will always worry him. He has to get into the arena and dare the bull, knowing that he will never have the complete armour. That the fear of bungling it all up would always be there and he has to accept the fear and yet act. 

Brave. Yes, that is what adult acts are like. And mind you, it has nothing to do with age. Some children never grow up.

The gentle beat...

Today, I decide to live with my heart. I realize that it has been constantly at work since I had my first breath. Constantly. Working harder when I ran or climbed, working slower when I rested. But working. It spoke silently when I went headlong into a direction which really wasn't mine- coming from shoulds that others thrust upon me. It sang when I found the right path again. Yes, sometimes the mind shifted into the driver's seat, giving meaning and interpretation to what I felt. Sometimes, even creating fear when I did not listen to it. But the heart was always there. Like a constant presence of the princess behind the curtains. Ready to be revealed if I reached out. And today I decide to...

Lessons from the Tarahumara

I love walking. It is like a religion to me. You can wake me up in the middle of the night and ask me if I could come for a walk, and I'll come. Walking makes me happy. Maybe, that is how I have survived so many hikes, so many treks. I just walked. Half the metaphors I write are about paths, trails and terrains- all linked to walking!

So when a few days ago, I woke up to a sharp pain in my heels, it threatened something I held dear. I had to know why.

And so began the search. Pronation, Overpronation, Supination, Arch Support, Plantar Fasciitis. The terms helped me come know what was happening and why but I did not like where they were leading me as a solution-" Buy a nice cushioned pair of shoes with a thick tongue and support for your arch", they said. It felt logical but something was missing. Till yesterday.

"Born to run" is a book about the Tarahumara (Tara-oo-mara), a tribe in Mexico known for their unbelievable running abilities. As Chris Mcdougall, who wrote the book, describes. a 60-70 mile run over an inhospitable terrain with stone walls and dry cold is nothing. They do it like a warm up. For them, it is fun.

So, here I am, walking a few miles everyday, in my modern nike and addidas and I get heel pain. While they have nothing but pieces of leather strapped to their feet and they run till the terrain ends and that too with no pain. 

How? If I were to simplify it to one word, it is love.

Love for running. They just love it. It bring them joy. It makes them happy. Perhaps a primeval feeling that we all get when we stretch our legs and run. The trees zipping past, the wind in the hair, the throbbing of the heart as the legs kiss the ground. The mind goes quiet. What is there to not love, I ask. It is hard wired into us. It is how we travelled for centuries. And then chose comfort and efficiency. Yes, we can now go to London in 8 hours but maybe we lost something more basic on the way.

But I am digressing. What I wanted to say is that if you really love something and you dont let someone tell you how much of it should you do, just do it. An 80 year old Tarahumara grandfather can run 100 miles because he loves it and because no one told him that he could not. 

In a strange way, my search for freedom from heel pain led me to another alley of insights. It solved another question that had been on my mind for a while.
  
You see, I love working and over the past few months, I have heard so many people and friends wonder why I should work so much. Especially, on Sundays. Take a break, they say. And every time I rested, it  felt strange, sad and unnatural. It did not serve to rejuvenate, it only broke the rhythm. And now I am beginning to understand why.

I guess I am made that way. Work brings me joy. Thinking through a new course, teaching a subject, designing a seminar or writing a report nourishes me. I can work hours and then a few more. I know it might sound strange but that is how I feel and now I am beginning to be ok with it.

Does it take a toll on social life? Not at all. Because when I stop, I am more happy to reach out and talk to friends. I am more aware of the of the cloudless skies in the afternoon or the headlights of the cars as they crawl through the roads at night. I am more in tune with myself and less cribbing of life in general. Is it tiring? Of course, it is. But, it is the kind of happy exhaustion which make thoughts cease and make me reach out for the bed at night.

I dont know if I would solve the puzzle of plantar fasciitis or whatever is the cause of this heel pain. But I do know that the answer lies somewhere connected to what I LOVE doing and if I keep walking on that path and being in rhythm with myself, irrespective of what others think is actually possible, I am sure that it wont be long before I discover what will make it disappear.

And as for the Tarahumara, bless them for telling me this.