Delayed processing

Two years ago, I was in a yoga teacher training course in Bali.

In the accidental video above, I thought I was lining up for the photo in this post. It was early in the course, and I’d asked a new friend to take my picture. This was right next to the yoga shala, and the rice paddies were so beautiful.

Why am I sort of crab-walking backwards? Why do I make weird little faces? I didn’t know I did this, but when I look at it, I’m like, yep, I do that.

If you don’t know me in person, this is seven seconds of me being very me.

This summer I’ve realized that I’m processing the events of two years ago—both the good and the bad. I think I’ve just been just too overwhelmed to sort through all my feelings and experiences.

But now, my kids are away at camp. (And gosh, right now camp is a brutal topic.) I have time and I have quiet.

Two years ago, after my mama had died, the absence of her was everywhere. Every room I was in, I was suffocated by how much my mom wasn’t there.

My schedule, which was typically filled with caretaking, was suddenly empty.

I cried so much that everything hurt. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep.

At least when there were people around, particularly my kids, who needed me, I was busy. I still cried all the time, but I had obligations.

I saw the gaping maw of quiet ahead, and I used money my mom left me, and I fled.

It was privilege, it was a gift, and it was one of the best thing I’ve done.

If my mama hadn’t died, I would never have gone to Bali.

Of course I’d trade Bali, I’d trade just about anything, to still have my mom.

Over decades, with my dad’s suicide attempts, with my mother’s illnesses, I’d done a tremendous amount of begging and pleading and offering up to God. But these aren’t the kinds of bargains available.

I’ve said this before, but as we’re on the topic of these kinds of deals, do not set your alarm to play “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” unless you want to awaken in abject terror.

So life being what it is, if my mom hadn’t died, I wouldn’t have gone to yoga teacher training at all. Because I couldn’t have gone to the November course I’d first signed up for, because by then I’d been diagnosed with breast cancer and had had a bilateral mastectomy.

So at this point two years ago, I was in lovely Ubud, Bali, trying to position myself for a nice photo in front of the beautiful rice paddies (in which I would spend so much time sobbing my guts out).

When I signed up, I was excited. And scared. In fact, more scared than excited. But I was terrified of being home alone without my mom.

Bali meant long travel alone to somewhere completely unfamiliar, which I hadn’t done since my 20s. I was worried I’d be the oldest person in the teacher training, which turned out to be true. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to keep up, which wasn’t the case. I was nervous that I wouldn’t really connect with anyone, which would make for a difficult three weeks.

I am all about human connection. The facts are never as interesting to me as the feelings.

Then I met Fiona in the immigration line in Bali, and we hugged hello, and by the time we got to our hotel hours later, I knew that no matter who else I met, I’d have a great time.

Fiona’s first room, which I initially envied, as it was so was beautiful, turned out to have a bathroom with a half roof. She had to be careful so the people from the building nearby couldn’t see her on the toilet. She had a plague of ants.

But what prompted her move was the frogs mating in the bathroom walls at night. They were loud. Very, very loud. And relentless.

She told reception about them, and they said she could come get them at any time of night and they’d throw rocks at the frogs.

Instead, she asked to move. As did other friends with the same frog problem.

I ultimately wound up in a lovely room, with ornate carving at the door and a little patio. You know about the extra-special exotic flowers in my garden, surely nothing we’d ever find in our countries!

Bali was both very foreign and very familiar, as the culture is predominantly Hindu. The vegetation—lotuses and frangipani and marigolds and rice paddies and all the lush greennes that comes with the monsoon—is that of my childhood.

It felt like going home. Which I really, really needed.

I had geckos in my room. I love geckos, which I grew up calling chingchoks, and trying to catch them with my brother in Bangladesh. This causes them to drop their tails, which continue to wiggle. They grow back.

I just looked it up, and chingchok is a Thai word. I never questioned the nomenclature. They were chingchoks. But it’s not Hindi or Bengali. But makes sense, as my mom lived in Bangkok while my dad was in Vietnam, and it was likely the first time she lived with them.

Chingchok, godown, and so we beat on, boats against the current.

I cried—like, squeeze your organs inside out sobbing—every single day.

But I also laughed so much. You know how there’s this electric charge around you when you feel intense emotion? And it can be triggered in so many directions?

It was like that. And alone, I cried. With others, I mostly laughed and laughed.

Except that once, when we were supposed to be meditating, and did both.

Our course included three free massages at a resort down the road. So Fiona and I booked ours together. A small group of us headed over at the same time.

What she and I wound up with was a couple’s massage. They showed us to a room and gave us each weird synthetic black underwear, and a sarong for cover.

We giggled and giggled. Not during the massages, which were great. Just you know, before in the weird underwear, and forever after, talking about our romantic couple’s massages.

I believe I was the most emotionally extreme, being weeks from losing my mom, with every nerve raw, exposed. But all of us sought out the course for some reason, and I think most of us had heightened emotions.

And I think, honestly I do, that sometimes they were trying to pull emotion out of us. There was one class where everyone got upset. The anatomy teacher started trying to teach us anatomy, and realized the class was verging on hysteria. So she had us do an emotional exercise that had people leaving the shala to cry.

So, Bali.

When I was younger, I moved and traveled to try to escape myself—which of couse never, ever works. It’s annoyingly true that wherever you go, there you are. It just took me a long time to understand that I was my own problem. And longer to stop being it.

This time, I was working to be with myself. I just needed less painful circumstances. And Bali was perfect.

I don’t know precisely why, but by the end of the course, something inside me had lightened. I wasn’t fixed, my pain wasn’t gone, but something fundamental had shifted in a positive way.

The day our course ended, Fiona and I had one last masala chai at our favorite spot down the road, and she headed home, and I went to a beach town for my last night. If I’d been in my 20s, I’d have stayed, and traveled frugally, as I did in India and Nepal all those decades ago.

But at that point, I was in my 50s, and I had a husband and dog waiting for me at home, and children to collect from camp.

That last evening I didn’t swim, but walked on the sand and in the waves of the warm and beautiful Indian Ocean.

I met up with a couple friends from the course, and had drinks in the sand at a bar on the beach. I looked across the sand and across the water at the horizon, and thought about how lucky, truly lucky I was.

In high school I was Emily in “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder. I memorized and said the line,"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?" approximately a million times.

The Stage Manager’s answer, in the play, is no.

And I would say that too often, it’s true, we don’t recognize how sweet life is in the moment.

But this particular time in this particular place, I did.