X - World Without End
Like fish, after three days, guests begin to stink. After three weeks holidays begin to unravel, and become something else.
We are not on holiday. Holidays with young children aren’t holidays anyway. But we knew we were attempting something longer, something more transformative, something cheaper than a very long holiday. Part of the logic of holidays depends on it being a limited period of time. You can splurge on a limited period of time. You can extend yourself and pack in as much as possible in a limited period of time. You can put off what is boring and routine – washing clothes, paying bills, school – for a limited period of time. At three weeks we’ve reached that kind of holiday limit. But if this were a holiday, we’d be keen to pack in as much as possible in these final few days, we’d be buying mementos and gifts, we’d be wearing that pair of socks one more time, and redoubling our energy for a last jolly before shifting through the gears in travelling home. But no. We’ve only just begun, and that’s where you realise that you need a day off from being on holiday. You need to do some washing, make sure Oberon does some maths, go to the doctor and see if your child has worms. All those things that you’d probably shrug and say “it can wait till Monday”, if you were on holiday.
In Advent Tommy was pressing me for Advent-appropriate thoughts-for-the-day and one came to me on the spur about Kipling’s line “if you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run” – and how that can become a millstone around our neck. I suppose it depends on what you count as sixty seconds worth of distance run. Reading a book could be sixty seconds good running, doing yoga without counting seconds is certainly worthwhile; sometimes the most practical use of sixty seconds lies in being asleep. The race is a long slog and if we’re going to survive these constant shifts without routine or continuity (on which children [and adults!] depend), we need not to act like we’re on holiday (as many people around us are) and find our own pace of life.
Part of what we’re both hoping to achieve in this sabbatical is a more intentional less reactive way of life. When you’re in crisis mode, as we have been it seems since the birth of our first child! it feels like you’re constantly fighting the problems of the day – like you’re hacking through a jungle with a machete. We’re not going to find our future equilibrium in the jungles of India, but I hope we can at least break the bad habits that have left our lives running us.
On safari this morning I felt the pull again of the safari drive always to find the big cat. The birds, deer, hippos and crocodiles, peacocks and trees, whatever else, you register along the way to the sightings of the big cat – here the Tiger – is what safari is about like you’re the big game hunter bringing home your photo and video trophies. I came across this first in Africa twenty years ago where taking safaris across South Africa, Tanzania and Kenya, people I met were obsessed with ticking off the big five. There was something unpleasantly crass about this to me – something boastful and acquisitive. The point it seemed to me was to observe nature in some of its most sublime contexts, and I’ve enjoyed the wonderful Indian trees enough to merit the exorbitant costs of safari! But to see a Tiger is very little; to see a Tiger moving through the jungle on its hunt, to grasp the context of the life of a Tiger as it should be is more to the point. And in a sense you can grasp that richness just in taking in the diversity and special atmosphere of the jungle here, knowing that the Tiger may be very near you in the shadows or waiting to pounce from a nearby tree branch.
I did see a Tiger sloping in their unhurried way across the road and into the mist. Apollo with his tiger-colouring behaves like a wild animal but without tiger-subtlety. Both boys now have tiger t-shirts. But it was the trees that were most captivating – especially the banyan trees, which are the national tree of India and in the morning mist capture everything you imagined about India from reading Kipling as a child! We’re not quite sure if Oberon saw the Tiger as I yanked him into the air. He thought not at the time though now he's convinced he did and having seen a fellow-traveller’s video that can conveniently take the place of a memory. In any case it was a beautiful morning sharing the wonder of this new environment, relaxed enough not to care whether we see Tigers or not, but to enjoy every little aspect of the new Edenic world that surrounds us.
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