Category: blogging

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Round Like a Circle in a Spiral

I wrote yesterday, nothing much, and when I got close to the end I wanted to include a quote from Polar Express (which I saw for the first/only time at my daughter’s last Christmas). I only remembered it because I read it somewhere recently, in a file that I’d obviously saved it to because I found it interesting. I thought I remembered reading it on my laptop, so guessed it was one of the Word files that I wanted to save in none-365 format. Just been looking for it, in all the places I could think of that it might be – I even thought I might have saved it on my phone, but no luck. Came on the PC to start writing, Googled ‘Polar Express quotes’, opened the third link down, and it was the second quote on the list:

‘One thing about trains: It doesn’t matter where they’re going. What matters is deciding to get on.’

The Polar Express

But the question is – given that the only reason I didn’t post what I wrote yesterday (apart from it being the usual pointless drivel) was because I wanted to find that quote, then I got caught up in doing something else and never got back to it – should I post that now or not? Should I do that instead of trying to write something today? Except… I’m almost half way to 500 words already.

What I write is throw-away, but sometimes, reading back through old posts, I find something interesting. Like that quote – okay, it’s not exactly Schopenhauer, but it’s interesting, right? In looking for it, I also found another quote that I thought was interesting, which I’d taken from a strange documentary about Jim Carrey that I watched last Boxing Day – but I’m not going to quote that now because it’s on the laptop, which is downstairs in the front room and I’m upstairs on the PC.

When things become self-referential, they create a sort of spiral effect, or maybe a hall of mirrors, to use a familiar metaphor I’ve often used before – and there I go again. But does it just take me up my own back passage, or somewhere different? Because a spiral (I used that word deliberately) is not a circle – it doesn’t take you back to exactly the same place as before – something has changed, it might be infinitesimal, but the circumstances, the conditions are not identical. Back to cause and effect again, and the Buddhist idea of ‘conditionality’, the connectedness of all things. Which set me off looking up definitions, and led me to a book I might buy.

I feel as though I’ve strayed away from the point somehow, but then, I can’t remember what point I was trying to make. So that’s kind of a good thing, I think: it doesn’t matter so much where the train is going, what matters is that I got on.

I’ve completed nine cards so far, and printed five letters which are now in envelopes ready to be posted.  

Round, like a circle in a spiral…

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Home Decor (continued)

Yesterday I wrote but didn’t post, because I felt it was too miserable, just read it again and it doesn’t seem so bad, should I post it instead of writing anything today? Because I don’t feel any better today than I did when I wrote that. Or should I try and write something innocuous, about bookshelves, maybe?

I said on Sunday that I’d been thinking I needed some shelves in the front room – despite the fact that only last year I finally got someone to come and take away the unit which was in there, which had shelves and cupboards at the bottom and a smoked glass fronted cupboard at the top, because I thought it was taking up too much space. But when I started thinking about shelves again, I had in mind something that could go in one of the alcoves either side of the fireplace, which would be more out of the way. The study is full of IKEA ‘Kallax’ cube units, which I bought because they’re so versatile – they’re a good size for box files, jigsaws, albums (the vinyl, musical kind and the photographic kind, both of which I’ve got lots of), and you can get extra storage things to fit in them, like soft boxes which you can stuff with knitting wool, and internal shelves, and drawers, and little doors to turn them into cupboards… except, of course, mine have just got stuff dumped indiscriminately on them. I could fit a two-by-four sized one into that alcove, but maybe something else would be better?

On our way back from the trip to IKEA, my daughter and I dropped in at her Dad’s place, to pick up the grandson whom he’d collected from school, and were talking about this dilemma, when my ex said:

‘Would the ones I got from Argos be what you’re looking for?’ So we went into his dining room and looked at two quite simple, basic, nice-looking bookcases, which is why, on Saturday when I was looking to buy them online, I looked at the Argos ones, and ordered one from there instead of IKEA – despite the fact that we bought cheap furniture from Argos years ago, and it was always a bit rubbish – but hey, I’m not anticipating a spread feature in Better Homes and Gardens, so anything I can just shove stuff onto in the corner will suit me fine.

It was delivered, in two boxes, on Sunday morning, and in a fit of enthusiasm I opened the box and read the instructions. All looks pretty straightforward, and I was tempted to launch into assembling it straight away, then thought: is it sensible to start doing this straight away when there are so many other things I’ve got to do?

So I now have two large cardboard boxes lying on the front room floor, which I ignore and step over, and the cat is slowly learning to navigate around, or stare at until I push them out of her way.

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Seasonal Rant

I spent most of yesterday getting stressed over how much I hate this time of year. All the miserable and uncomfortable Christmases in my life, even though outnumbered by the happy ones, rise up from memory like a dark tidal wave, and completely overwhelm them. I spent the morning working on the weather blanket and listening to podcasts, and then in the afternoon telling the therapist how ashamed I am that that’s all I’ve been doing, as well as about all the dark Christmases there have been in in my life, and how much I hate this time of year – in between bouts of weeping.

We got into the usual argument about what I ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ be doing (‘should’ is like a red rag to a bull for her) and when she asked if it wasn’t just those voices from the past telling me what to do, I got irritated, because, no, it isn’t just that – I know for myself that I would feel better if I did all those things that I ignore in favour of sitting and crocheting.

‘What do you think will happen?’ she asked.

‘Well, it’s not healthy is it? I’d just go into a downward spiral and sink down and down’ I told her, waving my finger round in circles.

‘What’s your worst fantasy of what might happen, if you took it to the extreme?’

To the extreme??? I thought. What a bloody stupid question – like the question about what do you really want from life if money and reality and the law of gravity were no object – what’s the point of asking that?

‘That by the time I was missed, someone would have to break into the house and find me rotting, surrounded by piles of rubbish, and with half my face missing because the cat’s eaten it’ was what I actually said.

I woke as usual at four this morning, but instead of filling the time with podcasts and reading, I spent an hour brooding, just like old times. Then at five, I started reading some more of ‘Out of Sheer Rage’, and to my surprise finished it, although my Kindle said I was only 85% through it – the last 15% was taken up with footnotes and a preview of another book. I was telling the therapist about it yesterday, and how much I’ve enjoyed it, and she asked if it made me feel less alone, which it did, but like the dyspraxia forum in a bittersweet way, because it IS good to know I’m not the only one, but also depressing in that it suggests to me that there really is no way out.

But there are so many bits that I wanted to highlight, and I will share this one:

‘thinking of giving up is probably the one thing that’s kept me going. I think about it on a daily basis but always come up against the problem of what to do when I’ve given up. Give up one thing and you’re immediately obliged to do something else. The only way to give up totally is to kill yourself but that one act requires an assertion of will equal to the total amount that would be expanded (sic) in the rest of a normal lifetime.”

“Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence” by Geoff Dyer
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Dodgy Knee

I think my version of hibernation is waking three hours before sunrise and lying in bed listening to podcasts or reading from my Kindle until about seven then getting up, doing my exercises, making coffee and coming on here to write this blog. Three hours before sunrise is pretty much the same time as sunrise was six months ago, when I was waking around the same time but it wasn’t dark. The advice I had from the insomnia clinic, years ago, was to get up rather than lying in bed, so that my brain would be trained to associate bed with sleep, but that ship has not only sailed, but long ago disappeared below the horizon, and I might as well just listen or read. Sometimes I do drift back to sleep again, and some days, like today, it gets to this time (it’s half past eight) and I think – maybe I could go back to sleep now (except I can’t, because I’ve got wet hair and a towel round my head, and anyway if I lay down on the bed I probably wouldn’t get back to sleep, just waste another half hour or so trying to, and even if I did I’d hate it when I did wake up, because I’d have wasted half the day).

Geoff Dyer’s book ‘Out of Sheer Rage’ makes me alternately laugh out loud and cringe, because of his rambly stream-of-consciousness style, and because I relate to so much of what he writes about himself – and it’s all the worst bits – maybe not the worst bits of him, but the worst bits of me. One that struck a chord with me this morning was when he was complaining about his dodgy knee – the right one, whereas mine is the left. He had terrible problems with it when he was in Italy (I think – or maybe Mexico) and he saw a doctor who showed him two exercises that would help if he did them regularly, except of course he didn’t, so it got worse, then when he was back in England he went to his GP who sent him to a knee specialist, who sent him to a physiotherapist, who showed him the same exercises, which he still didn’t do. Four years ago (nearly five now), I started to notice pains in my leg, so I went to the GP and was referred to the physio, and I saw her monthly for a while, but didn’t like to admit I wasn’t doing the exercises in between, but by the end of the year I had cancer anyway which kind of trumped the leg thing, except that a couple of weeks ago I woke up one morning with so much pain in my left knee I could barely stand – I put it down to spending the previous day in a low armchair doing stuff on my laptop on a stool in front of me – it gradually eased and now it comes and goes but is bearable.

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Je Ne Regrette Rien

This morning I got up and walked to the beach. I was there in time for the sunrise, but the cloud cover was solid, and there was nothing to see. I sat on my usual bench, but the wind seemed to be blowing directly at me, and I didn’t feel comfortable enough to drink my coffee, so I walked down to the tideline and tried to photograph the waves, which were pretty fearsome. They were licking at the remains of a sandcastle, which seemed bizarre – who had been there building a sandcastle at this time of year?

I left the beach to cross the esplanade and drink my coffee in the Rose Garden, which is more sheltered, and as I turned to look back, I saw the clouds moving and parting, and a brief burst of light came from the gap and shone momentarily on the sea.

I think I finished yesterday saying something about regret, and Geoff Dyer saying that whatever you do, or don’t, there are always regrets. But I part company with him there – I think I’m quite good at avoiding regrets, over the big things, anyway. Of all the major changes I’ve made over the last twelve years, I don’t think there are any which I would undo, were such a thing possible, even the ones whose consequences were painful at the time. Not that that spares me from agonies when I have to make a choice, but that’s another matter. The torments I went through before I decided to move here – which seem ludicrous looking back from this perspective – were only finally settled when I realised that if I didn’t at least try it, I would always wonder what would have happened if I had. And now I know.

I read somewhere – a few years ago now – that it is part of human psychology to see major life choices – marriage, house purchase, choice of job, divorce – in a positive light once they’ve been made and committed to. It’s the ‘it was meant to be…’ syndrome: ‘I was meant to meet you, move here, do that – because look what happened!’ I was saying this a couple of weeks ago, I think, when I talked about fate and fatalism. We know the consequences of those decisions, and can’t really imagine what the alternatives might have been like. Of course, this isn’t universal, and I can’t remember the research and references off the top of my head, but I can see how it has worked out in my life.

In the time before I left my husband, I bought a greeting card with the legend: ‘The only things I’ll regret are the things I don’t do’, and stuck it to the wall behind my computer. It also became the tagline for the new blog I started when I moved out. I’ve still got that card, in fact if I look over my left shoulder, I can see it on a shelf. I think it’s a pretty good motto.

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Dreams and Achievements

In the process of digging out the poem I shared a couple of days ago (titled ‘I Had a Dream’ and posted when I was in Berlin in 2012, about my fears and dread of having to come back to England with nothing resolved and no plans for what to do next), I read the comments in response to it from other bloggers. This was one:

hmm, sounds a bit pessimistic. Maybe it depends on how well formed our dreams are when we go after them, how high our expectations are. If we do not know why we have the dream, then when we go after it we do not know what to do when we “achieve” it, and do we even recognise achievement?

no idea really, not sure I have consciously gone after a dream.

22 June 2012

I was irritated when I read it, thinking that the poster didn’t seem to have much empathy, and wondering what kind of life it is if you never ‘… consciously go after a dream…’ I probably felt much the same at the time, because I hadn’t bothered to reply. But reading it again now, what did she say?

  1. How well formed was my dream? To go travelling across Europe, overland (no flying), visiting various places, staying with friends in some of them and ‘…hopefully making new ones along the way…’ (which, not surprisingly, never happened).
  2. Why did I have the dream? A whole complex mess of reasons I suppose, but fundamentally because I was unhappy with the person I was and the life I was living, and thought that by this massive act of ‘running away’ I would ‘…turn my life around…’ – a phrase I initially included in the blurb to Single to Sirkeci but later removed because it didn’t work out the way I hoped. And what way was that? By finding a new man, or a new place, or a new purpose in my life.
  3. Did I know what to do when I’d ‘achieved’ it? No
  4. Did I even recognise it as an achievement? No.

So, it pains me to admit it, but I can’t really argue with the things she said. I couldn’t explain why I had that particular dream; initially it wasn’t very ‘well formed’, although it became clearer once I’d started to ‘make it real’; I didn’t know what I’d achieved or what to do afterwards – although the same person later gave me a great phrase when I was closer to returning, and she said I would be ready to ‘…hit the ground running…’ and my reaction was ‘…or like a lead balloon…’ so that ‘Hitting the Ground’ became a title for the blog I wrote after my return.

But I did enjoy the experience – sometimes. And I did write the book – eventually (but only published the first part). Travelling and writing about it – or staying in the same place and writing about it. That’s what I’m still doing.

And hoping. That’s what’s important.

PS The featured image is a screenshot of what came up on Firefox when I opened it to post this. I recognised it instantly, because I’ve been there and taken multiple versions of the same view: it’s the Old Bridge (Stari Most) in Mostar, Bosnia/Herzegovina, which I would never have visited if I hadn’t followed my ‘dream’.

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Knitting News (Not the Meaning of Life)

The good news is – the Christmas jumper is now almost long enough, so I can leave out those other design items I had in mind, and move on to doing the bottom rib. The right sleeve – which I’ve been picking at on and off over the last couple of weeks – is also nearly long enough, although I’ve hardly started the left one. On straight needles, I would do both sleeves at the same time next to one another on the needles, to make sure they’re the same, but that wouldn’t really work with circular needles so I’ll just have to keep checking it matches the right one. This doesn’t mean I can get it finished in a couple of days, but the end is in sight, it should be done by mid-December at the latest. Then I’ll have to concentrate on catching up on the weather blanket, which is way behind.

Enough of knitting and crochet news, and the poem which I still haven’t found, because I didn’t look for it on the laptop, didn’t get round to it. I’m not sure what’s on there anyway, but maybe that’s where all the missing blog posts from 2016 are, it makes sense. Which reminds me that I need to convert all the Word files on my new(ish) laptop to Open Office or Word 2007 before Thursday, when my year’s free trial of Office 365 (or whatever it’s called) expires, and Microsoft start demanding money with menaces. I’m quite content with my legitimate copy of Office 2007, bought in good faith ten years ago and still perfectly adequate for my needs, except I can’t install it on the new laptop because there isn’t a CD player to load the software from. This time last year I wasn’t bothered because I knew I had a full year to work out how to install it on the laptop, or adapt to using Open Office, but somehow I slipped into the bad habit of using Office 365 because it was there. But a decision has been made, and I’m sticking to it.  

Well, none of that is very deep, although I do need to sort it out. I’ve not been putting it off because I particularly don’t want to do it or am nervous about it – in fact I started earlier in the week on some of my files, to confirm it was quite straightforward and wouldn’t take long – it’s just that other things seem more important and/or interesting.

And I will get back to Destiny and the Meaning of Life at some point (no, I haven’t finished with that, even though I’ve stated categorically that I don’t think there’s anything mystical behind it all). Come to that, a Destiny which was predetermined and inevitable really wouldn’t be worth talking about, would it?

I’m just going to throw out this thought for now: all the wisdom life teaches us seems quite banal when you think about it – maybe that’s why it’s so hard to live by.

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Process and Outcome (and losing a poem)

It’s a cliché to say that the quest is more important than the prize, the journey matters more than the destination. This is the meaning of the story of the Crescent Moon Bear, (retold by Clarissa Pinkola Estés), with the added subtlety that it is the hardships the protagonist experiences through the journey that give her the skills she needs to keep going and deal with her challenges (which are still there when she returns home).

In the process of trying to re-evaluate my life in order to better understand who I am and how I got here, this strikes a chord. There were things I was going to say. But earlier I remembered a poem that I thought I would dig out and now I can’t find it. This is the second time this has happened to me in the last few months and it is worrying. I have so many poems and they can be anywhere – well, I think there are a certain number of places where I would have saved them, but I’ve looked in all those and still no luck. Emily Dickinson wrote hers on paper, and shoved them in a drawer where her sister found them after she’d gone, but who’s going to bother trawling through my computer for mine?

I’ve gone through my assorted ‘poetry’ or ‘poems’ folders, but no sign of it – I can’t remember a title for it, which doesn’t help. I remember that I wrote it in my flat on Beach Road, which narrows the date down to between May 2015 and October 2016. And there’s no 2016 sub-folder in my Blog folder on Google Drive, so does that mean I didn’t write any blog posts in 2016? Of course, I would have been using my old laptop then, so it could be on there. But it was unfinished at the time, and then I’m sure I’ve gone back to it in the last couple of years and tweaked the last bit, so that implies it would be somewhere I’ve accessed more recently.

Well that’s blown out of my mind what I wanted to say. Process and outcome. My PhD is a classic example of a hugely significant process with an outcome that no one was interested in – not only if we assume that the ‘outcome’ was the thesis, but if we take ‘an academic career’ as the outcome I was striving for – well, that never happened either. I used to say that the process of doing a PhD is like having your brain extracted, tied in knots, and put back again so you can never see things in the same way ever again. Maybe that was just my experience.

If I think back to the time before, from the point when one of my OU tutors asked whether I’d ever considered a career in research, my aim was always to ‘do’ a PhD, rather than to ‘have’ a PhD – which reminds me of another poem, which hopefully I can locate…

I had a dream.
And then what?
I made it real.
And then what?
Dreams in daylight
turn to dust.
And then what?
How long does it take
to make a new dream?
And then what?

Linda Rushby 22 June 2012
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Not Writing, but Blogging

Where does this stuff come from? I sit down with a vague idea and the words come out in a completely different direction – like starting from a conversation about the role of fate and chance in an individual life and going off on one about Isaac Asimov and the fates of galaxies (not to mention Planet Earth).

Lately much of my time is being taken up with obsessing over getting this jumper finished – so much so that I haven’t even touched the weather blanket for a week. And a fair amount of that time, of course, is taken up with untangling wool, although yesterday I felt as though there was a better balance, and that I made reasonable progress (admittedly it was a less complicated part of the design). In fact it even feels as though I may be approaching the end – although I still have to do the sleeves, which always take longer than expected. I’ve made a start on one of them (when the body got too stressful) and I’ve decided to incorporate small candy canes into the pattern to relieve the boredom.

I still have moments (or even hours) of panic that she’s not going to like it. But then I think – too late to go back now, I might as well just keep on the way I’m going, knowing that whatever my daughter’s opinion, I’ll be embarrassed by it when it’s done. She asked for it, I tell myself, and she knows well enough it will probably turn out to be a mess.

But I’ve decided to stop worrying about the quality of the things I make (which goes for my writing too, which is why I’m still writing this blog). Also I heard on the radio the other day that only ten of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published in her lifetime, but almost 1800 were discovered by her sister after her death. What does it matter?

This takes me back again to ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’, and the idea of the poetic imagination, or Wild Spirit, (or whatever you want to call it) being stolen or given away or strangled at birth. Looking back over my life – which I still haven’t delved into in depth – has shown me how much I’ve repressed, denied, pushed away, belittled that side of myself, while simultaneously longing for it. So I’ve decided just to do what I can without thinking too much about it or expecting anything from it. Lockdown helps, of course – as it did in the spring: I feel a lot less stressed and more content when I don’t have to go out and interact with other people. That’s something else Dickinson is famous for – it’s said she rarely left her bedroom –at least I have a whole house to myself.

Despite longing for the life of a wild bohemian, I never had the nerve or the opportunities. I’ve always been more Emily Dickinson than Bloomsbury – and at least it requires a lot less energy.  

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Fail Better

Dropping the bucket down in to the well and seeing what comes up, as I do most days, a bit of this, some of that, maybe the odd scrap of inspiration, quite a lot of repetition. My online avatar, theoretically accessible to thousands, in practice viewed by very few – is it, as online personas supposedly are, pure fabrication, or is it truer to who I am than the perceptions of those who think they know me in Real Life? I show and tell so much on here that I would struggle to explain face to face, but realised many years ago that this is a safe space where few venture to look.

In trying to look at myself and my life with attention but without judgement, in trying to discover and welcome my Wild Thing, I look back over all the times I have run away, and the people, situations and commitments I have run away from. According to Clarissa Pinkola Estés, there is not one single descent into the underworld, the wild forests of the psyche, one lesson to be uncovered, learnt and brought to light, but layers beneath layers.

From all my runnings away, I have never returned voluntarily. Although once or twice it might seem that I chose to turn back (thinking specifically of returning from the USA to the house my husband and I had left four years earlier), the situation I returned to was always different from the one I left (or at least, I was different – in that case, I was now a mother with two small children, and no longer a professional career woman) and in each case it was only a matter of time before I ran away again (except arguably the most recent, but of course it could still happen – only time will tell).

What am I trying to say? That reading Pinkola Estés’ book is leading me to reflect on all those times I have leapt into the unknown, the choices I made (which were largely my own, though some also involved my husband), and see them as… well, maybe answering the call of the Wild Woman?

Last week, I read a piece where she suggested drawing up a time-line of life-events and at the time I dismissed the idea, but then I wrote about my first running-away – in fact the first two – going away to university and then accepting the first (actually, the only) man who asked me to marry him.

I have a tendency to look back on my life as a string of failures: failed marriages, failed (or abandoned) careers, dreams that were fulfilled but then turned to dust and ashes. But perhaps there were lessons learnt, things gained which weren’t recognised because they weren’t what I thought I was looking for? Most of those runnings-away were thrilling, at least in the early days, even though I eventually came to the conclusion that wherever I went, I could never ‘run away from myself’.

Fail again. Fail better.