Stoicwrestle's blog

For years, I had been sedentary and lazy. Anything remotely challenging would be torturous for me. At my heaviest I was 220 pounds, and that was certainly not muscle weight. Then one day, out of sheer disgust and as a desperate measure, I took two actions:
1. I enrolled in a gym. My first workout goal was to go to the gym for 5 minutes and touch a barbell. Yes, I was that reluctant to exercise.
2. I randomly picked wrestling as a sport that I would practice, and joined a local wrestling club for LGBT folks.
I am not there where I would like to be, but I am much more active and much alive.

Wrestling gets me out of my inflated sense of self, my self-centeredness. I know that there will always be someone far superior than me, younger, tougher, more agile, with more stamina and technique. In the end, I must learn that as an amateur wrestler, with no external rewards involved, my wrestle is really with my ego. My sparring partner/ my opponent is there to remind me of that.

I have a romantic vision of all-male camaraderie (which always involves competition) of Indian Subcontinent’s Akhara culture. Akhara is a place where men breathe, eat, drink and sleep Wrestling, because for these men wrestling is much more than physical prowess, it is a way of living a pure and virtuous life.

Happy Holi to anyone who celebrates. Holi is an Indian spiritual festival of colors where the celebrants throw color at each other in mirth and laughter. The festival celebrates the love between the divine and his devotee, symbolically represented by Krishna the godhead and his lover/beloved Radha.

When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.