Category: thinking

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Happy Solstice

The northern hemisphere summer solstice, as you probably know, is usually on the 21st June, but fluctuates because the convention that Earth’s orbit around the sun takes 365 times as long as each rotation is an approximation – the real figure is closer to 365.24, but with the addition of an extra day every four years, it’s a pretty good approximation to keep things consistent within the average human lifetime – though it does go adrift over the centuries, hence the introduction in the Gregorian calendar of another fix to remove a day from three centuries in four – an improvement adopted by the English less than three centuries ago, years after the rest of Europe, and then only with much grumbling, propagation of misinformation and conspiracy theories, and rioting in the streets. Plus ҫa change.

There I go again. Nobody likes a smart-arse. But the point is… when I’m doing the Cassandra smart-arse thing, it’s not that I’m trying to show off – well, maybe it is, but only because in the normal run of things, I feel there is so little I can show off about. In the normal run of life I am so chaotic, clumsy, awkward, forgetful, messy, slow, disorganised… dyspraxic. That’s who I am, it’s who I’ve been all my life, and (though I’m not a big fan of putting labels on people) it’s a relief to have a word for it.

When I started seeing my therapist, I told her all this and she began by trying to find a more positive word than ‘chaotic’ (though the one she came up with: ‘ditsy’ – didn’t strike me as an improvement). Like most people I’ve tried to speak to about this, she was making the assumption that it was just a story I was told as a child, and that I’ve been repeating to myself ever since, it’s not who I really am.

One day, after I’d been seeing her for a couple of months, she suddenly said: ‘What you’re saying reminds me of another client I used to see – I think you might be dyspraxic.’ So I looked it up and read the characteristics associated with dyspraxia – and saw myself laid out, even down to strange apparently random things like: not being able to read my own handwriting; lacking confidence in my appearance because I can’t do hair, make-up and have no dress-sense; took years to learn how to ride a bike…

I find it difficult to explain this to people. It sounds like excuses, doesn’t it? I think that’s probably been the problem all my life – I am so conscious of my shortcomings because surely, with a little more effort, I could find ways round them? So I try and fail and get frustrated and hate myself.

Maybe I should come back to this another day. Because what I started to write about was the Cassandra thing, because sometimes it feels as though a head full of useless knowledge is about the only thing that I’m good for.  

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Non-attachment

What will I write about today? Therapy day. What will I talk about? I have two blog posts to read out, at least.

Is anything shifting inside my mind? If it is, it’s probably due to the lockdown, which has given me peace and space to be by myself. But it can’t last forever. How will I cope when I have to start engaging with the world again? Well, I have some control over that. When I first moved here I felt I needed to get out and make contact with other people. Now that seems less important. When I was a child I was told that shyness and introspection are things to be conquered, but these days I can see my self-containment as a gift. Am I getting any better at managing my response to and interactions with other people when they do happen? I suspect not, but I’m more comfortable about avoiding them, and less concerned about ‘missing out’. I can look back on memories of happy times with friends without feeling an urgent desire to repeat them – which is a good thing, I see that now. I can have my own happy times,

Trying to explain how I feel about that at this moment, I’m grasping for the right words. Contentment, maybe? No, too mealy-mouthed. Maturity, a feeling that I am on a mountain top, where I can look back and see my life and the things I’ve done, experiences I’ve had and people I have known laid out below me – no that sounds arrogant, which isn’t at all what I mean. Enormous peace that I can be who I am. Gratitude to all those people who have loved me and whom I have loved, forgiveness of those who’ve hurt me and of myself for hurting others, and knowledge that I no longer have to seek after love, but can be whole and by myself. Non-attachment, not detachment.

Well, what a wonderful epiphany for a Thursday morning – one which won’t last, I realise that. But it is there, and might return. I want to sit with this, be bathed in it, but also to keep writing, to complete this task, this daily commitment to myself, if for no other reason than that I can then get dressed and have my breakfast.

I’ve just expanded the sentence about being on a mountain top, and it’s brought back to me a quotation I first read almost fifty years ago, when I was a student and I have to admit I got it from the cover of a Strawbs album, but I think it was originally from Lao Tzu (a name which would have meant nothing to me then). I will have to look it up…

For once Google let me down, but I did manage to find the album on my shelf and scan it in – and lo and behold, it’s from the Buddha. Doesn’t quite say what I wanted though.

I expect Lao Tzu would have said it better.    

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More Thinking About Thinking

I rounded off my post yesterday by saying flippantly: I guess the real lesson is: don’t get caught up in stuff on Facebook. But for once I’m really glad I did just that, because it’s opened up a whole area that I can write about.

People (specifically at the moment my therapist, but in the past my brother) have asked me why I’m so open on my blog, why I share so much of myself on social media, why I don’t just write a diary and keep it private. I’ve thought about that myself, because of course it can be risky, the sorts of risks I’m not prepared to take in face-to-face conversation (maybe not equipped to, because I can never think fast enough to be able to speak my responses). Yes, sometimes I get irritated, often frustrated that meanings which seem clear when they leave my brain don’t enter someone else’s in the same way, and depressed when there’s no response at all. But occasionally there’s a spark of something that maybe leads somewhere else, to something interesting. Nothing worthwhile is ever achieved without some risk.

We always assume that other people think the same way we do because we can’t imagine any other way. I only started thinking about the visual/verbal thing when I shared an early draft of Single to Sirkeci with a couple of artist friends. One commented: ‘You don’t paint pictures in the reader’s head’. I was upset because I thought, well, I’ve only got what I wrote at the time, if I didn’t describe the places I saw when I saw them how am I supposed to do anything about that now? I got round the problem by looking at my photos and describing what I saw in them, but it opened up a whole conversation about visual memory, and how can you describe something you saw two years ago? I can’t even tell you what colour the door of the house opposite is painted, even though I see it every day (it’s black with two glass panels and a silver coloured knocker, if you’re interested – I just checked through the window).

Returning to the Facebook discussion, something that amazed me was people talking about imagining scents and tastes. How is that even possible? I’ve thought about describing scents and I can’t find any words – other than very basic ones like ‘sweet’ and ‘pungent’ – which don’t compare them to other scents – how would you describe the scent of a rose to anyone who had never smelt one? (‘Sweet and flowery’? How does it differ from lilac?) Or coffee, fresh bread, smoke, shit… you might describe a scent as being ‘like’ any of those things, but you can’t really create them in the mind of someone who’s never smelt them. As I sit here I can sort of conjure up the scent of, say, coffee, but only with an effort.

Mmm, coffee – maybe something is reminding me that it must be time for breakfast.

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Left, right, Verbalise, Visualise

Things in my head today, I don’t know if I want to share them or not – not because they’re angry or shameful thoughts that potential readers might be offended or shocked by, just because they’re so incoherent, not sure if I can knock them into any sort of shape.

In the last few days I have seen one post on Facebook asking if people ‘hear voices in their heads’ when they think, and another two where you look at images and depending on what you see tells you if you’re predominantly ‘right brain’ or ‘left brain’ To deal with the right/left tests and get that out of the way, the first one told me I was ‘left’ brained and the second that I was ‘right’ – which says more about the kind of tests that get posted on FB than anything important to do with my brain.

The discussion on thinking styles was more interesting, but in the end I stepped away, even though this is something I have given a lot of thought to in recent years, because I could feel myself getting frustrated and irritated. One friend made a very good point about it illustrating how little we are able to understand what goes on in other people’s heads. It’s a few years now since the conversation I had when I told a friend that I don’t ‘see’ things in my head (unless I make a deliberate effort to do so), but that my mind is full of words, a constant narrative. I’d always assumed that that was what ‘thinking’; meant, that it’s about the words and concepts in your head, but he spoke to me as though it was a kind of disability, an affliction that marked me out from the rest of the world.

In the FB exchange there were some contributors who, like me that day, were just shocked at the idea that anyone could think any other way than with words. Others started talking about having multiple voices, ‘hearing’ accents, even linking it to schizophrenia, although to me it’s not about ‘hearing’, it’s not a voice, it’s just more like a voice-over or continuous narrative.

Someone else was sceptical because, she said, the internal narrative couldn’t be ‘continuous’, it’s always possible to stop thinking. I thought about my years of meditation – I won’t say I’ve never had any moments of a completely empty mind – but it takes effort and practice and even then it’s incredibly difficult and frustrating. The same person said she wondered if verbalisers (I hate inventing labels, but don’t know how best to express it) can feel any pleasure in reading fiction if they can’t picture the characters – I wanted to scream, because fiction is all about the story, and what are the building blocks of stories if not words? It made me think perhaps this is why I prefer radio to the telly, and reading to Youtube.

I guess the real lesson is: don’t get caught up in stuff on Facebook.