This thing is a lot huger than it looks
I am sitting on a couch in Pougny Gare feeling vaguely tired and strung out while trying to plan out the last little details of my voyage to India before embarking tomorrow. We spent the last 5 days or so in Barcelona with my sister, her boyfriend and Karine & X-Box (friends from Montreal).
Barcelona was an affirmation that we are ageing, not rapidly but inexorably by degrees. It is a party town par excellence. It is a city that slumbers from about 7 till 11 in the morning, from 2 until 5 in the afternoon and again at about 8 PM with each nap getting progressively more restless and agitated until it pours out onto the streets around 11 PM braying and elbowing its way down the narrow laneways in a drunken frenzy.
5-years ago I would have been in my element, but at 31 with 2 pregnant women (more on this later) and a sister with a kidney infection, it all seemed a little over the top - up to and including the inability to string together more than 2 hours of consistent sleep between the smashing of doors in the courtyard and the singing hordes of drunken Frenchman camped out beneath our window.
Still, we did have a few good meals a case of champagne and some excellent red wines (including a cheeky little number from the Priorat, a bottle of which will find its way into our wine cellar once Isabelle arrives home sometime tonight) so all was not entirely lost
Sitting here now in my elder sister’s place on the edge of the Rhone and the Swiss border, contemplating the next phase of my sejour abroad, the whole thing seems a little incongruous. As tomorrow I eschew the late nights and fine wines and embark upon a month of intense yogic practice and contemplation in the southern Indian City of Mysore.
The plan is to fly to Bombay tomorrow morning, arrive in the evening on Monday and then take an over night train that will leave me in Mysore at some point late Tuesday evening. Then off to practice at a small studio for a month until February 7th when Isabelle rejoins me in Bangalore and we take a 2-week trip down to the south.
I’ll try to keep this up to date as much as possible as the trip evolves.
In other news, I have finally been given license to reveal to the world that I am, as of about 3 months ago, a proudly expecting father. I realize that throwing this fact out there in the blogosphere may seem somewhat lame and hopelessly web 1.0, but I really don’t expect to have the chance to call all the necessary people before I head out to India, so there it is.
No word yet if it is a boy or a girl. We have no intention of finding out (well eventually it will be known) and quite frankly I can’t say as I am too fussed either way. I am, however equal measures of excited, apprehensive and bewildered at the prospect, and feel I have an added reason to take full advantage of this 2 month escape from life.
As of yesterday I am an accredited yoga teacher under the Yoga Alliance's certification scheme. I have completed a 200 hours teacher training that stretched over the past year with 10 full weekends and a week in August. I started the course with the basic goal of learning more about 'the practice' (as yoga-types are apt to call it) but have left with a sense that I could see myself getting more into teaching.
The one thing it has done though is make my head spin a little as I realise just how insanely deep and far you can start to go into this practice, and how much there is to be gained. Right now, I have the feeling that I need to go and learn a whole lot more before I could credibly start teaching people.
The next month in India should be a good time for reflection as I intend to practice intensively for 1 month with no work or other responsibilities to act as distractions and see where that takes me.
In any event, rather than the end of a yearlong course, I feel like I am at the start of a much longer journey.
With the great global apocalypse at our door, much talk in this country as in the US and Europe has turned to how one should go about 'stimulating' the flagging economy. The US has tried providing money back to households in order to stimulate spending, however this has not had the intended effect as much of the money was simply saved and not injected back into the economy.
This leads me to ask the question: were the government's aim simply to spur spending on consumer goods, why not accelerate the process by skipping the step of putting Ipods, running shoes and Xboxes into consumer's houses? Given the short useful life of these products and given the need for quick stimulus, why not expedite the process by taking the total money intended for stimulus, buying a representative basket of consumer goods, putting all these goods on a barge, and dumping them on the high seas in a great recession busting potlatch?
Time could be further saved by shipping the goods to Seattle, sailing into the middle of the North Pacific Gyre and deep sixing the lot there - where they would end up eventually in any event.
This site is just about exactly 2 years old now. It went up to document a trip through Central America and since then has been searching vainly for a raison d'être. 2 years is a long time in web-world. If expressed in 1's and 0's it would be a long figure (at least 7 characters, maybe more). I am only reminded of the passage of this time when I receive my annual renewal notice and I am left wondering whether the continued existence of this site warrants the (admittedly meagre) cost of keeping it up and running.
2 years is 730 days. Over the last 730 days I have posted 84 posts for an average of 1 post per 8.6904761 days.
Apparently the web world requires that one blog at least once every 2 days or so in order to maintain a blog that is worth reading. Anything less than this and you're audience migrates elsewhere. By any standards, I have lost my few viewers by shear negligence. And I wonder how this occurred.
Is it a lack of something to say? Reconciliation to the humdrum? Uncertainty as to the point of regular posting - is it self-aggrandizement? Fear of recognising your tiny planktonic voice in the vast web-ocean?
I am uncertain.
This is my annual reflection.
This site is slipping into oblivion.
Or maybe not, but it needs new life.
I sent for my Visa to India the other day and, despite recent events, will be heading off on the 5th of January from Geneva to Bombay (I eschew Hindu nationalist new names for originally British cities on the subcontinent). Perhaps, at least for a time, the site will re-find a purpose over the 2 months or so I spend there.
Posted by Rob at 03:48 PM| Permalink
