A Smiling Land

On occasions I've felt, during my current visit to Thailand, that I should have been posting blogs. The urge to compose in the early days (I've now been here for 15 ) saw me saving messages in the archive section of my phone, with a vague view to writing them up here. These were primarily written while drunk in various nightclubs off the Koa San Road, where I also rediscovered my enthusiasm for tribal dance music and the associated effects it can have on my body in the form of dance.

Believe it or not, on more than two occasions I have received compliments from strangers regarding my choreographic choices. One guy seemed to think I was a 'dancer', by which I suppose he meant some kind of professional; though I liked it even more when he said that 'the women liked' my 'act'. I cannot deny it, such external validation is much appreciated, though it is not (thank God) the reason I like dancing. After all, I am not used to receiving it.

Pretentious is how I'll seem, I suspect, if I start attempting to address why I like dancing and what it means to me, so perhaps silence is wise.

Besides very late nights, a lot of energetic dancing, little sleep, constant tiredness, and multitudinous thoughts and feelings about women, my early Thai days featured the enlightening discovery of the great book by Eckhart Tolle, "The Power of Now". It says timelessly true things which, when read, seemed familiar and irrefutable. And yet, before they were read, before I had bought the book, these insights had been forgotten; in their absence I had indeed sunk beneath and been obscured by the weight and dross of my everyday Ningbo life. It was nice, it is nice, as always, to be liberated from the prison of thought and of mind by the rememberance that, despite pressures conspiring to persuade otherwise, we are not thought, no more than we are mind. I think I knew this with a greater, easier certainty as a four year old.

For sure, if we do not control and dominate our minds (correctly), and keep them in their place, we will be controlled and dominated by them, and lose ourselves by becoming their slaves.

Unfortunately, I will presumably have to return to an ordinary life of ordinary drudgery....in a little more than a week. If this is not a crime against humanity, what is it?