Category: Uncertainty

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NaPoWriMo Time Again

My heart yearns for
the Dream Place,
the Crystal Space…

Linda Rushby 5 April 2021

I was in poetic mood earlier, in my yoga/tai chi/meditation time, with one of those moments of understanding who I am, and what I should be doing, which has faded somewhat now, as they always do, before I was able to get to the computer and capture what needed to be caught, but I will try.

This is the third year I’ve attempted NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month). I started in 2018, with haikus, because that seemed like the easy way (although I know that writing a good haiku is not something to be flippant about). I was so happy with the results that I had an idea about creating a hand-made book – I’d been on a bookbinding course and bought a bookbinding kit, and was going to lino print an image for the cover – but the only image I came up with was a forlorn daffodil, and I got frustrated and disheartened and never even opened the parcel with the bookbinding kit and gave up before I got started. Maybe one day.

The next year I didn’t even attempt the poetry challenge, but then last year I did, with no plan or ideas, I managed to turn out something for every day of the month, a motley collection of uneven quality. I have always said that poems come to me or they don’t, and I can’t make them happen, but one of my favourites, ‘Beachcomber’, came out of a challenge I was set to write a poem a day for five days on Facebook in summer 2015, the first summer after I moved to Southsea.

This year I wasn’t going to bother, but on the first day I wrote a very short poem, and posted it, not here but on another blog to which I sometimes contribute. That poem, entitled ‘Web’, is about the idea of a web of connections, not the electronic ‘world wide web’ so much as an older and more general sense of interactions between events, actions and people, which relates to my interest in systems thinking, the basis of my PhD, and the idea of ‘Crystal Space’ which I have played with for some years. Writing it out gave me the idea of pulling one of the threads in a web and seeing where it led – would it just attract the attention of some monstrous spider, or might it take me somewhere interesting? So the next poem was about Ariadne’s thread, and each day since some image or reference from the day before has triggered the next poem.

So far it seems to have led me back into my lifelong interest in Greek mythology, which is of course a very fertile seam for poetry. Each day’s poem is very short, but by the second day I had the idea that they might build into something interesting. On the other hand, I might just give up one day, but how will I know unless I try?

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Making Stuff

If you should happen to see me sitting and apparently doing nothing, I can pretty much guarantee that I won’t be ‘resting’. My mind will still be whirling around, jumping from one thought to the next and doubling back on itself without ever reaching any conclusions. I might be re-running an ancient conversation in my head, thinking of what I could have said differently to prove my point irrefutably, or composing a poem or a blog post, but most likely I will be thinking about what I should be doing instead of sitting there and thinking. This was brought home to me yesterday when I was facing the state of my kitchen table in the wake of a week spent (intermittently) making two birthday cards.

The process of making cards, while both creative and fun, is also quite stressful, and the clearing up afterwards even more so. It involves a lot of processes, with lots of bits of equipment and materials, some of them very small, others which are messy (glue and ink), and great potential for things getting lost, spilt, sticking to each other, hiding behind each other etc. As well as that, the creative process itself, the design of the thing, from sitting down with a mental connection such as: ‘Laura – tea and cakes’, ‘Chris – fishing’, ‘Simon- robots and/or dinosaurs’ (my 34 year-old son, by he way, though it could equally be my 5 year-old grandson), assembly of any materials relevant to that topic and trying to come up with something significantly different from last year’s effort is quite taxing in and of itself. Because I’m making them to give to other people – this has really only just occurred to me – it’s a lot more stressful than starting a jumper or blanket or whatever in knitting or crochet, when I know that it doesn’t matter what a pig’s ear I make of it, because no one has to see it but me.

Now, that is an interesting though. Making cards always implies the intention of creating something to give to someone else. Perhaps I should spend some time on using stamps, cutting dies and paper just for the fun of the process without producing anything which might be seen and/or judged by anyone else? When I started doing this craft, I was going to classes and workshops, where I was just making for the sake of it – I have stacks of cards made at those events hidden away in the cupboard, which I wouldn’t dream of giving to anyone else.

This is not what I started to write about – but I think it is a valuable insight, and it applies to lots of things I do – including writing this blog. I can do it because I know it is just for myself, although theoretically it could be read by anyone, very few people ever actually do read it, and so it doesn’t matter, there’s no requirement for it to reach a certain standard of quality, it is just itself.

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Life-Writing, Fractals and Plasterers’ Vans

I’ve been listening to Maya Angelou’s autobiographies, which have been serialised on BBC Sounds, each volume in five fifteen minute episodes. I’ve just played the first episode of a new volume, I think it’s the fifth, and I’ve worked out she is about thirty when it starts.  

I’m not going to say any more about it, and obviously I’m not in any way comparing myself to her in terms of either writing skill or inherent interest of the story, but it did set me thinking about the issues of writing about one’s own life. This is of course because I’m psyching myself up to go back to working on The Long Way Back (when I’ve finished with my current editing job, and if I don’t get caught up in anything else). Maybe when the cafés open again, and I can take my notebook style laptop (bought in late 2019 to encourage myself to go out and do just that, hah! What great timing that was!)

The thing about writing about your own life is the clash between the time it takes to write about it and the time it takes to live it- something I remember writing about at the time when I was travelling, and berating myself for not spending enough time writing. Time has this trick of passing no matter what your intentions or what you actually do (or don’t do) with it. And how do you ever stop? How do you write some kind of conclusion? You make a decision, you find a way to tie up the loose ends which are still dangling from the narrative, but if you don’t jump on it and get it done (and I am clearly not a jump-on-it-and-get-it-done kind of person), events overtake you, and how do you account for them?

I just got distracted by a van parked across the road, with the front passenger door open and covering part of the company name, so that it looks like: ‘X&Y PUG limited’ and I’ve been waiting for someone to close the door so I can see what it really is – I keep thinking ‘Pugh’ except that I can see there’s no ‘h’ on the end and there are some letters covered up, so that makes no sense. But when the full name’s revealed, it’s ‘X&Y PLASTERING’, my eyes had just conflated the beginning of the L with the end of the N to make U. How boring.

I intended to carry on what I was writing about yesterday, and not get distracted into life-writing and plasterers’ vans. I couldn’t see the connection between the former and the ideas of granularity and fractals that were rattling around my brain, but then I realised there was a connection. Writing about your own life is like having a hypothetical map of the world on a scale of 1:1 – it covers the whole world. If the grains are fine enough, doesn’t it appear continuous? So how to structure it into a narrative? TBC…

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Struggling

I dreamt last night, and remembered it for once. I think I’d moved house – at any rate, I was living in a different house from this, a more modern one, though to me ‘modern’ means any time from the 1970s onwards, I’m not used to anything more ‘modern’ than that. I don’t think I’d been living there very long, and I kept finding things in unexpected places – I know that’s not unusual with my memory, but among them were things I definitely didn’t recognise. The only explanation was that there was someone else in the house, or coming into the house, moving things around and leaving things that weren’t mine – I’m sorry this is very sketchy but my memory for dreams is never very clear. I was trying to explain to somebody – in person or on the phone, I can’t remember – about this sense of another person coming into my house, when I found a young blonde woman with a little girl was there with me, and she seemed to think it was her house, – she wasn’t the person I’d bought it from, but she clearly had a key. I tried to reason with her but she got angry. Then I thought I should call the police and get them to come while she was still there, but I couldn’t find my phone and while I was looking for it I woke up.

I lay in bed for quite a while and got up late. I felt overwhelmed with anger and despair, as I sometimes do in the mornings. I have got a lot of medical stuff to deal with over the next few weeks, I need to make appointments for blood and Covid tests, which I tried to ring up about yesterday (the GP and hospital respectively) but couldn’t get through. And I need to book my car in for its MOT, and started to think: the MOT is due by the 7th, and I have to go to the hospital on the 17th, and need a Covid test within 72 hours, so what if I book the test for the 15th but then find the car fails the MOT, then I would have to take the van, but the drive through testing at the hospital is under cover, so would I be able to take the van? And will the van even start? I need to know this well in advance so I can tell the hospital I’ll need an alternative non-drive through test. All the what-ifs, what-ifs, what-ifs and all the phone calls I need to make to sort it all out hang around me like a lead collar, and this is why I get so angry with myself. I thought I would get better with this stuff as I got older, but I never do.

I know that everyone’s struggling at the moment, but I can’t help feeling as though everyone is now just getting a glimpse of what it feels like to be me.

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The Sixth Age

The rain has stopped, the sun is out, but I can still hear the wind – which isn’t good, because tomorrow my son and daughter-in-law are coming to put up the new garden shed. Will it stand in this wind? Anybody’s guess. I hope so, because we get storms every winter.

I have been gradually emptying out the old shed over the last two weeks. There’s not much stuff left in there, and I’m planning to get it out today or tomorrow morning before they get here. That’s the plan.

I was talking a while ago about the Madwoman in the Attic years, those times when there were issues in the future that were going to resolve everything (if positive, like getting a job, finding a new lover, travelling, publishing a book, living by the seaside) or were being ignored (if scary, like settling down and finding a home for all my Stuff). In the last few years, I have come to accept that the former group are either never going to happen (the job and the lover), or have happened without really resolving things as I’d hoped they would (the travelling, the books and living at the seaside – though I don’t regret any of them, especially the last). In fact it’s been the settling down and finally having a place that feels like ‘home’ which has been the saving grace for me, though managing the Stuff is a big issue which still needs to be resolved.

The first year and a half of living in the flat near the beach felt in many ways like a continuation of the travelling years – or maybe the first year did, because the last six months was taken up with the stress of house buying, emptying out the old house in Bedford, and arranging for all the Stuff to come to rest here. Then the next year was taken up with dealing with cancer. So I suppose I could say I’ve had three years to date of adjusting to the ways my life is now. People talk about ‘the Third Age’, but in Shakespearean terms, I see this as the Sixth Age – the penultimate one.  

Why am I thinking in these terms today? A couple of weeks ago my therapist asked me what I want to do with my future, what I would do if money was no object. But money isn’t the problem – I have enough money for anything I need, and I can’t think of anything I want that would require money I don’t have. If I came into more money unexpectedly, I would probably give it to my children, or maybe put it in trust for my grandchildren. Perhaps I’ll have some nice holidays when travel becomes a possibility again, though I’ll never be able to travel as freely as I did before.

I spoke too soon about the weather. Rain and hail are driving against the window. Shed emptying, dismantling and erecting might not be possible this weekend after all.   

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Tired

Why can cats sleep for so much of the time and I sleep for so little?

Why do I lie in bed for so long in the mornings even though I don’t get back to sleep and I know that lying awake in bed for two hours isn’t going to make me happier, in fact quite the reverse?

Yesterday morning I made up my mind that this morning I wouldn’t lie in bed, but would get up and go to the beach to watch the sunrise, and I could have done it, I was awake in plenty of time and it wasn’t raining, but still I didn’t, I just lay there thinking about it and then got up just before seven and did the usual stuff and felt angry with myself. Well, I did listen to half an hour of radio, but even after that, I still had plenty of time to get up and go if I’d made myself do it.

They say two hours of deep sleep is the minimum you need to stay healthy, and I’ve been getting an average of 90 minutes over the two years I’ve been able to monitor it My fit-bit broke towards the end of last year, and I’ve lost all that historical data, but I got a new one this month which shows my average overall sleep for the last few weeks is six and a half hours, including an hour and a half of deep sleep, which is about the same as it was before.

I am tired – permanently tired – is all I’m trying to say, but I think most people who know me understand that already, I’ve moaned enough about it down the years. I’m tired and I look through tired eyes, and I have no energy or enthusiasm to do anything at all, but I hate myself for sitting and doing nothing and I wonder, if this is the endgame of my life, what then? Of course, there’s no reason to assume that this is the ‘endgame’, but I can’t see the future, I don’t know what it holds or what it potentially could hold, or how I could influence it in any way, or how I would even want it to be if it’s not going to be more of the same. All that running away has brought me here – I don’t mean geographically (I’m happy with that) but psycho-emotionally, I am the same person I kept running away from. Geographically I think I’ve found as good a place as I could have hoped for, but on those other terms I am as stuck as ever I was. All those things that were going to make me a different person, change my feelings about myself and allow me to grasp my destiny – children, PhD, leaving my husband, travelling across Europe, writing a book, moving to the south coast – haven’t made a scrap of difference to the sense that I’m as much a disaster as I always was.

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Awake, Alone, Aware

I wake alone, aware…

Sounds quite poetic, doesn’t it? Because of the similarities of the words? It would be even better if that was ‘awake’ – how would I work that into it?

‘I lie awake, alone and aware…’ yes, that works, – or, if it’s a poem, even just : ‘Awake, alone, aware…’

What was I aware of? How did that thought continue? Aware that… this is how it is. This is life – my life. And it’s another morning.

Still in bed, I read, via a friend’s Facebook post, an article in the Guardian about women who choose to be single, to live alone and forego marriage and children, defying the outdated concept of spinsterdom. But of course, the lives of today’s single women, even those who’ve never had a live-in relationship or children, are expected to be very different from those of the stereotypical ‘spinster’ – changes in social conditions and mores have utterly transformed that. A spinster in the Victorian (and also most of the twentieth century) mode could be presumed to remain eternally virgin, whereas modern single women are assumed to have (or have had) active sex lives just as single men are.

The article was focussing on women for whom the single, childless life has been a deliberate choice – something else that has massively changed over the last fifty to sixty years, as women’s opportunities for employment and self-determination have improved out of all recognition. But I’d guess that the majority of women living alone are like me – divorced, with marriage or cohabitation in the past, and maybe grown-up children who don’t live with them anymore.

Did I choose the life I’m living now? I don’t want to revisit the territory I explored last Sunday, but – no, not really – or only in part. Fifteen ten, maybe even as recently as five years ago, this was not the kind of life I was hoping for in my sixties, but it is what it is. The longer I am alone, the more I appreciate the advantages, and given my experiences of living in relationships, I think on balance this suits me better than that did. As the song goes: ‘you can’t always get what you want/But if you try sometimes/you just might find you get what you need’.

So, what is it about waking up alone? What was/am I aware of?

That sometimes we choose our lives, and sometimes they choose us, I suppose. That life is far more complex than we like to think; the future is far more unpredictable than we like to acknowledge, and that our choices are both more circumscribed and yet at the same time more potentially disruptive than we can ever understand. The forces which constrain our choices are not just the physical laws of the universe and chance (which can’t be circumvented) or the man-made laws of behaviour (which can be, but not without consequences) and of interaction with other self-determining beings.

I’ll stop there because I’ve confused myself.

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Palpitations

A few weeks ago, on a Thursday evening, I started having heart palpitations. It only lasted a few minutes, but it felt so weird, and when it happened again I got quite worried. I spent a couple of days hoping it would just go away, and trying to decide what to do. The following Monday morning, I went on to my GP practice’s website to see if I could book an appointment – the new appointments come up on Monday morning, and you have to be quick to get one. I got a phone appointment for 9:40 this morning, and now I am wondering what I’m going to say when the doctor calls.

The palpitations are still happening, probably three or four times a day, for a few minutes each time, but I’ve got used to them. I’ve got a history of suddenly developing weird symptoms which then lead to investigations (sometimes quite nasty, invasive ones, like gastroscopy and colonoscopy) that don’t come up with any answers – except referrals for counselling and once, a prescription for amitriptyline, which made me feel like a zombie and was followed by two months of double vision which meant I could only see by closing one eye (no proof that there was a causal relationship, but it was enough to make me stop taking them after three weeks and swear never to touch them again).

The background to the palpitations is that in late 2019 I had a senior patient health check (or some words to that effect) at my GP surgery, which among other things tested my cholesterol and found it was quite high. So I was prescribed statins and went back after about six weeks – last January – for a check-up. I’d been noticing palpitations after I started the pills, and mentioned it, but all the tests were good, I had an ECG which was normal, and my cholesterol was down. The doctor wasn’t concerned about the palpitations but reduced the dose of the statins just in case and told me to come back for another check-up in three months.

Well, that didn’t happen of course. I kept taking the pills, the palpitations went away, the prescription was renewed every month. I tried to cut down my cholesterol intake (not going out for breakfast two or three times a week probably helped). But I didn’t have any way of checking any of this.

And then the palpitations came back. I couldn’t find any suggestion online that they might relate to Covid, but I’d had a recurring cough for a few weeks after Christmas, so I got a home test kit (which came back negative) and made this doctor’s appointment. I know she probably won’t be able to say much over the phone without repeating the tests I had last year. She’ll probably tell me – as my daughter did – that palpitations are often caused by stress and worry. At least I’ll be waving a flag and saying: ‘I’m still here, don’t forget about me!’

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Maybe

Some mornings I feel as though I’m balanced on a knife-edge. Maybe walking along a cliff edge is a better metaphor, since, clearly, no one can balance on a knife-edge. Maybe a tight-rope. Maybe I’m over-thinking this. Maybe I am digressing into choosing the right words because I’m evading the concept. And maybe the use of ‘some’ suggests that this experience is rare, which is not the case – or maybe that’s just an extreme version of an average morning.

I’ve just remembered trying to explain it once to a counsellor – the one I was seeing in 2006-7, which dates it – that I felt I was walking along a very narrow ridge running through a bog, and at any moment I could slip, and potentially disappear without a trace. That describes the feeling, better than a knife-edge (which is a cliché anyway, as well as being impossible) or a cliff edge. There are no degrees of falling off a cliff edge – unless you land in a tree or on a mattress or something else which breaks your fall. Falling into a bog can be fatal, but my perception is that there’s a better chance of being pulled back, providing there’s someone around to do the pulling, or a handy branch or edge or something to grasp onto and pull yourself.

Which is a complicated way of saying that my morning routine is my branch. Not always easy to drag myself away from the night and that ‘oh shit, I’m still here’ feeling that descends on waking, but I know what I’ve got to do, and I do it. And by the time I’ve posted my blog, and am downstairs with my porridge and su doku, I usually feel somewhat better.

I don’t know why I’ve written that this morning, which doesn’t feel any worse or better than any other day. I guess if I was trying to learn a lesson from it, I could say – do something so you know what you’re doing; try things and push yourself a little bit, but not too hard; give yourself time and be ready to stop when it starts to get to you; come back when you’re ready, it doesn’t matter whether that’s tomorrow or in five years time unless there’s some external commitment or deadline.

It strikes me now how different that is from the usual sort of advice about setting goals and getting things done. Maybe those things are really not so important in a life like mine (retired, living alone). If I find myself struggling with things (like the bookshelves, or the housework) maybe I can live without them for a bit longer. If I carry on struggling, I might come to hate whatever it is, and swear it’s impossible, I’m useless and incompetent and should never have started in the first place and I’ll never try it again. But if I stop, walk away, do something else, maybe I’ll be more inclined to try again later.

Lots of ‘maybes’ today.

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What Changed?

When I returned to England at the end of July 2012, I found that not only had Ex-Hubby not put the house on the market, he wasn’t in any great hurry to do so. With a sigh of relief, I made plans to return to Central Europe the following year, not to Budapest, but Prague, where I’d found I could do a crash course in TEFL with a (potential, but at the time I thought it was definite) six month placement to follow. Neither of us knew then that it would be a further four years before things were finally settled. Looking back, I can see that he was procrastinating no less than I was, each in our respective Limbo, his of denial and inertia and mine of footloose running away. During those four years I was to live in five different locations: with our daughter; in the attic flat in the Fens; in Prague; sharing with him in the old house and finally renting a flat in Southsea.

Going through those old blog posts from 2008, I found one in which I shared an old fantasy about travelling across Europe until my savings ran out, in the hope that something would turn up before I had to come back. The same person who commented about me undervaluing myself had this to say:

I would guess that if you did take off and travel on your savings for 3, 6, 12 months or whatever it took to exhaust the piggy bank, at the end of it your circumstances would be vastly different. Your experiences during those months would have inevitably changed your outlook. Maybe for better, possibly for worse but I am willing to bet you would have found the time has led to any number of possible situations.

Maybe sitting in a cheap hotel on a Greek island, lap top at your side and your new found male friend opposite? Surrounded by people you have met during your travels who have altered your perceptions of who you are, what you want out of life and where you are going.

All I can say is – your state of mind would not be as it is now.

Comment on Husband or Cat, 17 October 2008

Well, although I stayed with existing friends in some places, I didn’t make any new ones, male or otherwise, or even have any racy encounters. On the contrary, rather than ‘possible situations’ and any alterations in my ‘state of mind’ or ‘perceptions of who I am’, what I discovered was that travelling is a great way of avoiding contact with other people. I became the Invisible Woman, anonymous and solitary, sitting on trains or in cafés, reading, writing, or doing killer su doku, living in cheap hotel rooms, behind whose doors I was safely insulated from the world. Now I have my own door to hide behind, complete with cat, and other hobbies to pass my time with, and the sense of isolation is not so different, except that the view doesn’t change.