Category: lockdown

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Connections and Constrictions (but no poem)

Why do I always come up to my study to write my blog on the PC? I don’t know – there’s no reason why I shouldn’t sit downstairs and write on the laptop. I’ve been working on here for the last couple of weeks, finishing off the book design job because I have software on here which isn’t on the laptop. So it’s habit, I suppose, sitting here feels like I’m doing something serious (as if).

The two poem lines I started with yesterday, I was questioning them before I even sat down to write about them, then I got carried away down tunnels of memory and snatches of songs which made me think of other things. But the distinction I initially made in my head – of a net that links versus a web that binds –  was always a bit of a false dichotomy, because a net, just as much as a web, is designed to trap whatever blunders into it. I was thinking more of a net as a network, a positive kind of connectivity, which links us with the necessities of life. As a corny example (no pun intended), the connections between people through the supply chain for food – farmers, processers, distributors, retailers, cooks – ‘field to fork’ – even that’s a gross simplification, which can be extended indefinitely in either direction, with microlinks in between. (Note to self: ‘Chain’ is another monosyllabic word, but when you think about it, that too can imply constriction as well as connection.)

There’s a lovely quote, (I think it’s from Martin Luther King), about how by the time your food reaches your table, it’s already travelled half way round the world. Though that’s not such a good thing is it? There was a time about twenty years ago when I used to get incensed about air miles – even had a letter published in The Times about it – but as always, nobody listened.

Which reminds me – yesterday I invited people to like the FaceBook page which is linked to this blog, but quite honestly, if I keep drivelling on like this, won’t I scare them all away? As I’ve tried to explain to a friend who was encouraging me to share my writing more widely, I can’t always guarantee to write ‘the good stuff’, and I don’t see the point of just trying to pick out the odd sentences that ‘work’ and sharing them out of context.

But on I go, and here I am again, pumping up the word count. Guess I should try and write another poem today, only four days in, ye gods, how am I going to do this for a whole month?

Connections and constrictions – that’s the point really I was trying to make. And perhaps the two are inseparable? Anything which supports us breeds reliance, holds us into a familiar position, if only by imposing a sense of reciprocal obligation.  You scratch my back…? ‘We’re all in this together… ‘ at a minimum distance of two metres, naturally.

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All for what?

Lambeth Bridge from Millbank, London

I didn’t go to the beach to photograph the sunrise, though I was awake in time to get there.

Instead I lay in bed, as I do, thinking.

And then it was seven o’clock, and then it was eight o’clock, and I was still lying there. And I thought how pointless everything is, and wouldn’t it be better to just let go, let everything go and stop trying to find reasons to stay alive?

All these stupid tasks I’ve been setting myself, like doing yoga and tai chi and meditation in my spare room, and writing 500 words. All for what? To make me think I’m doing something worthwhile with my days? All that self-bullying that I usually put into getting myself to leave the house I’m now focussing on creating a ‘structure’ for my life (though not on housework, no, never on that). And I resent it just as much, and find reasons for telling myself how pointless it all is, nobody’s making me do it but myself, so why shouldn’t I just lie in bed all day hating myself and feeling miserable, because that feels like the easiest and most natural thing in the world. After all, it’s what I’ve been doing for as long as I can remember, why change the habits of a lifetime? And now there’s no one to judge me for it but myself (and anyone who happens to read this, of course).

Someone said in a private message last week that I ‘torture’ myself. Well, why not? Maybe I deserve it. Maybe it’s all I know how to do.

While I was sitting on my cushion I thought about being on Millbank, upriver from Tate Britain, leaning on the wall and looking at the river and the new spring shoots on the plane trees, unfurling between the bobbles of last year’s seeds. I feel as though I have been there many times on lovely spring days taking photographs in the sunshine, and later crossing Vauxhall Bridge and going to the café which I can never remember the name of, but it’s also an antique showroom, and sitting outside drinking coffee surrounded by quirky statuary and old garden equipment, hiding from the noise and stink of buses. I’ve been going there for years, but I know it was still there last summer (maybe not the next time I go though, if there is a next time).

Hiding and running away are two sides of the same coin – yes, yes, I know, I know, I repeat myself, keep churning out the same old nonsense time after time. So why can’t I repeat the ‘good’ stuff? How the f*ck do I know? I don’t have control over what pops into my head. It’s all just bollox anyway, whatever I say.

I was planning to venture out again when I run out of milk – which will probably be today, or maybe I can stretch it out till tomorrow. Fact is, I don’t really want to any more.

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Knife Edge

This morning I added ten minutes of tai chi to my ten minutes of yoga and ten minutes of meditation. Now that the beds have been dismantled (not anticipating any visitors any time soon), there’s room in the spare bedroom/meditation room to do the first four moves to the four directions, and mostly for the rest of the moves I know so far, with a bit of adjustment. So the routine from tomorrow (because I did all the tai chi today at the end as an afterthought) will be: 5 minutes stretching/standing postures; 5 minutes tai chi to the four directions; 5 minutes for the rest of the form; 5 minutes floor stretches; 10 minutes meditation. It sounds like quite a lot but it’s not so much really. I started the yoga routine when I was in Prague and had a big room but hardly any furniture – or maybe before then, when I had the flat in Ramsey – anyway, I’ve never been consistent. When I was having chemo in 2017 I started again with a scaled down version that was mostly stretches and lying on the floor.

Now the clocks have changed, and sunrise is an hour later (by clock time), it occurs to me that the next few weeks are the best time for sunrise walks on the beach – added advantage being that there’s less likelihood of contact with other people. When I first moved here and was living in the flat on Beach Road, it was so close – 2 minutes up the road and then through the Rock Gardens – that I went all the time. Now there’s a 10 minute walk past boring houses before I get to the park, it’s not so appealing. That first summer was quite idyllic now I look back on it – that wonderful sense of getting away from the past and starting again (again!) but this time with the sense of finally finding the place where I needed to be, a place which was exciting and new, but where I could see myself staying for the long term, without a future where I would have to go back, or move on to somewhere else. A place where I could make a home – and have – more comfortably and easily than I would once have thought possible.

It’s been nearly five years, at the end of next month. I was asked a few months ago to choose: past, present or future? I replied: future, because if you expect the future to be worse than what went before, why bother carrying on? Now the future is confused and uncertain, hard to see, but that’s always the case, for each of us individually but also collectively. Throughout our lives we walk on a knife edge between what has happened and what might happen next. Though we may feel secure and comfortable in our certainties, none of us knows for sure whether we will see the sun rise tomorrow.

So tomorrow I will go and find it. Maybe.

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Paradoxes

If nobody reads what I write, have I been wasting my time?

Question which arose from a comment I received yesterday, pointing out that I keep repeating myself, suggesting that maybe I should try writing things that other people might find interesting, and offering an idea of how to do that. I replied that it was an excellent idea and he should try it, but I might just decide not share my writing any more.

I also realised that someone who was commenting earlier in the week telling me how wonderful I am might just have been taking the piss, and I got quite angry, not so much at him but at myself for not noticing at the time and responding in a suitably cutting fashion. Gremlins again – Gremlin 2 getting angry because Gremlin 1 didn’t step in and sort him out. Or maybe it did, and that’s why I didn’t hear a peep out of him yesterday.

Oh, the paradoxes of wanting people to take notice and then getting annoyed when they do. Or, probably more accurately, wanting to be anonymous and invisible and then being disappointed when they don’t notice.

Well, here I am again, shouting into the void. It is paradoxical though, I admit that. Why write about my deepest thoughts and feelings and then share it where it can potentially be read by anyone in the world (or anyone with internet access)? My usual answer is that I never expect anyone to read it, so it doesn’t matter, but then why bother at all, why not leave it where no one can read it but me? There’s a long and respectable history for that kind of writing.

I guess I keep coming back to this because there was a time when the people I met and the things that I shared in a blogging space had consequences in the real world which genuinely did change my life in fundamental ways. Of course, I have no way of knowing how my life would have been if I hadn’t met those people and done those things, but I can be sure, for example, that I wouldn’t be living where I live now – and that has made all the difference to the future I was anticipating, say, fifteen years ago – though there might have been other alternatives that would have turned out ‘better’, who knows?

So I am here, and I’m writing still/again, and maybe it’s because somewhere inside me I’m still looking for that flash, that transformation into another self, the portal into another world, the rabbit hole or wardrobe that will flip the dimensions, the two roads diverging in a yellow wood, the Crystal Space where all is potential and decisions must be made blindly, the ‘fast running rivers of choice and chance’ (David Crosby, ‘Delta’). The micro-choices that we make every day that can affect our lives and those of others – as the current situation reminds us only too well. Life is fragile. Writing is important.

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Fifteen percent

If you’re reading this and find it interesting, I have a request – please, if you can spare the time, go back and read at least from the start of this week, because I suspect my ramblings don’t make much sense if you don’t know the context, and, although I do admittedly repeat myself quite a lot, I am also trying to build on and make allusions to what I’ve said before.

Of course, this writing is mostly for myself, and I don’t anticipate anyone else reading it, or even understand why anyone would want to. It’s an exercise in trying to understand and hopefully learn to accept, maybe even love, myself, though god knows my efforts to do so over the last fifteen years don’t seem to have got me very far. In the past I’ve defined faith as: ‘continuing to believe in something against all evidence to the contrary’, and I’ve taken a leap of faith (it is leap year, after all) in throwing my thoughts out into the void, where theoretically they are accessible by all, although in practice only a handful of people ever bother to read them (which is just as well really, I’m not sure I want people I bump into every day – well, not at the moment, obviously, but any normal day – to be aware of all this stuff – which begs the question – why do it at all? And that’s a whole other can of worms for a whole other day).

What I’m saying is, if you do read this, I hope it’s not just because you like my quirky way with words, but that you understand that behind the words is a person who at times is genuinely struggling to get through life. I’m not saying this to ask for pity, or advice, just maybe a little respect (just a little bit!)

I’m limiting the length of my posts to 500 words a day, whereas I used to write 500 minimum. That’s an arbitrary limit I’ve set myself because I don’t want to end up going down rabbit holes and spending hours over the thing – and also because, I just thought it would be interesting to do it that way. It does mean that I won’t always reach a resolution – or even get to the point – on any one day, which is all the more reason to go back and see where these thoughts have come from and to follow where they’re going.

I’ll end the way I intended to start, with a comment from an email I received from an old friend last night: ‘…you don’t half think a lot. You think more than anyone I know. Please my dear Linda, give your mind a rest sometimes. Be calm, be still.’

I do try to be calm and still, but I’ve never understood how it’s possible to silence that constant inner narrative, until recently I assumed that everybody’s mind worked that way, but I’ve been told it’s approximately fifteen percent.

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Going out (or not)

I need to sort out this morning routine a bit better. Yoga, let cat out, make coffee, feed cat, take meds… this blogging gets pushed further and further back. Factor in shower, getting dressed and breakfast and it gets even worse.

This doesn’t look like a street in lockdown. Yesterday I told myself it was quieter than usual, but today I’m not so sure. Or maybe I just caught the rush hour. It’s gone quiet again now.

I left yesterday’s post to be continued, because I strayed off the point. What was that? Ah yes, my hermit tendency, the desire to hunker down, hide away, not have to engage with anybody from the outside. So you might think this situation is ideal for me, that I’m perfectly adapted? Ah, but the problem with that is that I know it’s not healthy. I fall into these patterns of dark thoughts, of the kind I sometimes share on here.

Sometimes I fight it by curling up, listening to the radio (telly is just for evenings, as far as I’m concerned, and there’s always loads of good stuff to listen to on BBC Sounds), su doku, crafts. Actually, crafts can be a bit of a two-edged sword – if it’s something I’m confident with, like crochet or knitting or cross stitch, it’s usually fine, but other things, like card making, lino printing and drawing, or (perish the thought) trying something new, I get so frustrated by my inadequacy and disappointed by the results (and don’t tell me that the results ‘don’t matter as long as you’re enjoying yourself’, because what’s to enjoy when you know you’re just making crap?) And if it’s inherently messy (or I make it messy by pulling everything out and leaving it over the table) it’s doubly depressing because I can’t be arsed to put it away and I can’t be arsed to try and I don’t know what to do and I ask myself, what’s the point?

So, what do I do instead? Despite my inherent reluctance, I force myself to go out and ‘do stuff’, maybe even ‘be with people’. However, even when it’s as non-threatening as going for a walk, I still have to psych myself up, bully myself into going, worry about what I need to take, look for things that I need that I can’t find (like phone, keys, wallet), tell myself a million times it’s not worth the effort and I’ll just skip it this once. Despite the fact that I know, once I get out there, I’ll probably feel better than staying at home (though not always, or maybe that’s just another excuse).

Which is why I join things, set myself up with routines, week after week, to go places and do things at certain times on certain days. And if there isn’t a specific activity, sometimes I make myself go out, find a cafe, sit with my su doku or kindle or whatever and watch the world go by. Not any more.

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Lockdown

So Britain is officially locked down today – for a minimum of three weeks, after which, who knows? My car is booked in for its MOT today (due in two weeks, but I was expecting to be on holiday from Friday week and wanted it done before then). But now I won’t be using it anyway.

Still seeing people walking and cycling in the streets – about half a dozen since I first sat here, about 10 minutes ago. Admittedly, the instructions don’t really seem that clear – and how are they going to be enforced? Feeling a little guilty now that I went for a walk on Sunday, though I don’t think I got that close to anyone, I keep thinking: should I have stepped onto the grass in the Rose Garden to pass that extended family who were on the path?

In all the stuff I’ve read about self-isolation and social distancing over the last couple of weeks, my first thought has been: welcome to my life – I’ve tried to resist saying it because it sounds whingey (see yesterday’s post).

All my life, I’ve never been the sort of person who needed to be ‘…where the people are…’ – unless there are so many of them that I’m not forced to engage, and can pass between them unnoticed, anonymous and invisible. That’s one of the reasons why I’m so happy when I’m travelling. Ever since childhood – for as long as I can remember – ‘friendship’ has always been a bit of an awkward concept for me – if you think I’m your friend, then I guess I must be, but I’ll always wait for you to make the first move – I don’t go out and ‘make friends’, I have to know that I’m liked by somebody else before I can decide whether there’s any point in me trying to be sociable with them That sounds arrogant, but it’s not really, quite the opposite – it’s because I assume that I am invisible and no one is going to take any notice of me, so why try and set myself up for rejection? There have been times in my life when I’ve lived without friends at all, or only ones that have imposed themselves on me – though most of those were when I was married.

I have now wandered away from what I was intending to say, though it is related. My normal inclination is to stay home and not risk going out and encountering anyone. Seriously, the converse of the anonymity of travel for me is the anonymity of staying put – that probably sounds a bit nonsensical, but I know what I mean. Being alone in my house, I am safe from having to interact with people, and from the possibility of being judged. The oddity of this is that when I do have to interact with people, I sometimes end up being happier than I would be on my own – partly from the relief that I’ve done it and it wasn’t that bad… tbc