Avoidance and iPhones

Vishal gave me an iPhone for Christmas and it's sitting right here on my desk, with no sim card yet. I've had it for a couple of weeks now and still haven't managed to get a sim card. Sounds silly doesn't it? Unless you've lived in India....

Last year (or the year before...I don't remember exactly ) the government here created some insane regulations for mobile phone companies to follow when signing up new customers. It was presumably an anti-terrorism measure, some attempt to keep better track of who is getting sim cards and blah, blah, blah... But basically it meant that in order to get a new connection you had to provide a crazy amount of "proof" of address and blood samples and the list went on. If you happened to be non-Indian, good luck. You had to take a Valium before going in to a Vodafone store and negotiating the new regulations with the ill-trained and ill-informed staff.

My whole point is that my iPhone sitting here with no sim card provides another shining example of how I literally hide behind my husband here. He is the Front Man for every single interaction we have with the powers that be in India. Well, I don't really hide behind him; it's more like I shove him in front of me saying, "Look, I have a free pass! My Indian husband is right here, so don't you mess with me. I'm no "foreigner" I'm a PIO!" (PIO is a Person of Indian Origin....equivalent to a Green Card in the USA)

I realized a long time ago that my presence in any given scenario leads to a quantum leap of complexity. What would have normally been a rather straight forward discussion suddenly becomes something extraordinary. I can also literally watch brain activity in the attending sales person stop; especially if for some reason we share the fact that Vishal and I are husband and wife. Complete brain freeze.

But I diverge....my intention was to address this great issue of AVOIDANCE in my life, which seems to have been accentuated by my Indian experience. I've noticed that I spend lots of time avoiding situations, people, emotions, etc... I suppose that sometimes it's a good idea to avoid situations that you know make you angry or anxious, but at some point we need to address WHY we are avoiding that thing, place, person or feeling. Because the word "avoid" is just a nice way to say "hide." And when we start hiding stuff, weird things start happening inside us and we start doing funny things.

When we first moved to Goa, after living in Mumbai for two years, I had to learn how to drive a scooter. There was a HUGE fear factor for me to overcome, not because of the mechanical skill of driving a scooter, but because I discovered I was terrified of the police. The thought of a policeman pulling me over was enough to send sheer panic through my veins. I had begun to associate Indian police with some dirty sort of parasites lurking around waiting to jump out and nab me. I have all the necessary paperwork and drivers licenses, but my fear was so intense that I found myself avoiding going anywhere alone on the scooter. I wanted to avoid coming in contact with what I considered a dirty element in the environment around me. Some how I had convinced myself that I wouldn't be able to handle the situation. So I avoided the situation.

But we all know that that which we avoid will come looking for us. We are so busy pushing it away and obsessively thinking about it that it's as though we have a big energy magnet for that very thing hanging around our neck! I was never stopped by the police but I did realize that my fear was totally getting the better of me, so I found that reciting a short song I learned from Isha calmed me immediately and for sure sent out positive loving vibrations rather than fearful ones.

Maybe I'll be singing that song as I enter the Vodafone store tomorrow.