When you do something, if you fix your mind on the activity with some confidence, the quality of your state of mind is the activity itself. When you are concentrated on the quality of your being, you are prepared for the activity
I didnt plan to be exiled from India for four years. But thats a long story (and a long wait before again being granted a visa for India). Suffice to say, I have somehow filled that time with three trips to Europe .. mainly Spain, but including the French Alps, a French hospital (that too is a long story),
Switzerland, and Morocco; a year being full time carer for my mother (now theres another long story... in fact 95 and still going strong); and just a few trips on a motorbike within my own country. Otherwise I have been roots and lifestyle (an term to be sure) living back in my house in Wamberal NSW Australia.
Oh.. and did I mention the Covid Pandemic? Another long story that is still to see an end. Now that was a curve ball that side swiped many a plan for many people with plans.
To arrive back in India is a tad surreal, not the least because the last four years seem to have quickly succumbed to a sense of an evaporating memory. In one sense it feels like I was here (in India) just yesterday. But the body is a great reminder that with the passing of time, we change energy as we grow older. That and a fall down the steps doing a good deal of damage to the Achilles muscle in one leg, followed by dropping 230 kg of motorbike on the other (result: broken fibula), finds me not quite the
Friends were excited for me... I finally got the visa.... and going back home to India etc.. etc.. Whats the plan? was often asked in the last month leading up to my flight. The question had this freeze affect on me. What is the plan? IS there even a plan? What am I doing again? What and why how and where? I am so much more aware that things can hardly be planned with any certitude at all.
It is a fascinating thing to watch the mind go out to a up, imagining how that is going to be and what to do to make it turn out a certain way, only to be totally caught up with a certain anxiety about it all... and then to have arrived at that moment and found a) it all happened totally differently and even unexpectedly against the plan and b) whatever anxious energy was spent thinking about it was pretty useless in the end. Far better perhaps to realise that something will happen, conditions will arise beyond my control, and that my reactivity
Specifics? The bedlam at Sydney Airport (3 hours from entering to getting to the boarding gate)... so the plane was delayed.... so the connection nearly was missed in Kuala Lumpur... so that plane was delayed.... so it was a close shave getting the last metro into New Delhi.... and finding the booked was (predictably) not straightforward.
And then I wake up on a humid New Delhi morning... go out to the street sense the chaos that I love with the fruit and veg carts, the traffic, the noise, the colour, the smells, and I just have to wonder WHAT IS THIS? and HOW DID I GET HERE?
Two days later, and despite so many moments in the past four years hatching plans and worrying about how it will all be; and after simply forking out $450 for overhaul with a new chain and sprocket set, new tyres, new battery, etc..etc...; I am again riding north to the Himalayas on my Royal Enfield (Gladys is the name) who has been patiently waiting in
Delhi storage all this time. Even my boots and pants and jacket and helmet etc... which were stored with her are in great shape (suffice to say I just put those things straight on after four years and they were fine).
So I do have a plan actually... I plan (and do) stopover in a familiar Gurudwara (Sikh for the night... ride on to up near Dharamshala to visit a good friend for a few days, and then ride on to my very favourite stopover place (Rewalsar) for a final preparation before the return of the king to my valley in District Kullu.
So theres the joke of change.
