I always liked floating. At young age, I discovered this technique that allows me to feel the water while still stay outside. Look at the sky, at the clouds drifting up there, and let the waves swing me from underneath. It is very calming, so much so that once you surrender to it and dip your ears as well so as to eliminate background sounds (“He took my ball!”, “She splashed at me!”), you can even break away from everything for a few seconds and only breath and float.
Metaphorically, I could say that this is how I am in general. Not hanging in the air, feeling the water, but keep my face outside. Not diving under. (Well, maybe a short dive to get refreshed and right away back floating). I never really connected to spiritual approaches that deepen into the soul. Once in a while I can relate to some clever say from which you can get a wise moral, but generally speaking, and I assume it is also related to Eyal – Darwin’s student – I am a pretty practical person.
Koh Phangan, and specifically the area where we stay, is some kind of a spiritual center. There is everything from everything here, especially yoga. I practiced yoga before in several occasions and liked it a lot, but something here, with all this spiritualism, makes it hard for me to even try it out. Due to this intensive pursuit around yoga here (as I was told: “don’t let anyone hear you talking about Pilates”), I am avoiding it altogether at the moment, picturing the scenario as a guest entering to a Kibbutz dining room. You probably never experienced that – it feels like everyone is checking you out.
So maybe we are missing some opportunity here, but currently I am not quite there yet. What we do find ourselves dealing with here quite a lot is education in general and specifically homeschooling. My practical nature was obvious also when I was an Education student in that I found it much easier to relate to those courses that provide you with practical techniques, and deal with measurable concepts. But every once in a while, a lecturer would arrive and get me into deeper thoughts about life. I was only 23, still without a baby neither in nor out, but I vividly remember the class about Winnicott’s theory about the “good enough mother”. Essentially, this theory claims that the mother fits herself to her baby’s needs almost perfectly, but when the baby grows up, this fit gets less and less perfect over time. By getting less attentive to his needs and letting him experience failure and frustration (to a tolerable extent), the mother actually provides an important service for her child. Winnicott says that children need their mother to fail them in tolerable ways on a regular basis so they can learn to live in an imperfect world. Obviously, I recalled this class after some annoying argument with the kids that made me lecture in a higher-than-necessary tone, noticing their eyes wandering about, thinking “What does she want now?! Would she just stop talking already?”, and I am going on and on. Later, I went online to look for some justification to my mood, try to remind myself that I am a good enough mother even when my patient is lost and my volume rises and I found this post, which I really enjoyed reading. The author did not provide justification to my behavior, but I found comforts in the fact that already 60 years ago, important intellectuals could point out that motherhood is imperfect, and that this is for the better. Besides, I greatly enjoyed the contents. Unlike Eyal, I am no autodidact. I don’t read articles for pleasure. I find it tiring. I really do. When I was a student, I would wake up rather late, start reading papers towards some exam and in less than an hour you could find me lying on the sofa, asleep (although Eyal relates that to the special sleeping capabilities of my family). Even a subject I have interest at – I would browse through lightly, or even just extract some headers, and only in rare occasions would they get my full attention and I would read it through. As I said – I am floating my days away. Currently, I take small dips in shallow water.
We spend the holidays here in some kind of floating as well. We feel it, but don’t go deep inside. There are advantages in celebrating from far away from home, mostly with the kids being exposed to much less holiday sweets. Besides, it places us parents as the intermediators of the traditions and the stories. Our fanatic minister of education and his friends may not like it, but we feel we had few too many stories about horrors and casualties by the thousands told to three years old kids. Almost every Jewish holiday is about many dead people who tried to get us killed first and our almighty god rescued us and we prevailed. So, it’s true that if our ancestors would not fight up and pave the path for us, we wouldn’t get where we are today (that is – Koh Phangan, Thailand 🙂 ), but we’ve gone a long way since, and we found better ways, and for that reason – the story of Hanukkah was told differently by us, focusing more at traditions and less at casualties. We even made dreidels and baked sufganiyot.
Christmas and the new year were somewhat more noticeable than Hanukkah here, especially in the number of tourists that raid the island, made all prices go up and forced the locals to renovate, fix and build towards their arrival.
So, for the arrival of the new year, a first diving lesson – writing down objectives for 2017:
- Learn how to play the guitar
- Improve my English
- Write a children’s book
- Do sport
- Smile more – especially to the ones I dear the most