to sadoo

in july i began wandering central mumbai like this – 

theory, as kandinsky and others say, follows practice. or rather each follows and leads (dao de jing ii – before and after follow each other). too much theory without practice (the bulk and worst of the academy) irritates as much as too much practice without theory (the bulk and worst of spheres of action).

i was compelled to wander perhaps to ask why i am compelled to wander.

after having sadooed (i verb the practice) almost 20 times – i mostly wander in the area bounded by nana chowk, jeejabai bhosle marg, dalal street, and colaba causeway: my practice so far has been silently walking solo (but responding briefly, quietly, rationally if spoken to non-threateningly) – threads emerge.

one of these is the weave of sanity – those often assumed configurations of reason and unreason,

conformity and non-conformity that imbue education and culture. it’s one thing to sadoo anonymously (responses range from indifference, fear, curiosity, camaraderie, laughter, ridicule, …), it’s another to be faced (befaced?) like this in my housing co-op (frequently with the politics of a small village) where i am somewhat known. a neighbor-friend is asked routinely if i’ve gone crazy. (but surely this

question/judgment has been around for years.) i'm asked directly if i'm ok. i hear someone whispering to a friend as i approach don't say anything.

i call it sanity currency. i experience it as a necessary parallel currency to money. as humans scrimmage for economic currency to survive and accumulate artifacts, prestige, power, so we scrimmage for psychic currency: a decent amount of human language is devoted to explicitly and implicitly sorting out hierarchies of what's 'normal'.

in my co-op it used to anger-annoy me when others – particularly those in leadership positions – would easily label others as insane or sane, when the epistemological bases for their perspectives seemed dubious, as open for critique as their critique of others. such labelling still bothers me but has more grown into curiosity about the assumptions we make about mental health, how not infrequently our working definitions about psychic-emotional-mental wellness serve particular interests of our own rather than broader pluralities or the humans we're judging (or perhaps ostensibly trying to 'help'.) 

(a lot has been written about this of course. i’m more inclined to the thoughtful experienced expressions outside of or on the margins of institutionalized psychology [psychiatry, therapy, wellness, …] than ‘mainstream’ orientations.)

i sadoo, perhaps, in part, to continue to question, in a more embodied way, our cultural biases and hierarchies about how to live well, circumscriptions and possibilities in and around this ‘how’ – to further feel, see, know, doubt what it means for me to explore humanness in a pyretically technological environment that's endemically obsessed with hierarchies.