How to win: Notes from a failure
Newsday
ANU LAKHAN
YOGA is not for me. Meditation scares me. I don’t read motivational books. Daily affirmations make me feel like a fraud. I don’t send messages every day telling people they are blessed.
It may seem to the observer unfamiliar with me that I don’t do anything to make my day better. Few things are less true.
Things, as things are wont to be, are hard. That is the nature of things. If the things that matter most to us were not hard, they would not be things. They would be brownies. Specifically, warmed brownies with regular Nestlé cream.
But that is not what things are. Because things are not brownies (or even tinned cream), the concept of trying – whatever that means to you – is involved.
Some are born to try. Some get there eventually. Some have trying thrust upon them. I have been or have experienced all three.
“Trying” is an excellent word. It lets you know straight off that things like effort, repetition, the possibility of not getting it right the first time, are all thrills just waiting for you. It also holds its other meaning: it is trying in the sense of “exasperating” or “strenuous.” “Arduous,” even.
Trying is exactly the right word for living.
I have been doing the living for some time now and hardly a day goes by without some trying of one form or the other asserting itself. I’m no expert on life. I definitely am not an expert or even a present-pert on successful living.
But trying, trying I know.
In what I call the Very Bad Days someone (a doctor, a friend, a friendly doctor?) gave my parents a dozen tapes (yes, as in cassette tapes, that’s how long ago) full of meditation goodness. It was supposed to help me calm my fevered mind. Settle my thoughts. Look inward.
I developed a terror disproportionate to the poor things. Look inward? Inward was where the dread and horror lay. I needed zero help looking inward and more looking out. Yoga seemed to ask similar things while turning yourself into the shapes of assorted animals.
I increased my weightlifting.
A box of ayurvedic – ah, um, ah – potions arrived from India. There were many bottles. I am 100 per cent one of those people who speculates about the old oil in which the chicken at the best fried-chicken places is cooked. It’s the old oil that makes the chicken magic. But what is in the old oil, no one wants to know.
At a glance and a sniff, the mystery ayurvedic oil (for oil it was) made me think of chicken-old-oil. It tasted of cardboard, car brakes and general rancidity. This may well have been actual snake oil made with real snakes.
I made it through a whole bottle and then admitted I didn’t care how far it had travelled, it was going no further with me.
I tell you these tales of woe and desperation not to say all is lost. With each thing that didn’t work, I knew I had to try something else. Because something had to work.
I am by nature what you might delicately call “pig-headed.” Snout and all. I was once thrown out of a positive-thinking workshop because of my negative energy.
You can’t make this stuff up. You also can’t let it stop you. No one was going to tell me what my energy was good for.
My mother was the immovable object the unstoppable forces of my ills came up against. When yet another thing didn’t work and she found me broken, she held me and resumed her search for something or someone else. Acupuncture. Reflexology. Different meds.
When brother found me looking like a hunted animal, he brought ice cream and just sat in silence until I felt safe. He anchored me. In a way, what I got from him was a sense that my pain did not define me.
We’ve been here before – this talk about trying and trying again. Maybe in different words. Maybe dwelling less on the ridiculous nature of my failures. (To say nothing of my animus toward the word “failure” itself.)
I see people trying to fight the darkness and the demons.
Keep going.
I’m not going to offer a cliché or any platitudes. Only this: it’s not only you. There are more of us out here than you think.
But only you can get up and try. Every. Day. And that’s the win right there.