Carni Vale

Welcome to the End of Time

This moment is strange. So strange that it feels disingenuous to write as if it’s a normal time. I’m writing this from Trinidad and Tobago, in the days leading up to Carnival.

Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago

Welcome to the end of time…
Welcome, hope you feeling fine. Welcome to the end of days…
What you say…
Welcome, if the end is near, the end is here, but have no fear, Sing!
— Farewell to the Flesh, Carni Vale, 3 Canal

I remember one J’ouvert after sun-up, looking to my left and recognising a paediatric oncologist. Took me a few moments. He was mostly wearing mud. That, a pair of jockey shorts and sneakers. Perfectly dressed for J’ouvert morning.

Blue Devils, Paramin. Photo: Miguel Galofre / T&T Rocks

Carnival is a predictably strange time. Every year in season, all manner of inversions are de rigueur. Celebration of the mundane elevated: sound, colour, movement, amplified. Then on Ash Wednesday, we take the masks off (or put them back on) and soldier through another 360.

I think of it as a collective shaking out of the psyche. Like lifting a rug and revealing all that’s been swept under. What has accumulated gets moved. What has been suppressed gets expression.

There is something deeply intelligent about it, from a nervous system perspective. A release valve. Communal embodied expression.

Carnival is, a bacchanal — no no no — carnival is a living ritual.
This one is ah annual celebration ah freedom,
A literal emancipation session,
Is a spiritual and physical expression of a living ritual.
Is a dreaming time… Revelation time, revelation time.
Carnival is a living ritual.
— 3 Canal

This year, the hope some folks had that things would return to normal has finally petered out. We are not going back to the before times. For some people, they’re taking a sabbatical on Carnival. “Nah, not this year,” one friend said, shrugging his shoulders. “I just not in it this year. I love it, but…”

Not that joy is absent, but our capacity to metabolise intensity feels uneven.

What once felt like release can feel like pressure. Maintaining the status quo takes real work. Culture doesn’t maintain itself more easily than any other human-made thing. Folks are dysregulated. When capacity shrinks, we have to pick our battles.

The question mightn’t be “what’s happening?” but “what am I choosing to attend to?”

Adding to the strangeness is the convergence of calendars. This year, the Saturday before Carnival is Valentine’s Day, and Carnival Tuesday is also the Lunar New Year. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent and Ramadan.

The poetry of it. Farewell to the flesh, welcome to the new year. Celebration folding into restraint. Sound giving way to silence. The converging of different seasons for contemplation.

Reflection after the peak, in the pause that follows.

There are seasons for expansion and seasons for contraction. Living in a body means constantly negotiating these rhythms. Stimulation and rest. Expression and containment. Movement and stillness. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale…

When those rhythms are disrupted, or sped up, or layered too thick or too tightly, the body feels it first.

What I’m sensing, both personally and with my clients, is fatigue. It’s not about not getting enough sleep. It’s reduced capacity. I notice it in myself when my breath is shallow before I realise it. When I’m wearing my shoulders like earrings.

In times like this, my nervous system needs anchors.

Simple, real reminders that I, in my body, am here, now, and not alone. For me, those anchors are in the mundane - very ordinary. The weight of my feet on the floor as I wash dishes. A breeze moving through leaves, not dramatically, just enough to be noticed.

What’s going on
Everyday is a hustle and a bustle
In the meantime, simple things we forgetting
Like how to say good morning. Good morning, neighbour.
I have a simple remedy, a guaranteed philosophy
just say to one another, morning neighbour
— 3 Canal

These moments don’t fix things. They don’t resolve what’s hard or confusing. But, in getting present with what is, I change my relationship to it. I turn toward, I come into my body, and I can choose my action.

The body is the site of regulation and of alchemy.

If you’re reading this and feeling a bit unmoored, disoriented in new ways, or just dammned exhausted, I want to offer something very simple.

Take a moment. Let the breath leave. Just exhale, and pause. Receive the next breath without pulling it in. Notice where you feel it. The nostrils, the throat, the chest, the belly. Belly, chest, throat, nostrils.

And for a few more breaths, notice where you are in space. Your heels. Your feet. Look around.

Then let the breathing return to its own rhythm. That’s it.

—Mindset Breath

Breath in the body. Awesome. Awe as the quiet recognition that the body is still orienting toward life, even under pressure. That breath is still happening. That sensation is still available.

There is and will be time for action. For decisions. For building, creating, responding.

There’s also wisdom in recognising when the body needs less input and more space. When beauty, rather than urgency, is what restores capacity. When breathing for a minute is more useful than pushing for another hour.

I’m advocating for regulation. For a practice of attuning. Paying attention to what is, and breathing into that.

As Carnival approaches, and we turn toward Lent, Ramadan, and the Lunar New Year, I find myself paying attention to these thresholds. The moments between noise and quiet. The space between the exhale and inhale.

Carnival Coming
It coming……Lord oh lord is Carnival time…
Everybody pump up and ready everybody getting prepared
these are two days of frenzy, the whole world envy
love is in the air, love in the atmosphere
— 3 Canal

What I want to offer in this season is presence. An invitation to stay in your body when the world feels unreasonable or to find beauty in the unreasonable - the Carnival spirit.

Roger Roberts of 3 Canal, one Jouvert morning. Photo: Miguel Galofre

If you’d like to understand the magic that is Trinidad Carnival, listen to 3 Canal’s 3:10 It’s their 10th anniversary album, released in 2007. Years after some kind soul put my wide-eyed innocent self up onto a paint truck and out of the way of harm in a Jocks tuh Pose band. It’s quite something. I’m listening to it on repeat.

Everything is mud, from mud then back to mud again, everything is mud from creation to Jouvert morning…this is a mud madness. Is a suspension of earth with ah injection of water, mother, father, sister, daughter, everybody come together…
— 3 Canal

A Rostant is the Founder & Chief Pulmonaut of Mindset Breath, and creator of Strategic Breathwork and the F-States. She holds space for high-performers to shift out of survival states and into Alivefulness - the Art and Science of embodied thriving.