I restarted some kind of work today, on a new project, and by coincidence this happened almost exactly 6 months after we came out of 14 days of isolation / quarantine due to dad's covid infection in January.
These 6 months have been interesting. I had suspended all work over these months. This partly came about from the fact that a couple of weeks after we came out of isolation / quarantine, I ended up getting a slew of strange health issues over Feb-March-April - old issues undergoing some modifications and new issues. I am pretty sure I never got covid, although I could have been asymptomatic... I never got tested for a complex set of reasons related to my role in taking care of dad and not knowing who could step in instead of me. Anyway, I had isolated at home with dad and his nurse (who stayed with us almost 24-hours at the time) and so my being covid positive or not did not particularly matter since I was not going to infect anyone else. The nurse tested negative, he knew I had not tested myself, and he and I took many precautions around each other, and he took major precautions so that he does not catch anything from dad. But I digress. The point is that the health issues that I faced over Feb-March-April had nothing to do with covid, and probably had to do with physical and mental exhaustion and stress I faced due to everything that had unfolded over the previous few months, topped off by dad getting covid.
Having turned away more and more from allopathy medicine over the past some years, I dealt with all of these health issues without any kind of medicines, through the guidance of some fantastic folks at The Health Awareness Centre (THAC) in Mumbai. In the process I committed to better understanding my body, dis-ease (the way THAC approaches the notion of disease) and health & well-being - understanding these both intellectually and experientially. It has been a most interesting journey, one which continues because while many of those health issues have been sorted enough for me to re-engage myself on other things, the experience has re-oriented my life in some important ways, even as it has raised number of conundrums for me - from questions about the socio-economic privilege that makes it possible for me to follow this path (I can see that the dominant structures and consequent socio-economic inequality makes it more and more difficult, even impossible, for the less privileged to take such an approach towards dis-ease and health / well-being even if they are inclined to do so) to dilemmas around how to understand and deal with covid given that the western medical approach dominates almost all our understanding and actions around it (THAC has a different approach, one which I am still trying to understand, come to grips with, figure out what aspects of their approach I am confident of adopting and what I am not).
Not just the last 6 months but the entire last year has been interesting, and might I add, completely unanticipated upheaval of sorts, not only due to the pandemic. The lockdown last April-May was the trigger to the changes in my life as it upended the housekeeping system at dad's place which had allowed me to live on my own, do my own thing, for 5-6 years. But there is no way of knowing how my life would have changed had the pandemic not happened because it just so happened that we began to see a new set of symptoms with dad around the same time, last May-June-July. Some really challenging symptoms appeared in the second half of December and I kind of lost it at the time, but thankfully many of the most challenging symptoms have since come under control. The point is that I don't know what I would have done, how my life would have changed, to deal with these changes in dad's condition in the absence of the pandemic. However, as I said, it all occurred around the same time. I moved to dad's place on June 2nd last year to take over the reins of the house and anchor his caregiving, throwing myself in the deep end without quite realising it... and thus began a difficult, confusing and illuminating journey for me in many many ways.
On a mundane and lighter note this includes realizing that although I wasn't a morning person and had never been responsible for another person's stomach for 45 years of my life, things can change and I am actually capable of waking up at 6-6:30 am every single day and making breakfast for another person (for bit more than a year so far... remains to be seen how much longer I can do this). And this has been very good for me for it has disciplined me in a way that I did not think was possible. It also includes more profound illuminations about all kinds of things which I will not get into in any detail since I need more time to think and articulate them in words. But they include the relative ease with which I seem to be able to take on certain challenges. I am quite sure this is not an innate ease that I possess but one that has developed through irregular but more engaged meditation over the past several years and quite regular meditation since early last year (in fact the best thing that happened to me is that I was in a 10-day vipassana course between March 5-14, 2020, literally just before the lockdown happened). These illuminations also revolve around my relationships with the staff at home (the daytime nurse, the night-time attendant, the 8-hour house-help), dilemmas around these, and my struggles to let go of some of my habits (from living alone for so many years) and my personality traits, and find the energy to interact and care for them, share the house with them, adjust and accommodate the ups and downs of their lives. I am sure the difficulties, confusions and illuminations will continue in different measures.
But meanwhile, in the last week, quite out of the blue, I suddenly felt I might be ready to reopen the work part of my life, taking on a project that I have been vaguely thinking of doing since few years. What this project is...well, I shall disclose it once it I make more sense of it, but let me throw out some keywords: Archive, Alternative histories, Ahmedabad, Urban Space / Spatial Restructuring. I started some structured thinking on the project today...and it certainly has promise. I do not intend to take on work outside of this project, given the current context of living with dad and all that this entails; a desire and need to focus on my physical & mental health and the journey in relation to that; and my own interests which have been evolving over the past some years in multiple directions. With regard to these multiple interests, I want to note that towards the end of 2019 / early 2020, I had decided that I would stay unemployed for the most part in 2020 and spend the year traveling in Gujarat and the bordering areas of Rajasthan, MP and Maharashtra. I had hoped to understand food and water systems in this region and see what was happening on this front in terms of taking a more sustainable approach at the local / micro-local level. Simultaneously I had also intended to explore labour migration and migrant lives across the rural-urban by spending time in the migration source areas in this region. Of course this plan went for a toss with the pandemic, and is likely to remain tossed for the foreseeable future given my current predicament vis-a-vis dad. But I have had other evolving interests too, and this project has been one of them (the other interest that has emerged over the past few years is to try to write a novel, recently conceived as an illustrated novel...not sure I could call it a graphic novel.. but not making a project out of this yet). Although the idea around the Archive project has been vague, it has brewed a bit in my mind every now and then over the past few years. So I am going to give it a shot. And I hope it will nourish my mind and my soul while contributing something worthwhile around things I care about, and that have driven my research over the past 15+ years.
