The shadow behind a walk in the park

 

The summer of 2021 had its own glory and challenges for me. On 6th July 2021 I came to know that I had been promoted to Professor of Robotics at Imperial College London. The feeling that I reached the last official milestone of my academic career was so gratifying. Looking back, the winding road through several universities in Sri Lanka, Japan, USA, and UK has been full of ups and downs. Every time an experiment went wrong, a paper got rejected, or a grant got rejected, the success of my come back pivoted on how I stopped, reflected, and re-adjusted priorities before pushing back. The wins peppered along the way kept reinforcing my belief that struggles are not won alone. There is a society behind every win. Apart from support from family, it has always been the right people I worked with who shaped how I win. Most important among them all are those who stood with me in failure and helped me to reflect and push back. Therefore, the promotion was a great moment to stop and feel grateful to all those who played a critical role in my life.

 

The rest of the summer was about another phase of realignment of my priorities. Among many important priorities in academic and family life, I also decided to revive physical and mental recovery activities after we stopped regular Karate Dojo practices during the lockdown. Every morning, I drove to nearby Richmond Park and jogged about 4km. There is a very silent patch of wood right next to a pond (Pen Ponds) at the end of my jogging track. There, I practiced Vipassana Meditation sitting on a log. The morning jog and the solitary meditation session in the woods were mentally and physically rewarding. After returning home, I mastered 3 types of Karate kicks each 100 times to perfect speed and impact on the kick pad with maximum efficiency. 

After about one month of this daily practice, my right ankle suddenly became painful. I couldn’t walk even 10m without limping. The pain grew intense and even the shin and knee started to hurt if I pushed any further. Concerned, I got an X-ray done. Luckily there were no bone fractures, but I had strained a ligament on the right side of the ankle. This is when my Vipassana meditation practice helped a lot. Daily sitting meditation helped to stay with the physical pain, fully accept it, and to take care of it with a deep sense of loving kindness. Stopping the momentum of physical training was first felt to be a setback, but I gracefully withdrew and gave it a rest hoping to push back later.

 

I started gentle ankle exercises first. After about a week, I could walk a little more than 10m without getting an intense pain. Walking on uneven grassy ground at Richmond Park was very helpful to exercise all ligaments in the ankle. My wife came to encourage me to take these baby steps. Determined efforts without causing too much pain helped to push the boundary bit by bit every day. After about a month of pushing the limits, from last weekend, I started to walk on average 9km continuously at an average speed of 122 steps per minute with an elevation gain of 93m. I am not sure when I will jog and kick as I used to but learning from warriors certainly seems to work. We don’t fight struggles alone. A silent society is behind our success. The walk in the park was not done alone. My wife, though she is not a great fan of long-distance walking or jogging came to my help for short walks in early recovery. The generous work done by the Richmond Park staff to keep such a valuable resource open to public has been such a valuable part of life. What Bruce Lee wrote about the philosophical and practical aspects of the warrior mentality in his book titled “The Tao of Jeet Kune-do” was a great source of inspiration. My meditation teachers at the Amaravati and Cittaviveka Buddhist Monasteries in England have been a great source of strength too. Such is the plethora of social support behind a simple walk in the park.