There's a heaviness in my heart. I don't know how to carry on. How to do all the everyday things, pretend they matter, go about the motions of life, like they are leading somewhere, pretend some joy in them? I look around me at people and wonder how they do it. How they go about life so easily, so happily. Don't they feel this heaviness sometimes, this wanting to just pause, to lay down, to cry...

I find it very hard to connect to people in general. It is a very very rare thing for me to make a connection. I don't even expect it to happen because it would be a miracle and miracles don't just happen. And yet, I count it among the best blessings in my life to have made one that was beyond what I could have ever asked for or hoped for. When it is something so precious, you want to hold onto it forever. And so I did. Deep down though, even as I found it, I always had this sense of time ticking. The patterns in my life gave me an intuition that it was just a matter of time. God had sent me this blessing when I most wanted it... but He would take it away... as he has always done, someday not too far. A part of me held this painful knowledge never wanting to confront it. Because I knew I couldn't do anything about it. All I could do is to hold the precious gift as delicately and tightly as possible. I feel sad that I did not always do that. It is easy to forget when you have something, to take it for granted... and so I did. Though I want to tell myself that I appreciated and honoured it too. I never lost sight of what a gift it was to me... there is this saying that I love and hate at the same time... when the student is ready, the teacher appears... when the student is truly ready, the teacher disappears... I hated this quote because it expressed what I really feared... that my gift would be gone someday... And I fear it has... my heart feels tremendously heavy at the thought of it... because the truth is I will never be truly ready to lose something so very precious... something that comes so rarely to me...but it wouldn't know...

As I was trying to find bits of energy to carry on, just to keep going, even if without much will or hope, there was a severe blockage in my kitchen sink... anything else I could have ignored but there is just one workable kitchen sink that needs to work... with me living in my own house, the responsibility is greater...it felt like when I could just not bear to feel anything but the deep sadness gripping me, I had to force myself to deal with this practicality... it made me want to drop everything and run... but it also made me see that if an issue with the sink could force my attention so much, how must it be if there was an issue with health? How much more terrible it would be if I had to be forced to deal with a painful tooth or a blocked gut...? A dear friend said to me recently that it helps to reframe a situation when something seems very dire... my reframing it this way helped me see how difficult it must be for someone who must deal with both internal health constraints and external worries... it also made me think about my own privilege to be able to freely wallow in sorrow without having to force my attention on survival or bodily emergencies... maybe we never realise how lucky we are with what we have until we aren't...

It was love at first sight. I felt it the moment I saw you. I knew that instant you were meant to be mine. I did everything in my power to bring us together. I almost lost you once. I wondered if it was not to be after all. If it was all but a dream. Too good to be true. But when all my hopes were almost dashed, they were renewed once again. Was it to be after all...? I have been on tenterhooks these last few months. Wondering, waiting, moping, hoping... And now, finally, at long last, here we are... united! I love you now as much as I did that first moment. When I knew deep down we were perfect for each other. I knew you would be everything I wanted. And I was right!

Dear reader, I speak of my house! ;) I am finally HERE! There were more turns and twists, ups and downs, since my last update on this matter. But, as I say quite often, all's well that ends well :) I have a ton of reflections coming from the experience of living in a house of my own and they'll be coming up by and by...

For now, I am preparing for 'that time of the year'. Yes, my China visit looms very very close. I am glad everything's clicked into place at the right time... and I have my dearest to get back to… hehe!

This article I was reading had the following two quotes which amused me and made me ponder:

“When you don’t watch television for a long time, your way of thinking becomes different, your idea of what is interesting is not the same as what television people think should be interesting.” (Tran, 2001:7)

“the common factor to all 20th-century lunatics and serial killers, from Stalin to Lee Harvey Oswald, was this: they didn’t watch enough telly” (Scott, 1999:17).

The article isn’t that old, but it would seem to be, given the rate at which technologies are changing. We don’t set as much store by the ‘television’ anymore I guess, since the arrival of Netflix and smart phones. Entertainment has moved elsewhere. Technically Netflix could be called television as you might be watching it on the television screen, but I guess what these quotes are referring to is something different. A ‘television culture’ as it were, which is produced by most people watching the same shows at the same times. It gave everyone’s life a common context so to speak. If you aren’t watching it, then it’s almost like you do not even live in the same world, even though you do. Sort of reminds me how in India at one point we had a lot of television based on the Indian epics: Ramayana, Mahabharata, etc. Everything revolved around them, people spoke of nothing else!

It’s not the same anymore with Netflix. Each person chooses what they want to watch for themselves. And many probably just choose to browse social media or do games on their smart phones. Of course, you could still end up watching the same popular shows on Netflix or other streaming services as your friends… but I think it’s still not the same? Unlike earlier when people who all watched television shared a common context or inhabited a similar world which was distinct from those who didn’t, now everyone inhabits their own unique world, a world in which what they consume in terms of media or stories or knowledge or news or entertainment is all very different from the next person. It sort of makes me wonder what that means from a social perspective…?