Ise Does It - Day 3
07.11.24
15.6Km
The shoji are rattling gently in their frames as a cold wind rustles up the valley, rocking our washing from side to side in an open window. I’m sat cross-legged on a futon under unimaginably harsh light in a room that smells of the cigarettes that have been smoked in here since the 1960s. And, my God, I really wish I could take a shit.
How the entire nation of Japan is not sitting on a four-day brew, what with a diet composed primarily of protein and white rice, is beyond me. Maybe it is, and I’ll never know. Kalia asked for us to be dropped at the pharmacy this morning and our driver insisted on following us in to help out. Kalia discretely showed the assistant the word 便秘 after which he made a pained expression, pointed at his bum, and then made his arms in to a great big cross. I would not get out of this discretely.
Pill popped from a packet that promised to get me moving and improve my flaky skin and pimples (BONUS!), we made our way towards Misedani, our next stop for the night.
Something about our host’s story of returning from Nagoya to care for his aging mother had stuck with me. For 12 years, he tended to her until she died at the age of 94, and there was something about the way he shared this that suggested something beyond a mere sense of duty, perhaps something approaching an honour.
In part, I too left behind a career to not exactly care for my parents, because that’s not where they are, but to be closer to them and to be there for them when that time comes. After 17 years of running away, this return has marked turning point in my life, my understanding of what’s important to me, and my relationship to the people who have given so much of themselves for me to become who I am. So I guess I can see where the host’s sense of honour is coming from.
As we walked, Kalia and I talked about aging and I realised how aging — not just old people — is so visible here in Japan. Yesterday, I watched a woman with a stoop so extreme she formed an inverted “J” tend to what was once a fine garden. On this day, she was tending to one plant with a small pair of scissors and today she might have tended to another, and as I walked away from her the idea of a managed decline came to mind, and a dignified one, too.
In Australia so much of aging seems undignified. We lock our old folk away in facilities that in very recent history were places of outrageous abuse. But because it was all happening out of sight, it was — until far too late for the victims and their families — out of mind, too. How different, then, to sit in a cafe and watch the owner prepare lunch for her daughter and grand daughter while her father quietly climbed the stairs to the house they shared above. The concept of the nuclear family — two parents and one or more kids living in a single family home — only dates back to the 1920s, but rather than serving as the ideal model for living, it seems ultimately to atomise us and disconnect us from community. And once you become nuclear waste, you’re locked away behind heavy doors where you’re so-easily forgotten
It’s not that I want to romanticise the idea of multi-generational living, but I am curious as to how we, as our populations age, as my parents age, and as I-and-my-husband-with-no-kids age, might create a more supportive environment for that aging to take place. And — and perhaps this is romantic — how might those that come after us more directly benefit from whatever lessons we may have learned during our vanishingly short lives? Because after all, I imagine most of us don’t want to die alone in some high-care facility, nor do we want to feel like our lives have been wasted.
Tonight, Kalia and I talked deeply about my relationship to my folks, how it’s evolved, and what’s enabled it to evolve. It was one of those conversations that surprised me as much as it might have surprised her, rich as it was with unexpected insights and reflections. I feel like with the completion of Master Class and its subset, The Connection Course, we’ve both been handed a reliable recipe for plumbing these depths with trust and respect.
Superficially, the mindset is pretty simple. Approach conversations with vulnerability. Aim for impartiality in your questions and responses, and if you can’t, then openly declare your agenda, so both parties are aware of it. Engage with empathy so that you might walk alongside your partner, but not take on their story. And ask questions — How… ? and What… ? but never Why… ? — from a place of wonder. The lived reality is a little more subtle, but that’s about the gist of it and Christ Almighty does it open up the opportunity for far deeper connection. But there’s been something about engaging in these sorts of conversations on this kind of walk and when Kalia asked me why I think that is, a couple of things came to mind.
Firstly, we’re spending 24 hours a day together, sharing our room, our meals, and our schedule. Very quickly the scales of managing others perceptions fall away, especially when you need help buying laxatives.
Secondly, across the course of a day, we pendulate between the mindful (or mindless) solitude of walking in nature which, I sense, allows for a whole bunch of background processing to take place, and reconnection over meals or stops to pay our respects at shrines.
And thirdly, I think there’s some aspect of the bone-tired exhaustion that sets in at the end of a long day’s walking which encourages an even greater vulnerability, if people are willing and feel safe to go there.
Maybe there’s the germ of an idea here, and maybe not. But it’s fun to think about.