I remember a
time when people would say exactly what they meant. When a husband forgot his
wife’s birthday, she would go into a thundering sulk and not speak to him for
days until he’d groveled so low even the cockroaches looked down on him. And
when a child misbehaved, he’d get what was popularly referred to in the
Unofficial Parents Handbook as “one tight slap”.
These days, the wife is just as
prone to say to the husband: “You’re not present in this relationship. I don’t
think you’re being your authentic self!” Meanwhile, the 2017 parent would
crouch down to the same level as the child and try to reason calmly and
rationally with someone for whom the idea of eating what he’s just excavated
from his nose is a simultaneous form of haute
cuisine and great hilarity.
Just the other day, Saffy told her
long-suffering boyfriend Bradley that she didn’t feel he was living life with
any degree of presence. “You’re also not very authentic!” she added.
Apparently, Bradley – who had come
over earlier that evening with the vague expectation that he would make out
with Saffy on the couch before proceeding to a full on Netflix and chill in the
bedroom – blinked. “What?” he said. “I thought we were going to watch ‘Gilmore
Girls’ like you wanted to?”
Saffy sighed. She disentangled
herself from Bradley’s embrace and struggled up on the couch. “You see, this is
what I’m talking about,” she insisted. “You’re not living in the now! It’s like what Sadhguru says, you
have lost the manual to your human operating system!”
Bradley found himself only able to
repeat, “What?” and then, because he felt the situation somehow needed
something more, he added, “Who’s Sadhguru?”
Saffy’s bosom inflated with urgency.
“He’s a South Indian mystic! I went to see him with Sharyn the other day. He’s
amazing! He says the world is only living either in the past or in the future,
which is why we’re all so unhappy!”
Bradley, being a man and thus
capable of only one important thought at any given time, said, “OK, so does
this mean we’re not Netflix and chilling tonight?”
The next day, Saffy told us that the
world is in such peril that it behooves us all to get more in touch with our
inner self, to which Barney Chen said, if you asked him, touching one’s outer self is even more crucial.
“I should start up my own spiritual
movement,” he growled, warming up to his theme. “Only hot people can join and
you have to have a body fat count of 10% or less! Is Sadhguru hot?”
“Aiyoh! How can you talk like that
about a ho-leee man, hah?” Sharyn
moaned. “He got white hair, big white beard and he is, what, ah, Saffy, seventy
year old?”
“For some people, that’s really
hot,” said Amanda, a committed equal opportunity campaigner when it comes to
aging virility.
“He’s at least a hundred,” Saffy
confirmed. “He’s very holy! He kept me riveted for five hours!”
“Coincidentally,” Barney said with
an unseemly glint in his eye, “that’s exactly what happened to me last night
with this guy I met on…”
“As I was saying,” Saffy hurried on,
“he talked about how spiritually empty we all are, and how we need to be
careful otherwise we’ll completely destroy the whole planet and die!”
“So how do we get to be spiritually
full again?” Amanda asked.
“Well, apparently, it helps to still
the mind. He said the undisciplined mind is kind of like you waving your hand
about all the time. So we showed us how to meditate, but only, I was very
distracted because some people started crying and someone near the front kept
shouting, so I didn’t feel very relaxed.”
“Yah, lor, but then, hor, Sadhguru
say, all the people who could not concentrate, who ask you to pay attention to
the people shouting?”
“Ooh, that’s deep!” Amanda said with
admiration.
“You think?” Saffy asked, doubt
etched in her voice.
“I tink, hor, they all in trance!”
That evening, Amanda went online and
YouTubed some Sadhguru lectures. The next day, her eyes were enraptured. “Oh my
God! He’s so good!” She practically swooned. “Everything he says makes so much
sense but without any mumbo jumbo! I’m going to see him the next time he comes
to Singapore. I also need to find my authentic self!”
Saffy sniffs that the only thing
authentic about Amanda’s newfound enthusiasm for spirituality is her collection
of Prada bags.
No comments:
Post a Comment