Category: Uncertainty

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Liminal thinking

I was thinking about freedom this morning, in that sleeping/waking borderland – which just made me want to use the word ‘liminal’, one that I’ve learned (or relearned, because I think I might have come across it when I was studying sociology, forty years ago), that lovely, slightly hazy, slightly scary word and concept that speaks of borders between places, between states (in both senses of the word) between meanings, perhaps. Or maybe I’m just talking pretentious boll*x again.

I’m reading a book which has been sitting on my Kindle for two and a half years (I checked, because it was originally recommended by my therapist, and I mentioned it in our session on Thursday, and couldn’t remember how long it was since she’d suggested I read it, and I said ‘a couple of years’, which surprised her, so I checked, and I bought it in April 2018, which makes my guess an underestimate, and puts in perspective how long it’s been sitting there unread, and also how long I’ve been seeing her).

When I bought it I read the opening and decided it wasn’t for me (these days I usually download the free sample before deciding to buy, unless it’s a sure-fire author I’ve read before and know I will enjoy). As I told my therapist, I didn’t exactly fling the Kindle across the room, though I might have done if it was a paperback. But this time I’m finding it more interesting, so I’m persisting. It’s a semi-mystical, Jungian exploration of women’s lives and psychology related to mythologies, but I won’t say the title until I feel I’ve got something I want to share from it.

Anyway, when I was in my ‘liminal’ state this morning, I remembered recently talking about freedom and constraints and how constraints are liberating, which seemed to me (this morning) rather Orwellian, so I needed to sort out what context I’d been speaking about. Then I remembered that it was the way in which having a routine frees your mind from having to make decisions in the moment. Constraints, or ‘boundaries’ (which brings me back to liminal states again), relates in my mind to dyspraxia, because it seems to me that a lot of the impact of dyspraxia is around difficulties with knowing where you are in relation to boundaries, in time and space and maybe other things – social acceptability, perhaps, or expectations – and how to manage those relationships. Okay, so that does sound like pretentious boll*x, but when I think that way I feel a buzz that I’m getting close to something interesting and exciting.

Maybe my life is permanently liminal because I am always negotiating my way between this and that, never quite knowing where the boundaries are until I’ve crossed one, which can be catastrophic, or thrilling, or both, or just trivial.

Where does this get me with thinking about freedom, or boundaries, or creativity, or how I find a better way of living with myself? Let me think some more…

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The Lottery

Yesterday afternoon was my weekly Skype therapy session, and, not knowing what to talk about, I told the therapist about the stress and worry over the test appointments earlier this week.

‘It seems you’re worrying about the processes and administration more than what it’s all about, which is the opposite of what most people would do’ she said.

By ‘what it’s all about’, of course, she meant cancer – but honestly, what’s that to worry about? If that sounds flippant, we’re not talking here about any particular risk. The infusion I’m going for on Saturday (tests permitting, and I’m still waiting for the result) isn’t even directly related to cancer, but to reducing the risk of side effects from the medication I’m taking to reduce the risk of the cancer coming back/happening again. And whether at some point I’ll get cancer again, or osteoporosis, or both or neither is not something I think about on a daily basis – although I do, of course, keep taking the prescribed tablets and a calcium supplement. That’s part of my routine. And going for the infusion, although uncomfortable and annoying, is also routine – this is the fifth time I’ve done it, and that followed after six sessions of chemo, which were much nastier and lasted longer but were basically the same process, in the same ward at the same hospital. So I know what I’m doing, I just have to turn up at the usual place for 10:30 on Saturday, with my Kindle to read while I’m waiting (there’s always lots of waiting) and after that it’s out of my hands.

This harks back to something I’ve said before: that getting through cancer (in my experience) is not about being ‘brave’ or emotionally strong or staying positive, it’s about doing what you’re told, turning up for the treatments, taking the meds, trusting in the expertise of the medical staff, accepting any help that’s offered. In the end, it’s a lottery, but you can buy as many tickets as you can lay your hands on to improve your chances of getting through. Even so, you could be knocked down by a car any day on your way to the local shop, so why torture yourself by worrying about death when there are so many other ways to do it?

The therapist’s response was to say: ‘There are two types of people in the world…’ and I thought she was going to say something profound, but instead it was just: ‘…those who blame themselves for everything that goes wrong and those who never blame themselves, and we know which you are,’ which we’ve talked about so many times, and didn’t seem terribly relevant or helpful in this context. I was thinking more of Chekov: ‘Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out’, which was sent to me on a card years ago by a friend who never saw her fiftieth birthday because she died of breast cancer six months before.

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Plus Ҫa Change

New day, new week. Almost a new month. Sunny but chilly.

Found out over the weekend that my local swimming pool won’t be reopening. When I moved to Southsea it was on my doorstep, and I started going in the mornings, then having a bacon butty and pot of tea afterwards at the local seafront café. When I first moved from the flat into this house, I stopped because it seemed too far to walk and I didn’t want to drive there. Then in spring 2018, after I’d finished my cancer treatment, I started going again, walking (it was only 20minutes away) first thing in the morning, only once or twice a week. The café had changed hands, but everything else stayed the same, and I would come out of the pool and stop for a few moments on the prom watching the sea and filling myself with love for this place. Then my writers’ group started meeting at the library on Monday mornings, so I would walk from the seafront into the town centre, and in the process found another café for breakfast. During that time, first John Lewis and then Debenham’s closed down, and our Sunday meetings moved from Debenham’s café to the library as well as the Monday ones.

I’ve lived in Southsea for well over five years now – in this house for four years next month. To me, it doesn’t feel very long, but in that time, so many of the things that I felt made the place special have gone or changed – of course, this year has accelerated that, but many went before that – in fact, of the things listed in the previous paragraph that have now changed or gone, only the pool and the second breakfast café (the one in the town centre) have closed as a direct result of the lockdown – and both were already in financial difficulty – this has just been the final blow.

Places change – that’s how it is. The sea is still there, and the park, I can walk there whenever I wish. Most of the people I’ve met over five years are probably still here, even if I’ve lost touch with them.

I came here intending to start a new life, and I’ve done that in many ways, and I guess I can do it again, even if so many things and places I treasured/took for granted have now slipped into memory (like riding my bike over the Common in that first summer and having coffee overlooking the harbour, watching the Isle of Wight ferries and other boats coming in and out – and when the weather got colder I started going swimming instead). I’d come out of a period when there was very little stability in my life, and the future had always seemed fluid and unknowable. Well, I guess that’s always true, but the human heart likes to kid itself that it isn’t.

I didn’t know when I sat down that this is what I would write today.

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Decisions…

I listened to that TED programme about decision making again yesterday. It takes me several goes before I take in what I’m hearing – same with reading, watching telly etc. This has always been the case, but I’ve always taken it for granted. Interesting to learn that it is typical of dyspraxia, and not just because I’m slow and stupid and don’t pay attention, which is what I’ve always believed. Or rather, maybe I am all those things, but there’s an underlying reason for it.

The format of the programme is that they interview people who have made TED talks about whatever the theme is that they’re talking about. One of the contributors yesterday was talking about how ‘hard’ choices are not always ‘big’ choices, and ‘small’ choices are not always ‘easy’. Their definition of a hard choice is where there isn’t a clear distinction between whether one option is better or worse than the other(s) – it may be that they’re all better on some criteria, but not on others. I recognise this problem very well – every day so much of my emotional and mental energy gets sapped by chewing over trivial decisions, because I can’t stop myself going round in circles trying to make comparisons between different factors. When I was a student in the 1970s, the focus was on ‘rational’ decision making, assigning probabilities and utilities to various outcomes and devising models, like cost-benefit analysis, to establish optimal courses of action. I’m glad to see that the field has moved on since then.

Another speaker talked about the importance of ‘committing’ to your choices. If I understand correctly, this is about coming up with a satisfactory explanation for why you made that choice rather than another – satisfactory to yourself, that is. This sounds like post hoc rationalisation, but evidently it makes a real difference to the subjects’ later attitude to the choices that they’ve made.

Just writing that now makes me think that there could be huge ramifications from this, in the ways individuals’ beliefs are formed and solidified. For example, what might it say about people who voted for Trump, or Brexit, and then find themselves having to live with the consequences? It also says something to me about the importance of narrative, or story – the stories we tell ourselves. And what about uncertainty? And unintended consequences? Because of course we can’t always predict the outcomes of our choices, or the likelihood of ‘success’ (however that is defined). And never forget the old cliché about ‘for want of a nail…’, or the more modern version, ‘the butterfly effect’ – what did I say a few weeks ago about banal events that turn out to be surprisingly significant, and momentous events that turn out to be surprisingly banal?

Well, this post started out feeling quite trivial, maybe even flippant, but in the writing it has triggered something in my thoughts, both about how my mind works – how I can never settle on a conclusion – and how the world works generally.

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Poorly cat

Just dropped Miko at the vet’s. It’s all social distanced, I’m not allowed in so the procedure is: I ring the bell; someone comes and unlocks the outside porch door then goes back behind the second door; I open the door and put her basket down in the porch, then close the outer door again and they come back through the inner door into the porch and pick her up from there. I have no problem at all with any of that, I think it’s perfectly sensible and reassuring.

When she had her six month check-up in January, she had lost weight from the previous one last summer. I wasn’t too concerned, the same thing happened last year and I put it down to the fact that I was away for a fortnight over Christmas and New Year, and she has a habit of going on hunger strike when her routine is disturbed, even though she’s used to the friend who comes and feeds her.

They recommended I bring her in after three months for a free weigh-in with the nurse, and gave me an appointment for April. That, of course, was delayed and eventually cancelled. The vet rang me for a chat, she asked if I had or could borrow any bathroom scales so I could weigh her myself, which I don’t. Then she said they aren’t doing nurse appointments at the moment, but I could have a socially distanced appointment with the vet, and to call if I had any concerns, stressing that they have a duty of care towards Miko, but I was sure she was fine and that it could wait till her 6 month check in July – I knew I would have to pay in full for the vet appointment, whereas the nurse appointments and 6 month check are included in my care plan, but that wasn’t the main reason, it was more just because I didn’t want the hassle.

But last week, in the hot weather, she more or less stopped eating altogether. She’s always been very picky about her food, very rarely clearing her bowl. Her normal routine is two pouches of wet food a day, one in the morning and one evening, and a bowl of biscuits always available. But a few weeks ago when the weather got warm I began spacing her feeds out a bit more, so that she was having half a pouch four times a day. Then it got so that I would put the fresh food in her bowl, she’d come running and eat a mouthful or two, then leave the rest.

I called the vet on Friday and they had an appointment free that afternoon, so I took her in to be weighed and she has lost 500g since January – and a quarter of her weight since last summer.

They booked her in for a senior health check this morning, including blood and urine tests. I was going to write about how I’m feeling. Maybe tomorrow.

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Happy Families

Yesterday I wrote but didn’t post. Because… I’m not sure why, now. Except I was full of anger.

I still don’t really know how to write about this. But I don’t think that my previous approaches to dealing with the sadness and frustration of various times in my life by trying to forget them and/or blaming myself has been very helpful in the long run. I think I am slowly moving away from the shame/self-blame cycle, but that has unleashed a lot of anger and resentment, as I try to find and understand reasons for why that became my default way of dealing with difficult emotions.

By coincidence, on my Facebook ‘Memory’ feed this morning, up popped a photo of my family which I scanned and posted two years ago, but which was taken when I was twenty, at my niece’s christening: Mum and Dad, my brother and sister and their spouses, my nephew (still not quite two at that time) and the baby, and me. Of course, we are all happy and smiling, as everybody does for family photos (apart from my brother-in-law, who’s just that sort of bloke). I remember the dress I was wearing that day, pale green printed with a pattern of tiny cream roses, very pretty and totally unlike anything else I wore at the time (or do now). I remember buying it with Mum from C&A in Hull (pre-Humber Bridge days, so we must have gone round the long way, because I’m sure we didn’t take the ferry – those were the days, when a shopping trip to Hull was a day out because there were exciting shops like C&A which we didn’t have in Scunny.) Dad must have driven (because Mum never learned how), no doubt under sufferance and with a lot of bickering. But he would have done it because he loved us, even though I don’t ever remember that word being used until decades later, when life and time were drifting away from them both.

That dress later became my interview dress, when I was trying to find my way through to the next stage of my life. I don’t suppose there’s a decent photograph of it anywhere, which is a shame. There I am, just a face, hiding at the back between my brother and brother-in-law, and it seems significant that I was the odd one then, as I am now (though with two broken marriages in between) while both my siblings are still with the same partners, almost fifty years later. ‘Between’ boyfriends, as I usually was, smiling for the camera, but lonely, sad and scared of the future, about to embark on a summer full of heartbreak and a desperate search for love and stability which would precipitate me into my disastrous first marriage.

I weep now for that pretty girl, full of misery and shame rather than hope for the life to come, and quite unable to talk to any of those other people, her ‘nearest and dearest’.

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Unknown unknowns – or are they?

I had an idea for the start of a poem in the shower, but as I mentioned the other day, poems don’t tend to come when I’m already writing, so not sure what to do about it. Not sure I even remember it now.

Something about balance, and equilibrium, and the middle way. No, even the first couple of lines don’t seem to be coming back. Bugger.

Maybe it was: ‘We live on a knife edge’ – no – ‘Life is in the balance…’ No, because I thought it could be the start of a haiku, and that’s too many syllables (whereas ‘Life is balanced’ is too few). ‘The balance of life…’? That’s about right. Then I followed it with a few comparisons: ‘Freedom and security/Joy and despair…’ That sort of thing.

Pretty trite stuff anyway.

Might have to leave it and see if anything else comes to me.

A friend keeps asking in emails if I’ve seen the Bill Gates (I think it was Bill Gates, somebody like that anyway) TED talk from 2015. I haven’t – not recently at least – but I think from the context I can guess what it’s about.

Something to do with the fact that scientists have been predicting a global pandemic for years, and how devastating it could be? It could have been SARS, it could have been swine flu (or was it bird flu?), it wasn’t, but it was inevitable, it was overdue, and it would come suddenly without anybody taking notice of the warnings?

I’m being completely honest here and the video might be about something totally different, but I have been aware of the science. It’s not that obscure, it’s one of those things that comes up on the news every couple of years, then everybody goes back to whatever the current worry is, and forgets about it – except the scientists directly concerned, and people like me (who as it happens made a detailed study of individual and societal reactions to this kind of high-cost –low-probability risk in the 1990s, and was awarded a PhD on the strength of it).

It’s the same psychology that brought us the 2008 banking crisis and is bringing us climate change and Brexit (don’t forget they’re still lurking in the background).

Twas ever thus.

If I have to sum up my PhD thesis in a single sentence I tend to compare it to Murphy’s Law, with a corollary: ‘Shit happens, but nobody does anything to stop it until it hits the fan’. No amount of forewarning, scientific investigation or crisis planning is ever quite enough to forestall disaster when it comes. This is where my alternative person, ‘Cassandra’, comes from. However we think we can manage and prioritise our lives, there’s always something that creeps up on us that we’ve avoided addressing. Emergencies emerge, that’s what they do. Donald Rumsfeld was ridiculed for warning about the ‘unknown unknowns – but even when they’re ‘known’, reactions depend on who they’re known by – and who chooses how to respond.

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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.