Putting the whip away

On productivity, urgency and dropping how I relate to it all.

On our Christmas day walk, my partner Alex shared some reflections that felt like important gifts to pass on.

I’d begun learning about qi gong so we practiced a little in the park. After we finished, I shared that for most of my life and in almost all respects, mastery was always my main goal. Whether it was surfing, yoga, painting or writing, I’d place an enormous amount of pressure on myself to attain mastery. The faster the better. I’d studied texts about it, analysing the best way to get towards mastery and knew that deliberate and routine practice was key. So I often found the whip of practice being cracked on myself by, well, me.

If I was going to try at anything, I might as well go all the way. If not, what was the point?

I once had a conversation with a friend, Alfred Megally, who’s thoughts on this stayed with me long after our conversation ended. He shared that it was possible to have lots of interests and not to require such a high standard of ourselves for each of them. Just go give it a try, see if you like it and see if it sticks. If not, that is okay. He encouraged me to treat all my curiosities as experiments that didn’t need to have a big outcome. I saw the rationality in his arguments but I wasn’t ready for those lessons yet.

Then I started learning about Qi Gong. Qi Gong is a traditional Chinese practice combining slow movements, breathwork and meditation to direct and balance our life force energy. Qi in Chinese literally translates to energy in English. I’d become drawn to it by way of training as a yoga teacher which led to an interest in bodywork and then eventually my belief that the esoteric world of energies and vibrational frequencies carries a lot of knowledge. I wanted to both practice it and then, of course, master it. But, while I’d been drawn to Qi Gong for close to a year, I was never able to go beyond telling people I want to learn about it. Ironically, only while I was sick here in Penang, and at home with nothing much else to do did the practice begin.

It had been hard to begin qi gong earlier because a big part of starting is breathing, slowing down and seemingly doing nothing much at all. It became clear to me that in qi gong, mastery can only be attained by not cracking the whip. I also had to become okay at being in the present moment so I could begin learning about it.

A counsel of qi gong elders I’d created with the help of ChatGPT shared this:
“Four minutes done well is already qi gong.”

“Ten minutes done with tension is exercise.”

“Twenty minutes done with ego is a setback.”

The only way forward is to slow right down, to stop trying to optimise, and to get rid of the whip. And this is very difficult for me since impatience has always been the way I lived my life. Moving forward, always, with inertia, onto the next thing, onto a bigger thing. My friends have come to know me as the person who dives right into something and spends a very focused period of time in the rabbit hole before, often, coming out and leaving that interest behind.

But, as Alex managed to convince me, during our conversation on Christmas Day, not everything we do needs to be about mastery. He shared that often people give up an activity when they realise they are not going to be good at it. But the moments spent doing it and learning it can be a form of enjoyment too. He gave the example of watching skilled basketball players and admiring them. It didn’t have to be a study of their skills. Not everything needs to be a grind. It could just be about an enjoyment and appreciation of the art form — basketball in this case.

Maybe I was ready for the lesson this time but somehow his words struck me with deep resonance. I could learn to love qi gong even while knowing I may never become a master. And I could do that because I could just relate to qi gong as an artform to be admired. In the same way, galleries and exhibitions are put on not just for people who want to study the techniques of others but for anyone who has an appreciation for the art. An opportunity to experience the work someone else has tirelessly created.

Alex posed the question of whether I had ever enjoyed just doing something without thinking about improving or trying to master it. I shared that I enjoyed identifying plants, something that I am ironically quite good at, but I have never thought I needed to be a master at it. I could feel the awe and joy in my body as I recall moments of correctly identifying trees by the shape and color of their leaves or plants of a tree. I started to have some semblance of an understanding of relating to living as not just blocks of time for me to master things, but living as being a beautiful act of appreciation, admiration and awe.

Prior, I’d always thought how can I achieve mastery through brute force? What is the fastest way for me to get there? And more importantly, who gives a fuck about the journey?

When I trained as a yoga teacher, I printed out every single pose on individual pieces of paper so that I could memorize them. I remember feeling the force I placed on myself. I also did the same with painting and drawing when I spent a year doing it most days. There was a three month period where I had enrolled at the Royal Drawing School in London and I would arrive tired and burnt out at the studio. I’d force myself to the point of not enjoying it at all.

And perhaps what was more tiresome and painful was remembering distinctly those moments, I’d get so frustrated that I am not further along in the journey.

It felt like I had my eyes shut the whole journey, just focusing on achieving mastery, not stopping to appreciate the journey. A state of disassociation, a mechanical robot. And then, unsurprisingly, not be able to sustain the practice. So yes, I haven’t painted in a couple of years even though I love and miss it.

This mindset permeates so much of what I do. One day a few weeks ago, we ended up at a vegan restaurant with a thick volume about crystals and chakra. I was excited to come across this book while we waited for our food. But instead of enjoying a couple of pages that I found interesting, I felt this overwhelming urge to flip through the book so I could absorb by skimming as much of it as possible and then narrow my attention to focus on a few specific pages. Whenever something caught my eye and I slowed down, I’d just as quickly rev up again, frantically abandoning it for the next set of pages. All the while, hoping I’d get through the majority of what I wanted to in the book by the time our meal came. Writing this makes me realise how absurd it sounds and yet this is exactly how I had been to date, living my little life!

So on Christmas Day, Alex’s wishes for me to slow down and enjoy the little moments in life became a window into the type of life that was possible for me. In this new year, I dare myself to sit and feel all the things I am avoiding leading to this urgency protocol. And I write this with some cynicism of being able to get there but a growing hope that I can learn to relate to mastery and productivity just a little more differently.

I close my eyes and look inwards to all my parts, the ones fighting to keep productive, the impatient ones, the scaredy-cats, the adventurous, the lost, the carefree, the curious. With a shy smile, and a heart beating with hope instilled by some semblance of confidence amassed over the years, I say to them, in this coming year are you willing to work with me to savour the gift of time, to drop our collectively tensed shoulders, to breathe a bit deeper, to unclench the tight fists and to invite a slowing down?

Caryn