Lazy Sunday Afternoons.
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| *Batik Painting by Chuah Thean Teng |
Not to be mistaken for lazy Saturday afternoons or any lazy afternoon, the lazy Sunday afternoon is special if not spiritual in very many little ways.
Apart from having to be on Sunday, the lazy part is largely accessed via feelings, emotions and experience. Lazy is in the sense of being aware but disenchanted. It is a moment where time stands still or at least drags on with a long languid languor of purposelessness. Usually imbued with heat and humidity - hence afternoon, one is caught in a situation one is inextricably part of, even though there’s really nothing happening. The situation as it happens, happens by unfolding unplanned. A situation within a situation, if you get my drift.
Visualise a situation in real life, in a café by the street, at the seaside, poolside, or simply gazing at nature, where you get to be the observer observing yourself in it.
It is a scene where everything happens as it should, nothing is amiss. Like a scene in a movie setting waiting for something to happen except nothing happens… not a word is said.
Here is where Sunday makes its distinction, being the sabbath, a holiday largely observed, most people are not bustling about at work or in traffic. Some are cooling off in an after-lunch siesta. Few if none are required in the scene as stillness directs.
This little window of inactivity on a lazy Sunday afternoon is a sweet spot for observers of nothing, at the same time it is ‘full of life’ for the observant.
A childhood memory of such an instance brings me back many years to when I was 7 or 8. It is our family homestead where just three of us were cast in an idyllic scene that framed the perfect lazy Sunday afternoon for me.
A large luscious lawn spreading out under several coconut palms, under the shade of a short one, sat my mother slicing coconut fronds with a small sharp knife stripping them to their thin stems. The dogs are taking refuge from the heat under the house, my older sister then only a teenager, cradled my head on her knee, using a tiny wooden ear digger exploring my inner ears for wax. My mother while slicing deftly, was surveying the surroundings looking for stray chickens, goats or cows that may wander into our compound. My sister deeply engrossed with the insides of my ear, forced me to keep completely still, only allowing me to take in the entire scene lying on my side as if it was my job to capture, frame and archive this subliminally. While variations of this scene happened several times before at our home, it was this particular situation that stayed with me all these years. Perhaps I was fully engaged with all my senses in that moment feeling a deep sense of connection to the ladies of the house who took care of me. But it wasn’t just about the ladies in the scene as I recall the entire vignette comprising even the smells and texture of the grass, trees, plants, shrubs, background fence, including the large Chiku tree at the end of the fence gently stirring in the afternoon breeze. It was a periphery vision that I had tuned into. A sort of floodlight vision that augmented my spotlight vision that afforded me an expansive even oceanic feel to experiencing the life I was living.
On that lazy Sunday afternoon, I felt I had a place in this big, complicated, and mysterious world I was thrust into. I felt safe coupled with deep physical and emotional comfort not fully comprehending then, that what I felt was love.
*Batik painting featured - Chuah Thean Teng, Malaysian artist born 1914 in Fujian, China is widely regarded as the "father of batik art" who developed batik as a means of painting;[1] "his adaptation of the traditional batik medium into an accepted form of painting ... elevated the status of batik as a craft to an art medium."[5]
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