In the gardens I went to check on the fish in the pond. I saw the two big fellas – one black, one coppery – and looked out for the tadpoles clustering along the edge – there were still some, but not as many as before. I walked round to the other bit of the pond, below the waterfall, and saw a man holding a camera. I paused and realised why – I don’t remember there being a plastic heron over the other side of the pond before, and then it moved its head. The first time I saw the tadpoles, I remember being amazed by how many there were, and then thinking: ‘if a heron finds them, it could clear this lot’.

Something I was thinking of yesterday in the context of plans and failure was a story my therapist told me on Thursday, about a past client from years ago who, towards the end of her therapy, revealed something about her life that she hadn’t mentioned because, as the therapist said, it ‘didn’t fit in with the story’. I’ve been wondering what she meant by that: was it just to tell me that things can change, however stuck and entrenched they feel, or was she suggesting that I’m holding back something because it doesn’t fit my ‘story’, either from her or maybe from myself?

I haven’t expressed that very well, and now I can’t see the connections with the planning thing, though I’m sure there was one. If I keep writing, maybe it will come to me.

Then there was that quote about ‘living your way into a new kind of thinking…’ rather than ‘…thinking your way into a new kind of living…’ (I had to look it up again) which also seems relevant. That seems to me to put the emphasis on doing (living) rather than planning (thinking) – so that doing something – whether that be knitting or other crafts, writing, walking, gardening, even a jigsaw – is better for me than when I am thinking about what those actions are leading to, or how best to do them – which sounds either very profound or utterly banal.

There’s a lot to be said for spontaneity, impulse, intuition – well, I would say that, given my aversion to planning. No, that’s not right, ‘aversion’ isn’t quite the right word: it’s not that I don’t want to make plans, it’s more that from experience I know the stress that planning causes, the struggle to sort it all out, to impose order and make sense, to remember the stages, to decide on the appropriate actions, to implement them without flying off in all directions, and to judge the outcomes. All those things that make perfect sense rationally, intellectually, academically and succumb to chaos when they hit the real world, that great, spinning distributor of ordure.

Having said that, it occurs to me that the major, dramatic changes in my life, the ‘leap before you look moments’, like starting a PhD, leaving a husband (both of them), travelling, moving to Prague and Southsea etc, were all preceded by years of ‘planning’, just not in the organised, logically –sequenced, rational fashion – more on the lines of: ‘…if I could, I would… if only…’ At New Year 2015, I met a lady and told her that I was hoping to move to Southsea one day, then when I announced in March that I was moving, her comment was: ‘you’re a fast worker!’, even though the idea had been in my head for three years.

There’s more I wanted to say, but as usual I started writing and then wandered off at a tangent. But I’d like to share a quote that I heard on Thought for the Day on Radio 4 earlier while I was making coffee: “You don’t think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking.” It was attributed to Henry Nouwen, a name which means nothing to me (apparently he was a Catholic priest, but I won’t hold that against him.)

I’ve often been told I think too much… TBC

Here is the last 40% of what was in my notebook from yesterday:

…

…

Eek, it’s not on the PC, because yesterday I sat downstairs and typed it on my laptop. There will be a brief delay while I run down and email it to myself…

…or maybe I’ll carry on with what I was going to say about napo first 9dammit, still got that problem with the keyboard and still haven’t ordered a new one).

When I started the NaPoWriMo poem(s) this year (consciously using the left shift key now), they kept coming every day, but I was aware that this was a risky strategy

Over the last few days, although only half way through the month, I felt that I had reached so far into the dark, that I was obliged to start coming out. By opening Pandora’s Box, and acknowledging the Hope that hides at the bottom, I started turning it around – although that wasn’t at all how I was feeling. Is it a good idea to have a crisis bang in the middle of a narrative? And after all, hope isn’t always to be trusted.

…Then I remembered that the gates to the garden behind the Natural History Museum were open when I passed the other day, and as that is quieter than the Rose Garden I decided to go there – it’s on my usual route. I found another sunny bench near the tree where I used to go to outdoor yoga classes last summer, and sat with my coffee and notebook, listening to the birds and the sound of tennis racquets and writing this (which I’m now transcribing at home).

I know it’s not unusual for people of my age to grieve for the past: the career, the family times, the children now grown up, and so on. But I think I grieve more for the future, or futures, in which I was going to raise a family; study for a PhD; live in a big house in the country; end my marriage and live my own life; go travelling alone across Europe; write and publish a book; move to the seaside. Now when I look to the future I see that my son-in-law is planning to build a ‘granny annexe’, so that when I’m no longer capable of looking after myself, I can return to Bedford and live with them. Which is reassuring, in lots of ways, but what else is there? What about the years – hopefully many – between now and then?

Linda Rushby 15 April 2021

I don’t think fractals was such a great metaphor for what I was trying to say anyway, because they are identical at different levels, and what I was talking about isn’t identical, just nested, like Russian dolls (which, come to think of it, are pretty identical), or ‘worlds within worlds’, the way that our conceptions of sub-atomic particles orbiting a nucleus depict them as being like planets around stars. And if that was the metaphor, what was the subject I was trying to describe? I’m even hazier about that but… my thoughts and actions, I think. Does that make any kind of sense? No, I don’t think so either, not logically, but in the analytical part of my brain, I can sort of see it.

It’s forty years now since I started studying systems thinking, in a module from the Open University, which I’d signed up to as a one-off (or so I thought at the time) – I think I was described as an ‘Associate Student’ (something like that), and I was just doing this second-level course, partly out of curiosity and partly as a precursor to doing a third-level course on ‘Systems Modelling’, which I thought would help me with a new role I’d taken on in my job – it didn’t, not directly, but it led me, after two years, to sign up for a degree with the OU which ultimately led me to a PhD and my thwarted attempts at an academic career.

Okay, so now I’m talking about my life, which doesn’t directly get me back to the whole ‘fractal thinking’ thing. Except, in a different way, maybe it does. I look back on my life, and I see it in chunks that overlap and interact with each other – the people, the places, the activities, and the different threads of cause-and-effect that run through them. In my teens and early twenties, I had no ‘plan’ for an academic career, beyond undergraduate level – and that, as I’ve mentioned before, I saw more as a way of getting away from the constrictions of my parents and my home town – and (rather ironically as it turned out) finding a husband and/or career which would set me up for an ‘adult life’ (or whatever conception of that I had at that time). Consequently, as I’ve also mentioned before, I messed up my first degree, and was lucky to get a reasonably good job (but less lucky with my choice of husband – the first one, I mean, not the second).

I still don’t think I’ve answered the question – actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure that I’ve even asked one yet. TBC

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…

There are many mornings when I start off wondering what I’m going to write and my head is so full of worry and fear about things that no one but me could possibly think were worth being worried or fearful over, but the worry and fear are there anyway, so do I write about them? I am trying to stop beating myself up over this, but it’s become apparent that it isn’t really just the ‘beating up’ that’s the issue, it’s the fact that the feelings are there anyway, it’s the things that I have to do, and the things that I fail to do, and the flotsam that swirls on the dark churning maelstrom of memory.

Planning and organisation are anathema to the dyspraxic brain, because while the attention is fixed on one thing, action or requirement and trying to assemble the others required to precede and follow it, the rest of the mind-stream is charging off into completely different paths, cul de sacs and labyrinths. ‘Write it down!’ I hear you cry, but any attempt to do that initiates mind-block and stasis – a Mexican stand-off while the focussed brain tries to remember what it was thinking of in the first place.

The only way to make things stick is through rote learning and repetition, so the same things are run through over and over again. ‘Planning’ consists of reminding oneself multiple times that ‘something’ needs to be done before a certain date, which induces panic that it will be forgotten, or done incorrectly, or will take a lot longer than the time allowed, and ‘writing down’ becomes a substitute for action.

In situations like this, ‘self care’ can only mean ignoring all that and doing something pleasantly mindless (or mindful) while all that other stuff goes to hell in a hand basket. Which famous author said: ‘I love deadlines, I love the swooshing noise they make as they pass by’? Can you remember? No, neither can I.

Incidentally, the Word grammar checker wants me to change that last ‘I’ to ‘Me’. Grammar checker, in this instance you are wrong, so wrong. How about if I turn it into a question? Can I? See, you can’t object to that, can you?

Why do I even leave the grammar checker turned on? Because it’s the default, and I can’t be arsed to change it, so I just ignore it because I have more confidence in my own understanding than in its – except sometimes I can’t see what it’s objecting to, so I follow the explanation and have a good laugh at its incompetence.

The routine is: write 500 words. And so I have.

This is not quite what I mean when I say I hear words in my head, or have arguments with myself. Despite all the stuff about Belinda, Melinda, Cassandra and Cat-By-Herself, or about gremlins, I know all that is metaphorical, and at all times I am just me, myself. Admittedly, at different times my thoughts – and the words in my head – manifest in different kinds of behaviour, and I don’t have any control over that, I can’t choose who I am going to be at any particular time. I wish I could. I think about the times when I thought I could ‘reinvent’ myself, focus on one of those aspects (usually Melinda) and let her have her head – when I was doing my PhD, or after I left my husband, or went travelling, or moved here – my ‘running away’ times, in other words. In many ways they were when I was at my ‘happiest’, because even though I still had bad patches within that, I had hope that somehow I was moving towards a sunlit plateau where the world was full of joy and light.

Yeah, I know, embarrassingly unrealistic.

The play was described as ‘darkly comic and heart-warming’ (I read the description afterwards) and had a sweet, hopeful ending, as the man makes friends with a neighbour who draws him out of himself and out of his flat into the world outside.

The writer had worked with MIND and with people who hear voices in this way while developing the play, and also played the pivotal role of the neighbour. The description says:

‘A diagnosis of voice hearing has long been stigmatised in western culture, but in recent years there’s been a new approach that helps hearers to understand who their voices are and where they come from.’

It made me think about how strange the workings of the human mind are, how little we really know about what goes on in others’ minds, or our own, come to that. How much of what we experience is down to underlying conditions like dyspraxia and autism, how much is triggered by early childhood experiences and trauma, how do these interact and continue to interact and develop through our experiences of relating to other people as we pass through life? Who among us is ‘normal’, after all?

We talked about the calm of hunkering down in lockdown, and I heard myself saying the words: ‘I’m happy…’, knowing in that moment it was true, and wondering what he would make of it. Looking back, I can see that at any moment of the conversation, with a carelessly chosen phrase he might have completely shattered that sense of wellbeing, but it didn’t happen. He said: ‘…it feels as though this is what retirement should be like…’, which this time last year (when he was planning to leave for Antarctica within the week) would have sounded bizarre, coming from a man who ‘officially’ retired in his fifties, and has spent the years since recreating the bustle and stress of his business life in numerous ways. I reminded him of the plaque our Dad put on the wall when he retired: ‘How good it feels to do nothing and then… rest afterwards’ and we shared a chuckle.

I know this is not a sustainable situation. Every morning I have to get up and do battle with my demons, dragons, bogies, black dogs, gremlins, negative vibes… whatever you want to call them. During the day, as long as I can escape interacting with others, avoid the news (and most of social media), don’t give too much attention to the ambient chaos, focus on doing the things I enjoy and give myself time and space to do the things that make me stressed (including being prepared to abandon them mid-stream and try again tomorrow), life feels okay.

Five minutes ago, while I was pondering that sentence I noticed a single white speck floating past my window. Now they are coming in ones and twos every few seconds. If this is going to be snow, it’s the first I’ve seen in three years. The sky does have that look to it, but we shall see.

I know this situation – the sense of peace, not the possibility of snow – is not sustainable. At some point, the world will start to intrude again.  The madwoman in the attic can only be ignored for so long. But happiness is about les petits bonheurs (and I wish I’d thought to say that to my brother yesterday, a missed opportunity to show that I’m also capable of being pretentious and intellectual), the pleasurable moments. Looking out of a window, whether of a train passing through the Dinaric Alps or counting the snow specks falling on passing cars, knowing I have nowhere to go, except downstairs for breakfast.

‘If you had the choice of going back to when you were ten but with the knowledge you have now, or $50k and fifteen years into the future, what would you do?’

My reaction was: it might be interesting to see what the world’s like by 2026, but why would I want to go back to the age of ten and live through all that shit again? What use would the accumulated wisdom of half a century be to a ten-year-old girl?

Anyway, what would I do differently? Skip the first marriage, obviously – but not the second, because of the children. And it was my first husband who pointed out to me the job advert which led me to Bedford and ultimately to Hubby 2. On the other hand, if I knew then what I know now, I could look out for that job in the early summer of 1975 and apply for it anyway. I could apply for that degree course in maths and linguistics that was in the list of degrees I looked at in 1971, instead of the one in economics and statistics in Southampton. I’ve often thought that might have been an interesting path to take – I can’t remember which university it was, but I’d be in a different place, with different people, my student life could have been completely different. And I could still have applied for that job in Bedford – assuming the rest of the world was still running on more or less the same tracks.

There was a film in the 1980s, called ‘Peggy Sue got Married’ in which a suburban American housewife (played, I think, by Kathleen Turner), disappointed with her cheating husband (ditto Nicholas Cage) and teenage children, is sent back in time to her high school days. In the climactic scene (spoiler alert), when she is trying to explain to her childhood sweetheart and would-be fiancé (the aforementioned cheating husband) why she doesn’t want to marry him, and how she knows for sure that he will be unfaithful, she pulls off the locket round her neck and shows him the pictures of their son and daughter as babies to prove the truth of her time-travelling tale.

‘But they’re us’ the puzzled lad replies. ‘Our moms must’ve given you those photos of us as babies.’

Cue big moment of realisation. She looks at the babies, and looks into his eyes, and says, breathily (in a young version of Kathleen Turner’s voice):

‘You’re right, they are us, they’re you and me!’

Or words to that effect – it must be over thirty years since I watched that film. I don’t remember how it ends – probably she awakes from a coma because it was all part of a concussion dream, or whatever, with her loving husband and children around her bed, and realises how lucky she is to have them all.

But no, I couldn’t write my children’s father out of my story.

I raised that question about controlling my thoughts a couple of weeks ago, but here is a related one which was bugging me when I woke up this morning: do thoughts control emotions, or emotions control thoughts? Which is the chicken in this arrangement, and which the egg? But this question is just as impossible to answer as the original, given all the feedbacks between the two states.

If I’ve learnt anything about this topic, I would say that trying to control emotions by thinking alone – in other words, wishing them away – is a waste of effort. The fake-it-till-you-make-it idea of slapping on a happy face and banishing all that negativity has always failed and frustrated me, but I’ve discovered from experience that there are activities that improve my mood. Finding the ones that work and can be done with the resources you already have is a great gift.

Writing can be one of those things – although sometimes the mood improvement doesn’t come until after it’s done, rather than in the process. When it’s going well, it’s the best feeling in the world, but when it’s a slog, it’s hellish. There isn’t really a basic process to follow that can make it happen if it doesn’t come spontaneously, except this sort of stream-of-consciousness brain-dumping that I do every morning, and which has yet to cohere into anything tangible. What I’m thinking of here is that I can at any moment pick up a hook and a ball of yarn and start to make something, or continue with what’s already started, and that doesn’t really require any thought. It might go wrong, and that might seem enough to induce frustration and disappointment, but somehow it doesn’t – I just unravel it and do it again differently, or put it away and do something else till I feel ready to get back to it. There’s always something I can do, and if it doesn’t work out, it’s no big deal, I can leave it and do something else.

But isn’t that what I’m doing every morning? Maybe this is my way of applying that approach to writing. Now, that’s something that I’ve just thought of in this process, that wasn’t in my head when I sat down to write, or even when I started that last paragraph. This is my throwaway writing, it doesn’t matter whether it means anything to me or anyone else – but it’s not really ‘thrown away’, I just shove the words to the back of a digital ‘folder’, it doesn’t take up any space, not even ink and paper.