Si j'etais...

Struggling with the conditionnel present... Got stuck with some opinion that had to be sent to the client rather urgently so had to miss my swim. Feels awful. I wish I could swim somewhere even now at half past midnight...

Still Crawling!

Debs and I down to 13 strokes for a breadth! Him going easy and me somewhat cheating with elbows showing up only after I've crossed half the distance! But the water feels good...

The fly remains elusive!

Time flies...

and everyone knows that...

But sometimes you feel it very strongly. And that's what I'm feeling right now. The time that's gone seemed to have flown past much faster than the time to come...

Limited by awareness...

I was thinking sometime ago how it was when I was a kid. I knew no limitations. And growing up was, amongst other things, a gradual discovery of those limitations. Some real, but perhaps most imposed falsely by my experiences.

The first instance that I clearly remember of being surprised by what I could not do was when I joined a boarding school in the 5th Grade and ran a mini cross-country in the first few days. We had to take a round of an inner circular road of the school, starting at our boarding house and ending there as well.

I think I sprinted the first few minutes with a sense of belief that I could keep going like that the whole distance and beat everyone. Then after a few hundred metres the tiredness set in. Unexpected development this. I dropped to a slower pace. Then the legs started giving away. Slower still now. Then went out of breath. So a jogging pace. And then, at least that's how I think it was, an embarrassing sense of awareness struck- other boys were surely faster. And they could run longer (at that age I did not know what stamina or endurance actually meant). There were many others behind of course. But I only cared for those ahead. And I sort of decided I could not do long distance (in the days to follow I afforded this status to short distance as well).

There it was. The first sense of limitation. There were of course instances before that where I would not have performed as well as others. It could be anything- sports or studies. But until this point I never thought of not coming ‘first’ as a limitation. It was something I never cared to understand. Maybe because I didn't know what winning meant either. Or perhaps thought that coming on top was all a matter of chance.

Unfortunately, I understood limitation to be an unalterable reality for a long time. So from that point onwards I never really finished a long distance run in time at all. It was only much later when I was a senior at school that I decided to give it my all. I practised hard. I thought perhaps within my limitations too there could be a higher potential that I am missing. So I decided to touch the end of the spectrum of that limitation. And after days of dogged practise when the day of the run came I started with an uneasy mind. But I ran ok. And managed to hit the top 20 in a 10km run. A purely average performance by the standards of any decent athlete I agree. But surely a big change from the previous 7 years of not finishing the race. All the same, I felt I could do better. And I saw the bubble of my limitation grow beyond the boundaries I had set earlier.

And I realized this- if I wanted to, I could do it. Most things possibly. But I seldom tried very hard. And that was my only limitation. It perhaps still is.

What is music?

That's the question crossing my mind again and again over the last few days.

What is it? And how about those who cannot hear? Saw 'Le Pays Des Sourd' (Land of the Deaf), a French documentary by Nicolas Philibert, adding to the curiosity. The first scene was a concert sort of thing being performed in sign language. If music can be felt, as many say it can be, then surely music goes beyond hearing. And to animals? What would it mean to them?

Hope to find out someday...

New Office...

...and new work.

New people... and new settings.

But the same old anxieties and same old excitement with anything new...

Sorry for being absent. Sorry for making up excuses (only to leave them unused though).

Hope less time will not mean less reflection...