Category: connections

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Still Holding That Thought?

Yesterday morning, I posed a question, started to explain what I meant and got distracted into another part of my past. I will try to answer before the end of these 500 words, but as I don’t know what I’m going to say till it happens, maybe I won’t.

I started thinking afterwards though: I mentioned (if not yesterday then recently) that I don’t like meeting new people and making small talk, but presumably I must have got over that to some extent when I was going to the networking meetings – yet I went from there to travelling alone, where I became the Invisible Woman. How did that happen?

There’s quite a simple explanation really, and one I’ve thought about a lot over the years. When I first started blogging, I described it as two different personalities, and gave them different names: Belinda and Melinda (later to be extended by the addition of Cassandra and, ultimately, Cat By-Herself). But that led me down some strange paths, to the idea that I could somehow do away with Belinda and become Melinda permanently – Bel symbolizing all the things I disliked about myself, and Mel some kind of happy-crappy life-and-soul fantasy me. Part of the thinking behind that was the times when people have commented that I’ve ‘changed’ dramatically when they got to know me better – telling me that I’ve become a ‘completely different person’ and that I mustn’t ‘go back into my shell’. What they were seeing was just that I had grown used to them, to the setting in which I interacted with them, and was more relaxed – which is clearly what happened with the networking group. It’s not the case that anything has changed within ‘me’, just that this is a process I always follow with new people. I meet someone, I don’t know them, they don’t know me, I don’t know if they’re going to like me, I don’t know if I’m going to like them, it takes time to negotiate all that to the point where I can be comfortable. It’s a scary process, and one which I’d really rather avoid. I don’t have a problem with being somewhere I don’t know anyone as long as I can stay the anonymous ‘Invisible Woman’ and don’t have to worry about whether or not they are going to accept me.

Also, I implied that nothing came out of the networking group for me, but that’s not strictly true. One week the speaker had just finished writing his autobiography, and was looking for an editor. I spoke up, said I could help him with that, had a chat with him, talked about self-publishing (about which he knew nothing and I knew very little more, but, I thought, enough to sound convincing) and he promised to send me some of his first draft. That was the first germination of the idea of Damson Tree Publishing, even though he never got back to me, and when I contacted him he’d employed someone else.

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Hold That Thought…

Do I have control over my thoughts or do my thoughts control me?

When I was going to ‘business networking’ breakfasts, ten years ago, the speakers often emphasised the importance of having the right attitude: plan for success, visualise what you want to achieve, believe in yourself, banish negativity etc. Softer, gentler life-coach types would also add things like: practise gratitude, be in the moment, take care of yourself; but the general thrust was pretty much the same – you can do this if you think you can. Think right, and everything will fall into place.

Needless to say, I struggled with all this. I would go to the meetings, listen to the talks, chat to people, get a momentary buzz of: ‘I can do this!’ and then go home and remember: I had no clients, I didn’t know how to persuade people to buy my services, and I wasn’t sure that what I could do would be ‘good enough’. And, also needless to say, I blamed myself – I was never going to get anywhere with an ‘attitude’ like mine, if all these shiny, happy people could make it work for them, what was wrong with me? And the answer was: this is what’s wrong with me, the fact that I have to ask: ‘what’s wrong with me?’ and so it goes, round and round and round.

But I met some nice people, and I ate some good breakfasts (not necessarily a healthy habit to get into) and gradually – mainly in retrospect – I came to realise that they were mostly in the same boat as me – scrabbling around trying to get business from other people who were also scrabbling around trying to get business, in the belief that by behaving like ‘business people’, they would magically find success, by ‘investing’ their hard earned profits into subscriptions that accumulated up and up the pyramid to the people at the top. I was ‘invited’ to be a local organiser, which meant my subscriptions were halved in return for a few hours spent every fortnight sending out invitations, following up to check who was coming, getting there early and checking people off the list as they arrived, collecting £10 from each and paying the venue for the breakfasts, then passing on the balance to the regional organiser. And every day of the week, in a different venue, there would be another one of these meetings, where I could go and pay £10 for another breakfast, another pep talk, and maybe meet a different group of people, but most likely many of the same, and so on. At least I felt I belonged to something.

I seem to have digressed a bit into reminiscing about those days. I’ve never been happy about meeting people, or good at making small talk, but I suppose I bit the bullet and got on with it and it didn’t kill me, though it didn’t make me a business person, either.

But that’s not what I was intending to write…

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Worlds Within Worlds

Just been for my first trip to the shops this year. The last time was New Year’s Eve, when I arrived outside Sainsbury’s at ten past eight to find that they weren’t opening till nine, so I went to the Co-op instead. Not sure why they had different opening hours for New Year’s Eve – New Year’s Day is a holiday, but not the day before. Anyway, the Co-op was open as normal.

And today, I went to Sainsbury’s. Ten days – no, eleven – I must have stocked up really well – not just on Christmas stuff, but milk too, because that, as usual, was the indicator that sent me out this morning.

We all live in our own worlds, that’s what I was thinking earlier, before I went to Sainsbury’s. ‘We have just one world/But we live in different ones’, to quote Mark Knopfler (Brothers in Arms). Each of us has our own personal world inside our head, which evolves over time, partly from genetics, partly from the environment we live in, partly from our experiences of interaction with all the other worlds surrounding us, the physical, social, economic and cultural worlds (all of which can be considered as constituting the ‘environment’ to our personal world). Each of us has a world of incredible complexity inside our heads, whether we consciously realise it or not, even before we factor in the ways in which our internal world interacts with all those other internal worlds of all those other beings with whom we interact.

I was going to say ‘people’, but I said ‘beings’ because – well, even my little cat has her own world in her head, which leads her to predictable actions but is largely impenetrable to me – such as the way she was in the living room when I got home from the shop, but while I unpacked the shopping and made coffee, she came upstairs and was sitting on the landing outside the study door, waiting for me to come up and switch on the computer. She can predict my behaviour almost better than I can predict hers – sometimes we surprise each other, but given that our relationship is based on observation rather than verbal communication, it’s surprisingly mutual and very close – even more so since last year and my periods of lock-down.

I don’t know why I’m writing about this this morning (although in a way it is the basis of my PhD thesis). How do we understand all those other worlds that we crash into and bounce away from like billiard balls? The default position, I would suggest, is that we start from an assumption that our own world is ‘true’, and that other people’s experiences of and relationships with the world are broadly similar to ours – at least those with whom we are in close contact. In fact, we have to start from that assumption, that our own perceptions are based in some kind of shared reality, otherwise how can any kind of communication be possible?

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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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Round Robin

I didn’t post on here yesterday, but I did write my annual letter, sent to a handful of people from years ago whom I’m still in touch with enough to send Christmas cards and write to once a year. I don’t really know if the recipients are pleased to get it or resent being sent a computer-written and printed ‘round robin’ style letter. I used to edit each one for the specific person it was going to, but as the years pass and the interval since I saw them all in person grows longer, I think – well, at least this is better than nothing. At least they know I’m still alive. One person sends me a similar letter, one sends me a handwritten letter, most just a card with maybe a few words or just the usual greetings.

The handwritten letter is from the longest-standing friendship of them all, a friend from school, who went to teacher training college in London for three years in the 1970s and returned afterwards to the village she’d left, married the brother of a girl we were at school with, and taught at the village school all her working life. The last time I saw her was at her silver wedding anniversary party in the village hall in 2004, and before that, her 21st birthday party. In the quarter-century in between, we’d lost touch, until my Mum, one day in the 1980s, had a phone call from her asking ‘are you the Mrs Rushby who used to live in…?’ and passed on my address.

The letter I wrote yesterday turned out to be a little longer (600 words) than these daily offerings, about how I’ve been, and what I’ve been up to (not a lot, apart from the wedding) and my plans for Christmas – which changed anyway in the course of writing because I got a message from my daughter saying that my granddaughter is now quarantined till the 16th because a child in her class has tested positive for Covid, so I won’t be going to see them next weekend. And as usual it’s a computer-produced letter, but I decided yesterday morning that I would make Christmas cards this year, using the vast array of card-making equipment (die-cutting machine, metal dies, stamps, inks, sheets of patterned card and paper, scissors, glue, stickers etc etc etc) which I’ve acquired over the last two years.

I won’t go into the background story of how I started that particular hobby (not today anyway), but I will say that although it’s fun some of the time, I also find it unbelievably stressful. This is partly because there is absolutely no way for me to avoid creating a massive mess with all the stuff, and also (and related) that it takes me ages to make anything because I am constantly looking for the thing that I had in my hand only ten minutes earlier.

Yesterday I started with a determination NOT to get stressed, to keep it simple, and tidy.

I will try again today.

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Singing at a Distance

A few days ago I got an email from the committee of the Friday night choir I’ve been attending (on and off) since I moved here, saying that they are planning a Zoom rehearsal for tonight. I’ve used Zoom, for tai chi and occasionally for meditation (I prefer the Sunday evening meditation sessions, which are by Crowdcast, which means my picture doesn’t appear, the interaction is all through ‘chat’ and as no one can see me, I can carry on crocheting through the talking part). Even with the tai chi, though I’ve been doing that every week (except once when I honestly forgot) and do speak occasionally, it never seems to put me up on the main screen (thank goodness). I don’t know why this is, whether there is something technical to do with my laptop, or my speech isn’t loud or clear enough, or whether even the technology can recognise that it’s better not to put my face up onto people’s screens.

I don’t really understand how the choir thing is going to work. Of course, I sing a lot by myself when I’m by myself, but that doesn’t have to be in tune. At choir, I usually rely on the ladies around me to get it right, and hope I can blend in. The email said that the Musical Director has ‘some ideas of things we can do’. Knowing him, I’m sure he’ll make it fun. We have the music we were rehearsing for the Easter concert (which was cancelled, obviously). We were also supposed to be doing a concert at the Guildhall last month, but we never even started rehearsing that. I haven’t looked at any of it for four months, of course, but I know where it is.

The thing is… I’ve really appreciated having Friday evenings to myself, not having to think about going out and interacting – more so in that I have to go by car, and finding somewhere to park is a nightmare – not just at the rehearsal hall, but also around here when I used to get back at about quarter to ten. There’ve been Friday evenings when I’ve spent half an hour driving around looking for a spot, and ended up parking so far away that I then had a twenty minute walk to get home (though that has improved a bit since the residents’ parking permits were introduced eighteen months ago, although they’re not in operation by that time of the evening).

Choir is one of those things that has caused me massive amounts of stress – especially around concerts – but that I keep bullying myself into going to because – well, mostly I enjoy it once I get there, but also I feel I have to go out and interact with people. And actually, it is quite non-threatening, because chatting isn’t compulsory, in fact most of the time it’s frowned upon. And they are a very nice bunch – those I know enough to actually speak to.

We’ll see how it goes.

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Socially-Distanced Yoga

After I finished blogging yesterday, I got a text from my yoga teacher to say that she was holding a socially-distanced class in the park in the evening and would I be interested? So I answered yes, and then spent the whole day stressing over the fact that I’d committed myself to going out and interacting with other people.

I went early, thinking I could go to the seafront to take pictures or take something in the park, because I’m rapidly running out of anything photogenic in my garden for my daily Facebook photo post, but I saw them all sitting around when I got there and couldn’t think of a way to avoid joining the group. We sat around for quite a while chatting because we were waiting for the last two people – as it turned out they hadn’t been able to find places to park. I was surprised at how busy the park was, and I presume the beach (two minutes walk further on) must have been the same. There were seven of us in the end: the teacher, her daughter, me and four others, two of whom I knew by sight, but I wasn’t sure about the last two, though presumably I’ve met them before. I don’t know any of them very well, and I didn’t say very much.

I thought it might just be a short session, but no, it was the full hour and a half, including lying down at the end. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it – though I felt a bit awkward during the chanting (given that there were other people around, although we were in quite a secluded part of the park). I’d dressed in my usual leggings, tee shirt and sweatshirt, thinking it would be colder later when I had to walk home, I felt a bit overdressed at first by comparison with some of the others, but it did cool down before the end so I was grateful for that.

I went telling myself that I always come back from the sessions in normal times with a smile on my face, the five-minutes-just-round-the-corner community centre sessions. I didn’t feeling exactly elated walking back from the park, but thinking about it now, I’m glad I did it and I guess I’ll go again.

I was very unsettled all day yesterday, I suppose partly in anticipation. Today all I have to anticipate is taking the bins out and Zoom meditation for an hour at seven. I need to go to the health food shop to see if they have whole wheat flour – my last loaf had to be all white because that’s all I could get in Tesco. And I thought I’d go and check if the florist is open, as they sell garden plants too – in normal times – and my sad garden needs something to brighten it up. But who knows how many of those small shops will be opening again?

So maybe I’ll go out today – or maybe not.

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Human Relations

I opened the kitchen door for Miko, and she stood on the steps, sniffing the air for a couple of minutes, had a drink from her outside water bowl, then turned and came back in. I left the door open for her while I went upstairs for my morning practice, but when I returned she was curled up in her bed. I went to shut the door, and realised it was raining, very faint and light, but definitely there. And a good thing too. My improvised water butt (an obsolete plastic dustbin) is almost empty of the collected autumn and winter rains, and I’ve been anticipating a hosepipe ban (not that I use one anyway.) I checked the camping chair that’s been on the lawn and there were spots visible on it already, so I folded it up and put it in what’s still left of the shed.

Why do I try to share my feelings, when I know no one likes to read about them? Maybe it’s because I can’t talk about them – although I’ve had someone to talk to regularly for two years now, it’s still quite difficult. It’s hard to get beyond the banal – some days that’s true of writing too, but in general it’s easier and much less stressful to write than to speak, to engage with an unpredictable human being, to have to think about their responses and respond in turn. Easier to be honest in writing, when you don’t have to be constantly on guard for the pitfalls of conversation.

I’ve spent most of my life hiding behind masks, trying to pretend to be someone I’m not, or rather, letting other people make their own assumptions about what kind of person I am, and not bothering to correct them, trusting that I won’t get caught out too often. There again, ‘hiding behind masks’ is just a rather glib metaphor, because for most of the time I don’t know myself what it is that I’m trying to hide, or what I’m pretending to be, for that matter.

I want to think of something to say in the next 150 words, not necessarily something profound, not even particularly interesting, just something… what? Have to stop and think about that. Honest, maybe? Today I’ve done my morning practice before I sat down to write, unlike the last two days, so this isn’t unmediated early-rising stuff.

Human relationships baffle me. They say no one is taught to be a parent, but is anyone ever taught how to interact with other people? I’m sure I never was, or only on the level of: be polite; don’t say that; if you can’t think of anything nice to say, say nothing. I more or less picked up the Golden Rule: ‘treat others as you’d like to be treated’ and I try to stick to it, though it’s occurred to me in recent years that the way I’d like to be treated may not be what other people want, and vice versa.

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Roads Not Taken

Shopping day disrupts my routine. I had breakfast when I got home, in the garden, trying not to think about the fact that I hadn’t done my yoga/tai chi routine or my writing. Well, does it matter, when these routines are self imposed? That’s the slippery slope, you let yourself off for one day and then down and down you go till suddenly you’re back to… well what? Formless chaos, a sense of emptiness, hopelessness, pointlessness… are there any positive words that end in ‘ness’? Goodness me, I can’t think of any.

There are the things I know need doing, and the tasks I’ve set for myself, and the overwhelming temptation not to do any of them… Just to sit in the sunshine, making another scarf, drinking coffee and eating biscuits, ignoring the weeds pushing up through the gravel and these thoughts popping up into my awareness (oh, note to self, that one’s fairly neutral). Kindness, hopefulness, carefulness, busyness – I wonder why business is spelt the way it is? Or should that be: pronounced the way it is? English is wonderful, actually all languages are wonderful, and fascinating. In some ways I wish I’d followed the path from mathematics into linguistics, rather than into statistics, when I chose my first university course. Maybe if my sixth form had been able to accommodate my wishes to do double maths and German at A level, instead of having to compromise on double maths and economics, I would have done it – though I considered applying for a maths and linguistics course anyway – I can’t remember where that was, but it wasn’t Southampton. The road not taken – I would probably still have ended up going into computer programming after graduation, but I would be in a different place, with different people – and that would have made all the difference – I assume.  But how much of what I’ve done in my life has been down to the inherent personality and characteristics that were laid down in those first eighteen years of life? Maybe things wouldn’t be as different now as I think – different places, different people, yes, but thinking about the last fifteen years or so, the different places and different people don’t seem to make that much difference to the inner me.

Ooh, this a bit deep, and it’s starting to give me vertigo. It goes back to my ideas of the Crystal Space, the paths we take and the ways through the mirrored labyrinth, the network of possibilities, probabilities and improbabilities, the book that I’ll probably never write but that haunts every now and again.

Well, I came back from my shopping expedition and now I seem to have written quite a lot after all.

I’ve even got a poem, of sorts, which I cobbled together yesterday from a cluster of little poems or ideas which had popped up at different times, each too long to be haikus, loosely connected but all a bit rough and ready – as my poetry often is.

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Day 5 – Circle of Friends

Circle of Friends

Three months ago, or thereabouts,
a circle of friends sang songs of hope.

Knowing we must part,
knowing we would meet again,
but not knowing when.

Knowing there would be hard times,
not knowing what.

Knowing we would all find joy
not knowing how.

Another year, another song.

The memory of that evening comes to me,
and makes me smile,
for the time when we will meet again,
and touch, and hug, and maybe kiss,
in the place that joins our hearts.

Linda Rushby 5 April 2020

It’s good when a poem comes like that, when I was getting dressed, and making coffee, and feeding the cat, and taking pots from the dishwasher. So that by the time I sat at the keyboard, I already knew what I was going to say.

Sheesh, if only it was always that easy!

Can I get away with that today (at least it’s not a haiku!) or do I have to keep on writing? Well, I set the rules, so I guess I can do what I like.