Game Over?

If you’ve ever been out of practice for a while, you’ll know that a dangerous subroutine can start to creep into the mind’s operating system. I call it Game Over Thinking. Stay out of routine for long enough, and the will is sapped, the spirits flag, and ennui sets in; you start to baulk at the very idea of having to pick up once again where you left off. An imaginary mountain starts to loom on the mind’s horizon, as you start to wonder, “How will I ever get back to where I was now?” Or worse still, perhaps you start to think, “Maybe I’m actually fine right now. After all, I’m still here, and I’m functioning.” Sound familiar? If you ever get here, or close to it, know that this is the crucial tipping point - the fine line between the mindset of growth, life, and nourishment, and the mindset of collapse, death, and decay. GOT. Your choice of which path you go down will have a powerful butterfly effect on the rest of your life, so don’t be duped by the comforting wings of idleness and ease. Energy won’t always come to you, sometimes you have to reach out and grab it. It’s like playing a months-long game of Zelda and having the plug pulled out and the data lost, just as you were slaying lynels for breakfast. You want to sag into a heap and become as close to the human embodiment of pyjamas as possible. 

I speak from recent experience these last three months. Whilst moving back from Switzerland to England in December 2024, I drove around 4’200km shifting my entire life - for reference, that’s about the distance of a leisurely road-trip from Zürich to Baghdad. I’d set myself the task of being “home by Christmas”, loading up the Luton van so heavily on each trip that it sat buttock-clenchingly low on its axles. As a barely-established yoga teacher trying to switch careers and countries, I didn’t have the ten grand loose change knocking around to pay for a removal company. (To my non-Swiss readers, that’s not an exaggeration.) So, my brother Athamos and I did everything ourselves: humping, lumping, and grunting boxes up and down staircases, until a nerve-line of pain zinged from my right shin to my right jaw 24/7. Sleep left me, and as I watched more and more of my life disappear from my beloved Küsnacht flat, I struggled to even remember what the “old me” felt like. I thought I’d reached a low point when I tucked into (yet another) dinner of boiled noodles, but this time straight out of the pot and lying on the floor of the empty flat, covered in a lot of paint, a fair bit of sweat, and some blood. 

Actually that low point was still to come, when, on the second and final journey up by van, buffeted by record winds and sideways rain, we finally arrived in Calais. We must have looked a right state as we pulled into the Eurotunnel check-in, wearing the same trackie-bums we’d had for the last fortnight, deep black rings under twitching eyelids, and the full range of crushed, empty Rockstar cans spread across the dash. I thought I’d never felt like less of a rockstar when the humourless duo of French customs officers told me to open the back of the van. But even here, I was wrong. In the lashing rain, I tried to explain that there were delicate items that may have moved around and could fall out, but the bloke just bellowed at me, so I shrugged and opened the back panel, to the inevitable sound of smashing porcelain and glass. Enjoying their power trip to the last, they stood by as I cleared up the mess in the rain (Athamos had been ordered to remain in the cabin for safety reasons), and waited until I’d closed the van and relaxed, hand reaching for the door, before shouting at me again and telling me there would now be a full inspection. That, that, was my lowest ebb.

I was in a kind of autopilot at that point, unable to put up a fight, or generate the life-force necessary to push back against this casual bullying. I drove over to the inspection point. The pain in my right side was unbearable, so I had to sit hunched forward and tense the muscles in my right leg to take the edge off. English customs officers had now joined the party, and the two instigators stood back, one of them with a smirk on his face, I noticed, as I climbed back out into the wet (we were under a roof but the rain was still lashing at the van). That was the final straw. I turned to the Brit officer next to me, soaking, and told him, voice dripping with sarcasm, that these two fine gentlemen had obviously seen something suspicious enough amongst the plants, clothes, books, tables, and chairs, that warranted a full inspection for the safety of our two countries. “An inspection they clearly have no intention of taking part in,” I added, as they sauntered further under the shelter of the hangar roof, hands hooked on their bulletproof vests, eyes alternating lazily between me, their boots, and their Glocks. Talk about navel-gazing.

The guy next to me sighed as he looked between the self-satisfied instigators a few metres away, and the overladen interior of the van in front of him. All the frustration of three months’ gruelling work, bad sleep, and zero routine all came flooding into the present - I quite literally crossed my arms, and stomped my feet. I was so close to home soil, and I felt the rising fury of being held back from my turf. I knew at times like this my words could get a little loose, but I figured if an inspection was going to happen anyway, I had nothing to lose - it wasn’t like I had 10 keys of Columbia’s finest in the back, unless my bro had made a personal investment and declined to tell me. So I stomped, and said, “I’m not lifting a finger unless those two clowns get over here and tell me exactly what’s so suspicious we need to go through this circus at 3 in the morning.” I felt fire in my belly for the first time in weeks, my skin was tingling, my body flushed with blood. It felt good. I’d been awake for 22 hours, and I’d do another 22 if it pissed them off. I recrossed my arms and huffed loudly, allowing a little smile to creep into the corner of my mouth. Fuck these guys and the fish they swam in on. 

The Brit inspector sighed again wearily, and scratched at his temple with the end of a heavy-duty flashlight. “Look son,” he said in a consoling voice, “I just need to be able to see to the back of the van. If you can point it out to me while I shine the torch in, we can all move on. If I can’t see it, I’m afraid we’ll have to take everything out.” The distaste in his tone was palpable. A few minutes later, I was closing the van again, having successfully balanced myself like a monkey on the inside ledges of the van and an item of furniture, the English customs officer doing the same as he shone his torch, and I’d pointed, explaining, gesticulating wildly, guiding his eyes from pot to plant to pillow. Finally, he clicked the light off. “Alright. On your way son. Welcome back.” And good riddance, I thought. Since we were still in the territory of the two irritating instigators, I decided to leave them a parting gift, and kicked all the remaining soil from my broken plant pot off the back of the van onto the ground, without looking up. Try cleaning that up with a broom, tweedledick and tweedledumb, I thought, as I ran for the cab, slamming the door behind me and turning the ignition in one fluid movement, before lurching the van aggressively through the English customs barrier before they could shout sacrebleu. I wasn’t dry, but I was finally home.

***

My personality thrives on a sense of progress and achievement, as I discovered throughout this process, and therein lies one of my greatest weaknesses. (I hate to disappoint my more gleeful readers, but this article will only broach the one shortcoming - for a full panoply of my other faults, I’m afraid you’ll have to dig into the rest of this journal. Shameless plug.) Back in England, unpacking presented much the same problems - nowhere to cook, nowhere to stretch, not a blind idea where my sportskit was, or what pieces of furniture even one of my five yoga mats was wrapped around. But that moment back at Calais had taught me a lesson - I had an attitude problem. I’d let my fire go down to mere embers. I’d almost lapsed into Game Over Thinking. 

Being in routine was a luxury, one that came and went, and will probably continue to come and go as long as I live. What left me, rather troublingly, was my internal A-game, and not in an instant, but gradually over time, as one day after another turned into death by a thousand cuts. Each day the reasoning had been the same, “Oh it’s fine, you’ve a lot to do today, you’re moving house, it’s not important right now, prioritise this process, etc. etc.” Piece by precious piece, I allowed my core to weaken, whilst simultaneously taking on more strain externally than I’d been through since I’d been in the army, over a decade before. But rest assured that my purpose here isn’t defeatism, but hope. Sometimes things have to burn down to their very ashes before the phoenix can rise anew. 

As a yogi with a strong, regular practice, I had fallen into an invisible trap. I’d started to identify with practice in a very specific way - my body tuned to a certain degree, my mind functioning at a certain level. And when I couldn’t stick to my ideal routine, I nonchalantly let it drop away, one day at a time. I had let rigidity creep into my life, and the more rigid something is, the easier it is to snap. Yoga had lapsed into an external expression of myself, not an internal one, and I realised with no small amount of shame that I had been tested quite lightly, and had come up wanting. Not because I couldn’t practice during the last few months, but because I had forgotten to be thankful for that luxury. If I couldn’t have it all, exactly as I wanted it, then I petulantly rejected it altogether. It wasn’t anger or frustration that had lit the fire again that rainy night in Calais, but the tantalising proximity to being home - the forethought of how thankful I would be when I was in my own space home once more, my own space, my own body, back in alignment with myself. When I could just be, even for a few minutes. I longed to be home, to feel union, to feel “yoga”. And I would bloody well fight to have that back.

A couple of weeks later, I was on my final flight back to England. Unusually for me, I’d booked a window seat - I’m normally an aisle guy - so I could look out and soak up the significance of this last journey home. As I stared out of the window, down onto the ancient battlefields of northern France, it struck me that I literally had nothing behind me. No things. All that was left of all the structures and patterns of seven years of living in Switzerland was… my feelings. With brutal clarity, it struck me that this is all I ever had, and all I would ever have, and that practice is simply the deliberate effort to curate this great fuzzy ball of now-ness we call a life. It’s almost laughable, how sucked-in by ideas of the past or the future we can sometimes get - or rather, how sucked-out of the present. To paraphrase Alan Watts: the seriousness with which we approach life is the only thing we have the power to regulate. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we can pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again. 

What a joy it is to be able to do so, and what a privilege it is to have the physical capability to return to practice. Ready player one.