Posts Tagged ‘life’
Proud of a bruise?
In the above picture, the red line is the outline of a shin bruise. I started kickboxing recently. First came online videos and boxing/kicking air from the comfort of my room. Then, more recently, I joined a gym and that meant actual heavy bags. This bruise came from the first day of landing repeated shin kicks on a heavy bag.
It has been a long journey from couch potato to kick boxing…
When Covid had boxed us in, I too found a few extra hours in a day. These hours eventually went into developing movement practices. At some point, I had looked at a body in its fifth decade and extrapolated it to the eighth decade and I didn’t like what I saw.
They say that if you want to do something in your eighties, you need to do them now….
The movements had started with yoga, a practice I was familiar with in my childhood. Then came Qi Gong. Then came a passion for the forests, i.e., hiking. Cross-training followed – to combat the repetitive stress injuries that were a result of working from home, without significant movement for 8-12 hours a day. My routines have now became so varied that I feel like a NASA astronaut (link). And yet, all my activities had been solitary and quiet activities, meditative even. Bulk of my activities were conducted within the confines of a 10 ft x10 ft room, a bedroom turned into an office room. And when not in the room, I was outdoors, on foot in a forest, or on a kayak on the Bay.
I am not a fan of a gym. Loud music and windowless spaces make me claustrophobic. And yet….
I was proud when I signed up for a trial power kickboxing class. I was surprised when I loved the class. The day after, I was surprised when I was upright and not in significant pain. I was even more surprised when I survived half a dozen more of the same. I decided to graduate up from the softer freestanding bag to the heavy bag. And then came the bruise. And I went back for more.
I am told that the bruising would go away in 1-3 months…
When I pretend that I am a NASA astronaut
NASA astronauts on the space station exercise 2.5 hours daily, six days a week. I am finding myself in a similar predicament. They do it to counteract muscle atrophy. I do it to manage pain.
I have had an on-again off-again relationship with pain my entire life. It has been in an on-again for last several years as I started the fifth decade. My hips hurt when I walk horizontally. My knees hurt when I walk vertically. My shoulders hurt when I go to bed. My back hurts when I garden. My joints are stiff when I wake up in the morning. My head hurts when there is too much noise. My neck hurts I have spent time staring at the monitor. Over the years, I have realized that my aches and pains are best managed with a balanced activity regime. Part one is bones and joints. They need to be treated roughly – jump up and down, run etc. Part two is muscles, they need stretching and strengthening, lift weights, do yoga. Part three is nerves and fascia, they need unclogging with QiGong. And finally, part four, the balance that improves with dance or slack line. Then there is rest – for the brain, the conductor of the daily orchestra, the one that gets stuck in the circle (link). It needs quiet moments, a bit of star gazing or watching the hummingbirds. Too much of one and too little of other throws the system off balance and recovery takes days.
On days I feel annoyed with all the refurbishing, I think about astronauts. In case you wondered that they are up to, fitness wise, here is a normie testing out astronaut’s exercise regimen (link). Thoughts of them stuck in a smelly tardis, where globs of sweat coalesce on their face, to be eventually sucked in by the ventilation system to be converted into next day’s coffee is guaranteed to make you feel good about your workout routine.
On shoulders of giants
This photo isn’t my memory. It is my mom’s memory. I was too young to remember. I have memories of seeing this photo in my mom’s album. I do remember dad’s watch. He wore it for many years. It was a little loose on his wrist and would invariable climb up or down and swing about. I remember his glasses. Again, he wore them for many many years. They went out of fashion and came back into fashion during his lifetime. I remember his thick curly black hair. In my childhood photos, my hair is curly like his. I remember his broad shoulders and his chest press machine. He had a resting unhappy face but he would laugh very easily. I am like that too. I have inherited his hands and feet as well, narrow and small.
After he passed away last year, I read tributes of his colleagues. Many remembered him very fondly. One story touched my heart especially. This was someone who was newly posted to his office, the National Institute of Communicable Disease (NICD), India’s equivalent of CDC. In those days, job postings of civil servants was decided by government committees. It was his first day and he was nervously waiting to speak to my dad whom he only knew by reputation. Dad had kept him waiting for a bit. And then when they met, dad bombarded him with many technical questions. This colleague had felt that my dad’s interview was a lot harder than what he had gone through in the government’s bureaucratic process. At the end of the interview, he was assigned his first job by my dad and that job was to present the office at a prestigious conference the very next day. He was scared at first to speak at the conference, but as he participated, he felt more and more confident, eventually coming out feeling victorious. He went on to work with my dad for many years and referred to my dad as a great mentor of his.
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As I live, I gain memories. But as I live, I lose many of these memories. This is my attempt to hold on to some memories dearly.
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Holding on to a fading memory
Baroma, my great grandma, had a partial index finger. As kids, we would ask her on every visit, why she was missing her finger. Her stories would change with every telling. But the one I remember the most is the one where she was guarding her chicken coop against a fox and the fox bit her finger off. I also remember that my Baroma had a faded tattoo on her forearm. She never told that story. I have this bad feeling that it had to do with the Bengal partition.
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Locomotoring 