Whether it’s the planets, destiny, or just the Tao feeling frisky, you get those times everything seems to go totally nuts – your body, your mind, your technology, your workload, your communications, your schedule, and/or the general theatre of your life, yet through it all you’re somehow able to miraculously maintain your sense of humour and innate trust in a benign universe just enough to keep you laughing through the spin cycle till you’re back up to speed again. Only a couple of weeks ago or so, just before setting off from Italy back to Ibiza, for instance, having spent a while spontaneously delivering a series of rapid-fire fairly fierce hsing-yi kicks to the sides of a hapless hanging punch-bag, I let fall my last kick, congratulated myself on my performance and youthful vigour-for-54, proceeded to walk away and accidentally whacked my bare foot against a rough fallen tree branch lying hidden like a snake in waiting on the ground, sustained quite a cut, which sent a subtle shock wave up that side of my body, dislodged the energy flow in the meridians there, then later, after a couple of luggage-laden plane rides, I gallantly carried an 8 litre pack of water on that now weakened side quite a distance for someone, thereby inadvertently  triggering an old hip injury sustained 30 years earlier doing extreme kicking practice funnily enough, which suddenly flared up again as if out of the blue while doing tai chi a little later to get my chi flowing again, ironically, and knocked my sacroiliac joint right out of position, so now able to walk only with the greatest pain, made an appointment to see a recommended chiropractor, spent a rather un-youthful-even-for-54 thirty minutes hobbling and sweating in the burning sun completing what would usually be a three minute walk from my friend’s place at the port to the car, which it turned out wasn’t there as it had just been towed for sticking out a grape’s distance too far, a call was made, more friends came to collect me, got to the pound on the edge of town, paid the €213 only to find that the official car-kidnappers’ dastardly activities had caused the car’s too-sophisticated-for-their-own-good electronics to close down the ABS and ESP, thus effectively both immobilizing me and the car further at the pound and presumably rendering me and it temporarily without psychic skills till I’d spent a psychophysically excruciating 10 minutes more sweating under the unforgiving sun endeavouring to decode the implausibly complex instructions in the manual that didn’t actually tell me how to do what I needed to do but by some fluke I sorted it, got to the chiropractor 30 minutes late, had to park ages away, he turned out to have been trained at the same school as the people who wrote the car manual and couldn’t do the requisite adjustment, left him in even more pain (me, not him, as far as I know), drove home to the forest thinking maybe I’d fix the hip myself through self-applied acupuncture, sheer bloody mindedness and a makeshift system of ropes and pulleys, and in any case by then, having wasted over a day doing nothing more productive than mimicking Quasimodo, was by now at least mentally just about ready to finally sit down and get to work on completing a mammoth new audio project for Nightingale Conant just in time to meet the deadline, only to find that for no discernable reason whatsoever my whole recording studio had decided this was the precise moment to go into semi-permanent freeze-mode, so now, still laudably cheerful, waiting for my friend, the local genius to swing by to fix it, I went for using the time to start answering the three hundred and forty three emails and counting that had been piling up in my inbox over the preceding 24 hours, only then to find the internet for my sector of the forest had decided this was also the precise moment for it to close down too, and there’s more but it gets so ridiculous you’d never be able to digest it all in one sitting so I’ll leave it for another time perhaps. Meanwhile, thankfully, once the extreme of karmic madness was reached – somewhere around when the internet inexplicably closed down as I was about to press send on the first urgent email reply and my sense of humour finally started to show signs of closing down too, me now mildly flirting with the edges of despair, I remembered to say those time-honoured magic words to the Tao ‘alright Ineffable Presence, enough’s enough, ease off will you?’ (or as Danny The Magic so meekly puts it, ‘Tao, I’m doing my best to do your work – why are you standing in my way?’, or when he’s a little angrier, ‘fuck off Tao, you can’t be serious!’) with sufficient gravitas for it to know I really meant it, which did the trick, grace dropped in from the sky like Mary Poppins and the new yang phase of the cycle instantly kicked in, swiftly bringing with it a much needed retrieval of universal health for Barefoot, presently finding him in finer fettle than I’ve been in a long while and even the technology is more or less behaving itself these days (which is the real healing miracle).

Now I’m not suggesting this as some form of elaborate Taoist exercise in self-torture for you to attempt in order to fully appreciate yin and yang – to the contrary - indeed if you’re ever repeatedly kicking a hapless bag hanging from a joist, do certainly pay attention as you walk away for any low-lying snarly objects, accidental impact with which might have consequences for your person beyond the scope of your rational mind to presently imagine. But I am suggesting that by knowing that after constriction always comes release, it does help you to keep laughing through the pain and that when you do reach the point of despair and send your heartfelt complaint in to head office, this invariably marks the turning point so have faith at that moment that all will be well, because it will be.

There you like that story?

May you somehow derive enormous benefit from this tale of a modern Taoist idiot-savant, and find yourself belly laughing at life at least three times between now and ere we meet again after the weekend.

Love, D

PS to find out how I actually healed the hip, which was quite a miracle, interesting if you ever want to set about healing any part of you, read the Members’ Weekend DocBox