Category: thinking

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Seeds

Ennui

Today I feel nothing.
no words in my head,
no thoughts worth sharing
just a dull emptiness.

Why am I here,
staring at this screen?
The keys touch my fingers
but they won’t help,
they are mocking me.   

Why am I writing
staccato rhythm?
Short lines?
Empty words?

Yesterday the spinner
rolled out her thread
into this future,
which became
just a day,
like any other.

Linda Rushby 10 April 2021

On my desk I just noticed a seed pod. This must sound bizarre. How can there be a seed pod on my desk and me be surprised to see it there? Believe me, there could be anything on this desk and I wouldn’t know where it came from. But thinking back through the last few days, I remember emptying out a drawer from a cheap plastic chest of drawers, one of three which I bought in B&M the first summer I moved here, to store stuff in my flat, things which were in boxes which I was going to ‘sort out’ into these drawers, but in the event they just moved from one chaotic mess into another. And this week I decided I would empty one of the chests and put it out in my new shed, for storing shed stuff, with the vague sense that this would somehow make the chaos more manageable. Each chest had four drawers, some of them only contained things which were already in boxes which could be moved and put on top of the IKEA shelves. Another was mostly full of cassettes and CDs, a staple gun and various other junk which I piled up on the desk, including, apparently a seed pod, like an elongated, thin brown pea pod. Before I moved here, I collected all sorts of seeds from the garden of the old house, and put them all in envelopes with the names written on the front, but I have no idea what happened to any of them – I didn’t plant them, that’s for sure.

This long, thin brown pod looks vaguely familiar, as though I should know where it’s from. I might even have taken it from a plant in a park. There were still seeds inside it, I popped them out while I was thinking about what to write, and they are sitting in a cluster on my phone, about eight or ten of them at a guess, papery round the edges with a brown centre about a millimetre across. I could try planting them and see what happens, though after all these years it’s unlikely that anything will grow.

But I need to find a seed and make it grow, and this morning that feels really hard. I pick up the staple gun – I bought it over thirty years ago, when we were living in the USA, and I’m not sure whether I still have staples to fit it, and if so where they are. I probably can’t get any more now.

But I haven’t used it in thirty years anyway.

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Birthday Poem

Red light on the horizon
and the sound of birdsong
and a light, white, rime
on the cars and the low roofs
and the fence posts,
like cold glass
beneath my fingertips.

New morning, in a new place,
turning a new year in my life.
What can I say to the world, but
‘Here I am’?

Sometimes I think:
‘I would give the whole world
to be other than this.’
but that’s not a choice
which is given to me.

So I stand here,
and listen to the birds
and watch the changing sky
and lean on the fence
and stroke the smooth ice.

To welcome another day,
another year,
another chance for hope.

Linda Rushby 7 April 2021
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Crafting Chaos

Yesterday I started off with one topic but didn’t finish it before I moved on to something else – okay, you could say that I never finish anything, and that’s true, but I didn’t really say what I wanted to say.

I thought I had a great start going, I’d been thinking it in my head a couple of previous days but then discovered I had other stuff to say when I got onto the keyboard. That’s how it works. I can’t remember what I said that was so good, because once it’s written it goes, and that’s how it works too. I could open yesterday’s file and read it back but I don’t usually do that.

This coffee is weak. I only drink decaff, but that’s not the issue, it’s the flavour. It’s disappointing. I must have misjudged the amount of grounds I put in the machine. It was getting down to the bottom of the tin.

This is my mind, and the way it works all the time. That’s what I wanted to write about, about how exhausting it is to bounce around inside my head like this all the time and not have anything to show for it. I do nothing, I achieve nothing, but I’m not resting, not relaxing.

I sat and stared at all the mess on my kitchen table, trying to work out how to sort it all out. Some things have to be done before other things can be done (that’s also true of the process of card making, which I also mentioned yesterday – now I’m beginning to remember). I have to sort out in my head which is the best order to do it in and what I need to do first. There are tools, like the scissors, tweezers and the pokey tool (apparently that’s its official title), they all go in one of the small drawers, which are somewhere in the mix, but should I do those first? There are piles of paper, card, sticky-back paper, stamps, cutting dies; packets for the stamps to be put away in; packets for the dies, which come in sets; packets containing dies or stamps which I got out but didn’t use; ink pads; plastic wallets containing scraps of paper; scraps of paper left over from cutting, some of which can go into those plastic wallets but some which should probably just go in the bin; bits of backing from used sticky-back paper; plates from the rolling machine; envelopes; finished cards; the machine itself; two guillotines; the cutting mat; the craft knives…every time I think I’ve finished the list, I remember something else.

It makes sense to put the small things together in piles eg one of dies, one of stamps… but there isn’t any space left on the table, so things spread further around the kitchen. The stamps and dies from a specific set can be collected together and put into their packet, if I can find the packet, which is somewhere on the table…  

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Making Stuff

If you should happen to see me sitting and apparently doing nothing, I can pretty much guarantee that I won’t be ‘resting’. My mind will still be whirling around, jumping from one thought to the next and doubling back on itself without ever reaching any conclusions. I might be re-running an ancient conversation in my head, thinking of what I could have said differently to prove my point irrefutably, or composing a poem or a blog post, but most likely I will be thinking about what I should be doing instead of sitting there and thinking. This was brought home to me yesterday when I was facing the state of my kitchen table in the wake of a week spent (intermittently) making two birthday cards.

The process of making cards, while both creative and fun, is also quite stressful, and the clearing up afterwards even more so. It involves a lot of processes, with lots of bits of equipment and materials, some of them very small, others which are messy (glue and ink), and great potential for things getting lost, spilt, sticking to each other, hiding behind each other etc. As well as that, the creative process itself, the design of the thing, from sitting down with a mental connection such as: ‘Laura – tea and cakes’, ‘Chris – fishing’, ‘Simon- robots and/or dinosaurs’ (my 34 year-old son, by he way, though it could equally be my 5 year-old grandson), assembly of any materials relevant to that topic and trying to come up with something significantly different from last year’s effort is quite taxing in and of itself. Because I’m making them to give to other people – this has really only just occurred to me – it’s a lot more stressful than starting a jumper or blanket or whatever in knitting or crochet, when I know that it doesn’t matter what a pig’s ear I make of it, because no one has to see it but me.

Now, that is an interesting though. Making cards always implies the intention of creating something to give to someone else. Perhaps I should spend some time on using stamps, cutting dies and paper just for the fun of the process without producing anything which might be seen and/or judged by anyone else? When I started doing this craft, I was going to classes and workshops, where I was just making for the sake of it – I have stacks of cards made at those events hidden away in the cupboard, which I wouldn’t dream of giving to anyone else.

This is not what I started to write about – but I think it is a valuable insight, and it applies to lots of things I do – including writing this blog. I can do it because I know it is just for myself, although theoretically it could be read by anyone, very few people ever actually do read it, and so it doesn’t matter, there’s no requirement for it to reach a certain standard of quality, it is just itself.

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Life Systems

I haven’t returned to what I was saying about fractals the other day because every time I sat down to write I found other stuff to write about, and anyway, although it seemed very clear to me at the time when I had the initial thought, it had got hazy by the time I was at the keyboard..

I don’t think fractals was such a great metaphor for what I was trying to say anyway, because they are identical at different levels, and what I was talking about isn’t identical, just nested, like Russian dolls (which, come to think of it, are pretty identical), or ‘worlds within worlds’, the way that our conceptions of sub-atomic particles orbiting a nucleus depict them as being like planets around stars. And if that was the metaphor, what was the subject I was trying to describe? I’m even hazier about that but… my thoughts and actions, I think. Does that make any kind of sense? No, I don’t think so either, not logically, but in the analytical part of my brain, I can sort of see it.

It’s forty years now since I started studying systems thinking, in a module from the Open University, which I’d signed up to as a one-off (or so I thought at the time) – I think I was described as an ‘Associate Student’ (something like that), and I was just doing this second-level course, partly out of curiosity and partly as a precursor to doing a third-level course on ‘Systems Modelling’, which I thought would help me with a new role I’d taken on in my job – it didn’t, not directly, but it led me, after two years, to sign up for a degree with the OU which ultimately led me to a PhD and my thwarted attempts at an academic career.

Okay, so now I’m talking about my life, which doesn’t directly get me back to the whole ‘fractal thinking’ thing. Except, in a different way, maybe it does. I look back on my life, and I see it in chunks that overlap and interact with each other – the people, the places, the activities, and the different threads of cause-and-effect that run through them. In my teens and early twenties, I had no ‘plan’ for an academic career, beyond undergraduate level – and that, as I’ve mentioned before, I saw more as a way of getting away from the constrictions of my parents and my home town – and (rather ironically as it turned out) finding a husband and/or career which would set me up for an ‘adult life’ (or whatever conception of that I had at that time). Consequently, as I’ve also mentioned before, I messed up my first degree, and was lucky to get a reasonably good job (but less lucky with my choice of husband – the first one, I mean, not the second).

I still don’t think I’ve answered the question – actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure that I’ve even asked one yet. TBC

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Lost Hour

On a clear, bright morning in spring, it would be good to set out on a new adventure, in search of a new life.

But today is neither clear nor bright, just dull and grey with the sound of the wind between the rooftops. And there are no new adventures in the offing, nor, most likely, any new lives to be had which are substantially different from the present one.

Just to say, that first sentence popped into my head as I sat down at the computer. I know it sounds like the start of something, but I’m buggered if I know what. Except that the first phrase – up to ‘spring’ – has a nice lilt to it, as though it could be the first line of a poem. Quite clichéd though, like all those folk songs that start on the lines of ‘One morning in May…’ but which, come to think of it, descend into tales of lust and seduction (when sung by Steeleye Span), and sometimes betrayal, revenge and horrible death.

Well, that’s got those cheery thoughts out of the way.

I put my bedside clock forward last night at bedtime, and when I woke it said 5:20, which was good because I thought I could get up at my usual time and slip quite easily into the new time frame – but in reality I ended up lying in bed anyway listening to podcasts and not getting up till seven. Then I messed about with changing the central heating clock, which was easier than I expected, but as I’ve been doing it every six months for the last four years I should have got a bit more proficient by now. The thing that still bothers me though is that there are two programmes, one for Monday-to-Friday and one for weekends, and I can’t work out how to get onto the weekend programme to change it. At the moment I have it coming on at 6:30 in the week but not till 7:00 at weekends, it took me a while to realise why it was still cold when I got up on Saturdays and Sundays. The instructions I have are on the inside cover of the little box, small print and hard to see, so I have to take it off the wall and into a well-lit area in order to read them, but even then I can’t find out what I need to know. I can override it by pushing the ‘up’ or ‘down’ buttons to adjust the thermostat, so that’s what I do in the mornings if it feels too chilly, but I would like to sort it out.

Other than that – and something falling through the basket of the dishwasher and jamming the rotating arm so that everything which should have come out clean is covered with crud which has baked on during the drying part of the cycle – there aren’t enough words left to say anything else – except I had to unravel my jumper again yesterday.

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Life-Writing, Fractals and Plasterers’ Vans

I’ve been listening to Maya Angelou’s autobiographies, which have been serialised on BBC Sounds, each volume in five fifteen minute episodes. I’ve just played the first episode of a new volume, I think it’s the fifth, and I’ve worked out she is about thirty when it starts.  

I’m not going to say any more about it, and obviously I’m not in any way comparing myself to her in terms of either writing skill or inherent interest of the story, but it did set me thinking about the issues of writing about one’s own life. This is of course because I’m psyching myself up to go back to working on The Long Way Back (when I’ve finished with my current editing job, and if I don’t get caught up in anything else). Maybe when the cafés open again, and I can take my notebook style laptop (bought in late 2019 to encourage myself to go out and do just that, hah! What great timing that was!)

The thing about writing about your own life is the clash between the time it takes to write about it and the time it takes to live it- something I remember writing about at the time when I was travelling, and berating myself for not spending enough time writing. Time has this trick of passing no matter what your intentions or what you actually do (or don’t do) with it. And how do you ever stop? How do you write some kind of conclusion? You make a decision, you find a way to tie up the loose ends which are still dangling from the narrative, but if you don’t jump on it and get it done (and I am clearly not a jump-on-it-and-get-it-done kind of person), events overtake you, and how do you account for them?

I just got distracted by a van parked across the road, with the front passenger door open and covering part of the company name, so that it looks like: ‘X&Y PUG limited’ and I’ve been waiting for someone to close the door so I can see what it really is – I keep thinking ‘Pugh’ except that I can see there’s no ‘h’ on the end and there are some letters covered up, so that makes no sense. But when the full name’s revealed, it’s ‘X&Y PLASTERING’, my eyes had just conflated the beginning of the L with the end of the N to make U. How boring.

I intended to carry on what I was writing about yesterday, and not get distracted into life-writing and plasterers’ vans. I couldn’t see the connection between the former and the ideas of granularity and fractals that were rattling around my brain, but then I realised there was a connection. Writing about your own life is like having a hypothetical map of the world on a scale of 1:1 – it covers the whole world. If the grains are fine enough, doesn’t it appear continuous? So how to structure it into a narrative? TBC…

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Spring Thoughts

Sun shining again this morning. There’s something sneakily deceptive about the tail end of winter and start of spring because, although it might be sunny, it’s not actually warm enough to throw off coats and jumpers, until that day when you find yourself walking down the street in your winter coat and notice that other people are out with bare arms and legs (scrub the latter because these days there are some English blokes who will go out in shorts at any time of year – very different from how it was in my childhood). Oh look, the grammar checker wants me to change ‘bare’ to ‘bear’ in that previous sentence – must be thinking about the US Constitution (or is it the Bill of Rights?) Either that, or it’s about men walking around with fat arms covered in dense fur, like bears – that’s an image that’s now lodged into my brain and won’t go away in a hurry. The explanation given is: ‘possible word choice error’ – nope, sorry mister grammar checker, I said exactly what I intended to say, and I’m right and you’re wrong, as usual.

The coming of spring should be a source of joy, so why am I so grumpy? Partly because of the shambles in the garden, I guess – not that I’m ungrateful for my snazzy new shed, but it’s brought home to me the amount of work that needs to be done everywhere else. Gardening is one of those things that I have in times past been very enthusiastic about – or enthusiastic about planning, thinking and fantasising about, at least. Like most things which require sustained effort and attention, I rapidly lose interest when the results don’t live up to my hopes – or just generally lose interest when other things take over my time and attention.

A recent discussion on the dyspraxia Facebook page centred on the word ‘dyspraxia’ itself, which has been concocted from Latin or Greek (maybe both) to mean ‘bad at doing’, just as ‘dsylexia’ translates as ‘bad at reading’ or dyscalculia ‘bad at arithmetic’. (BTW, I did pick on the fact that I mistyped ‘dyslexia’, but left it because it amused me.) To me, ‘bad at doing’ sums up everything perfectly, but some contributors to the discussion found it excessively negative, and were arguing for the use of the term preferred in the US, which is ‘Developmental Co-ordination Disorder’, or DCD. I don’t like this at all, and not just because it’s American. ‘Developmental’ makes it sound as though it’s something that occurs in the developing child, and hence the implication is that you can ‘grow out of it’, which I can confirm is a long way from the truth. Then ‘Co-ordination’ puts the stress on the physical effects on gross motor skills, reminiscent of the old term: ‘clumsy child syndrome’, whereas the main impacts for me are those on brain functions: working memory, planning, organisation, absorbing and retaining information, time management, lack of concentration etc.

Not to mention, shit at gardening.  

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Everything in the Garden…

I’ve already been to the Co-op today. I managed to avoid going all last week, because I stocked up the week before when I was having visitors for the weekend. And by using up supplies of longlife and evaporated milk, and Elmlea (which I’d bought to put on trifle – for my visitors – till I went to the shops again and managed to get real fresh cream); taking dinners from the freezer backlog of all those ‘chef’s surprise’ slow-cooker meals which have been building up; and a take away curry delivery on Saturday, I held out without needing to go until today. Saturday’s dinner in the slow cooker will be belly pork with cannellini beans, celery, red pepper, carrots and maybe sweet potatoes cooked in cider, because too many of the ‘chef’s surprises’ seem to have sauces based on tinned tomatoes, and I fancied a more radical change.

I have been getting discouraged about a lot of things lately – mainly the garden. My Facebook memories keep showing all the lovely things which were in flower at this time last year. Someone said to me the other day that my garden is ‘blooming’, but he was judging it from Facebook, where I have posted pictures of every single flower I’ve seen so far – sometimes several pictures of the same one, over a number of days, as I’m still trying to post a photo every day. The actual total of flowers so far has been: one yellow and three white daffodils on the forecourt, and in the back garden one blue hyacinth and a handful of mini daffodils; two hellebores (one single and, more recently, one double flower), a few blossoms on the rosemary which were only visible if you looked very carefully and a couple of yellow celandines under the camellia (which I only just remembered). The rest is a desert of weeds, rotting planks and general junk currently in transit between the sheds. Is this disaster down to the hot, dry summer last year, or a total lack of interest and attention? I assume most likely a combination of the two.

It’s the curse of social media. However honest I try to be about my general worthlessness and self loathing, it seems that people want to keep seeing me in a more positive light. Which is very frustrating – but on the other hand, if they could see me more clearly, they wouldn’t want to be my friends anyway. And then I’d feel even worse.

I honestly don’t know how to shake off these feelings, and more and more it seems that there isn’t any escape. The effort required feels overwhelming, but so is the effort to pretend to be what I’m not: brave, positive, upbeat, hopeful, happy etc. Feelings always take control over intentions to change, to find a better way to be.

I almost didn’t write today. Perhaps it would be better if I didn’t throw all this out into the void. But I usually feel better afterwards

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The Long Way Back

Yesterday was the anniversary of one of my most vividly-remembered days described in ‘Single to Sirkeci’, when I arrived at Port Camargue. Earlier in the week I was remembering Prague, and it all set me thinking about ‘The Long Way Back’, and whether I’m ever going to finish it. I’ve been thinking about it for years – or, more accurately, I’ve been avoiding thinking about it. At first I used to start each year with the resolution that: ‘this is the year I’ll finish and publish it!’, but gradually I got over that, and recently I have been trying to learn to let it go, along with all my other failures.

I spent about six months, from autumn 2017 to spring 2018, trying to make something of it. It started with the ‘rump’ of around forty thousand words describing the return half of the journey from Istanbul back to England, which I’d chopped from the sixth draft of ‘Single to Sirkeci’. Prior to deciding to split the manuscript, I’d spent a couple of years on the herculean task of trying to edit the 200k word first draft down by half, and after brushing off multiple suggestions of chopping it into two books, and stalling at 140k, I gave in to the inevitable.

When I published ‘S2S’ in early 2017, the plan for ‘The Long Way Back’ was to combine the material I had on the return journey with a briefer description of what had happened after my return; my time in Prague; my moving to Southsea; and some reflections on lessons learned from the ‘life journey’ (if I could think of any) – I even wrote an introduction and blurb to that effect, which I must dig out some time when I need a good laugh at the ironies of over-ambition.

Giving myself six months to deal with cancer and chemo, I started in September 2017 to go through blog posts from the time between returning ‘home’ at the start of August 2012, and departing for Prague in May 2013. Rather than the planned précis, I found myself editing a tale of disappointment, depression and yearning, as I struggled to come to terms with life – while, in the present, also struggling to come to terms with moving on from cancer. This resulted in a further fourteen thousand words to add to the forty, and I hadn’t even started on Prague – which, when I went back to it, was also a saga of depression and disappointment, although alleviated in places just by the fact of being in Prague. Then there was the year after, living back with my ex (working title: ‘Madwoman in the Attic’), mystery illness, moving to Southsea – and then what?

For a while I toyed with the idea of turning Prague into a third volume, and spent some time trying to find three–syllable words starting with either ‘B’ or ‘R’ to make a catchy title: ‘Bohemian Something-or-other’ but with no luck.

Then I just stopped. I just stopped writing.