“It suddenly occurs to me that the transition I’m caught up in is NOT the transition from a pre-to-post COVID world, it’s from a pre-to-post COVID me! The concern is not what I will encounter when I return to B.C., but who, what and how I will be.” (Blog post #16, A Yogini at Large March 8, 2021)
It was mildly disturbing to discover that I had already posted a blog on “Transitions” several months ago. At the time, hard as it is to imagine, I was focused on my return to B.C. later that month, before the end of our six-months-less-a-day that we are allowed in the States. Due to another outbreak of COVID our March departure was delayed, and now I am fast approaching a new departure date. Eek.
As plans go, I will be in Whistler to post Blog #38, which, in the meantime, allows me to observe how my mind and body adjust to the reality of leaving Hawaïi. Poorly, as near as I can see. This “difficulty with the dismount” as they say in Olympic gymnastics, is not something that has been mitigated with age. Judging by this morning’s headache, upset tummy and tendency to distract easily from the task at hand (don’t I need to wash my bike, hem those pants, fold those towels and call a repairman about that squeaky kitchen fan?), I can see my ’chicken-with-her-head-cut-off’ tendency running rampant. While all those other chores are legit demands on my time and energy, it is only by writing my blog that I can address what is happening in my mind and body.
To aid my understanding of what’s been going on internally, I searched for the Hawaiian term for transitions, because I appreciate how the Hawaiian vocabulary often builds on a story of how that term came to be, or how it applies, culturally speaking. In my internet search for the equivalent of “transition” or “transformation”, I found the word “Ho’ololi”. According to the Hawaiian electronic library Ulukau, “Ho’o” means “to try” and “loli, to change”. “Hoʻololi i ka manaʻo”, means “to change the mind”. (Or more literally — and realistically — to try to change the mind). I’d really like to change my mind about transitions. I’d like to shift the dead weight of resistance to “what is”, to something more positive.
Martha Beck, a favorite life coach and author, offers an intriguing perspective on how one’s “internal wiring” can aid or inhibit one’s ability to transit from one activity or program to another. She describes two groups with very different attitudes towards timing. The first —monochrones — lead well-structured, punctual, and schedule-driven lives, wherein time is “fixed, rigid and absolute”. By contrast, the second group — polychrones — “see time as loose and elastic”. They have a fluid sense of time and can get so absorbed in what they’re doing that they tend to lose track of meetings, schedules and deadlines. Beck writes:
“Entire cultures can be polychronic or monochronic. In a polychronic country, dinner may continue throughout the night, and appointment times are suggestions, not space-launch absolutes. But First World cultures (except maybe Mediterranean ones) are extremely monochronic. Our high-tech society requires human synchronization on a massive scale: Huge numbers of us must show up at precisely agreed upon places, at precisely agreed upon times.”
I am unarguably polychronic, and Hawaii, as far as I can see, is a polychronic culture, which suits me to a ’T’. Which also explains why I have great difficulty leaving. Not only have I dug deep roots in a relatively short time, absorbed in all things garden as never before, but I also find I am more in synch with the casual spontaneity, the organic flow of life on the Big Island. Locals and tourists alike are familiar with the term “Hawaiian time”, which differs greatly from the monochronic culture of the mainland, where, until COVID interrupted the supply chain (among other things), one could reasonably predict a correct ETA for everything from mail delivery to garbage pickup to subway trains. But for those of us who can’t always ’keep up with the plot’, as the Brits would say, (you can look it up) changing course in a major way can be disconcerting at best, and traumatizing at worst. Beck even uses the term “transition trauma” to describe how difficult it is for a polychrone to disengage from whatever has arrested their attention:
“Although disengaging feels to us polychrones like having our molars pulled, transition trauma is brief (it goes away as soon as you’re engaged with the next activity), and it’s much better than most alternatives”. (Aka getting fired, losing friends, or suffering feelings of extreme inadequacy.)
The trauma for me in going back to B.C. would be losing the more laid-back approach I have adapted in the past nine months; losing track of the simple joys of puttering in my garden (which one grandchild egregiously calls “Meme’s farm”); and instead feeling a need to compare and compete (if only in terms of needing someone to show me who, what and how to be).
As fate would have it, I concluded Blog #16, with a clarion call to my future self:
“Unlike Alice waiting to be told who she is before she will leave the rabbit hole, the “me” who emerges from the detox that is COVID has to be informed by my own vision of who, what and how I want to be. And not only informed, but inspired and motivated, as Gandhi would say, to be the change I wish to see in the world today.”
It seems ironic that my next blog, #38, will be double the number of blogs written since I first explored the topic of transitions. Or transformation, as the Hawaiian dictionary would have me say. What has become clear to me since then is that to stay engaged and focused in the present moment, as any good polychrone is wont to do, may mean I miss the odd deadline, but I won’t have time to second-guess or dread whatever’s coming around the bend.
Now if I could just find where I left my head…