Scoop

On unexpected life lessons, and learning to let go

“Life has much more interesting and imaginative plans for us than we ever have for life.”

Pico Iyer

“Just scoop the ball. Don’t whack it.”

I was on a padel court for the first time, and the friend who’d invited me to be there was giving me some pointers.

A couple of months earlier, the same friend had organised for a group of kids, including her sons and mine, to have padel lessons every Friday afternoon after school, and she booked an adjacent court every week so the parents could play while they waited for the kids. I always declined the invitation to join the game. I’ve hated playing racquet sports since I was a kid, when my ineptitude would make me feel completely inadequate.

But on that hot, humid day in Bali, my friends only had three players and needed a fourth, so I reluctantly stepped in. My clothes, like my attitude, were all wrong. My friends were all wearing cute padel clothes – short skirts and sleeveless tops - and I, having just been dragged off the sidelines, was wearing a dress. And yet there I was, scooping the ball instead of whacking it, and finding that, despite myself, I was loving every minute.

That was in February of this year, and I’m as shocked as you are when I tell you that padel has since become an obsession. I play as often as I can, which at the moment is most days. Last week I played in a fun tournament with seven other mums from my boys’ school, to celebrate the end of term. Over the weekend I played in a more serious tournament, and made it through to the semi-finals. On my 55^th birthday, my friends booked courts for us so we could all celebrate together while doing our favourite thing.

In my wildest imaginings, I would never have seen any of this coming.

In June of last year, when we were about to make the move from Beijing to Bali, I wrote a post about how I wasn’t expecting myself to become anything once we’d made the move here. I wrote that in all our previous moves, as I’d anticipated what my life would be like in our new location, I’d expected myself to become something new and different once we’d settled into the new place. But this time, I wrote, I was already all the things that I wanted to be. I was a mother and a podcaster and a writer and a photographer. I didn’t need to become anything else, but just to allow myself to become more of what I already was.

What I failed to factor in, however, is that life can bring new and unexpected gifts, and you must be flexible and open-hearted enough to accept them.

For the first year or so that we were in Bali, I kept up a frequent posting schedule here on Substack. The amount of work that goes into a podcast meant that I could only post every fortnight rather than every week, but I was still consistent, and I watched my stats avidly, hoping that my words, and my interactions with other people’s words, would help me to keep growing an online community.

But then “real” life, the thing that some people might infuriatingly refer to as “offline” life, kept nudging its nose into my existence, calling me to look away from my screen and focus on the things that were happening in the actual physical world that I inhabit. The kids and their needs are always priority number one, of course, but other things kept drawing my attention too. There was a book club to establish, and friendships to enjoy, and business opportunities to explore, and literary festivals to attend, and dogs to adopt. And there was padel. Many, many, many glorious hours of padel, during which my body got stronger and my friendships grew deeper and my sense of competitiveness, which I hadn’t known existed, was awakened.

There’s an expression, here on this island, that “Bali chooses its own”. People believe that if you’re meant to be in Bali then things will go well for you here, but if you’re not open to the lessons you need to learn in life, then the island will find ways of showing you that this is not where you should be.

It sounds weird and woo-woo to say it, but I do feel like Bali has chosen me. The island is teaching me so many lessons that I can barely keep up. I’m not even sure what all of the lessons are yet, but some are about letting go and lightening up and figuring out what it is that I really want, and how to go about achieving it. Some are also about finding ways to be OK, and to teach my children to be OK, in this increasingly fucked-up and divided world.

And so, while I continue to enjoy this unusual season of physical activity, of walking my dogs and swimming with my kids and being 100% present for every point in endless padel games, I’ve suspended payments on subscriptions to this Substack. I’m so very grateful to anyone who’s ever paid to read my words, and I apologise for the recent season of silence. I’m undecided as to when (or whether) I’ll reinstate payments. I’m not giving up on the podcast or on Oblivious Witness in general – I have a very exciting episode of the podcast coming out next week – but I’m going to spend some time letting life’s plans for me unfold.

I’m so grateful for your patience while I stand still for a while, examining the road signs.

With love and light

Michelle
xxx