To the unknown people of my heart

This is my joy: precious and passing connections, shared moments of warmth and light that linger in a stained glass glow of significance. I welcome each of you to my heart. 

It happens less often now than it did when I was young and on my own and life had little privacy. Recently, though, I found a myself sitting on a crowded, evening train next to a girl, glowing 17-year old skin beneath a dark head-covering. As I contemplated plugging in to a podcast, I noticed that she was not really looking at her phone, and so I spoke.  

"Have you been shopping?"

"No, I'm going home to see my Dad."

And so it began, an hour's conversation punctuated by comfortable pauses that grew less as the time went by. She was a catering student, a former atheist who had sought religion and, finding the Catholicism of one side of her ancestry wanting, turned to Islam. We discussed all we had in common, our desire to see the world a better place, our disquiet with the hatred that divides nations, our longing for everyone to find human connection instead. We talked about the histories of our religions. We talked about our hopes and dreams and experience. We talked about our families and what we like to do with our time. And then the train pulled into her stop: "Goodbye, goodbye, what a wonderful talk, how good to put the world to rights, goodbye, may all go well with you," and since then she has popped in and out of my thoughts and I bless her with all that is good and whole. 

She shall pop into my mind now and then for the rest of my life, and I shall wonder how she fared, just as I wonder about the older girl I met on a bus when I was 17. She was sad, and our conversation was good, so I took her for a coffee in McDonalds when we arrived. She was the first person to tell me, unbidden, that I was pretty and so cracked the shell of body dysphoria - something she shall never know. And I wonder, this perfectly made up girl, did she ever discover she was lovely enough not to need a man-made face?

I wonder about my fellow-travellers on the Mosel-Schwarzwald train when I was 20. The English-Danish lad worried about the environmental impact of a mooted connecting bridge between Germany and Denmark - did he keep up the fight? The tall, thin Dutch law student, how cadaverous his face - did he end up as I pictured him, thundering justice in the courts from dark and glaring eyes? The joyful, joy-sharing American girls, larger than life with vast suitcases we had to shift every time the refreshments trolley passed by - was their Geneva university adventure all they hoped it would be?  

I wonder about the young mathematician I met on a flight from Hong Kong - the one who was the secret love of a fellow-student - did their plans to stay together work out? I wonder if he remembers the young woman who traded stories and bought him an overpriced coffee in Geneva airport when our onward flight was delayed. In return, he taught me backgammon and I set to with Ludo logic - keep the last counter up with the rest - and he said, amazed, that no-one had ever come so close to beating him before. 

And what of the kind and steadily sozzling business men on the plane to Beijing? The retirees returning to the UK in February after 18 months following the summer around Australia? The tipsy woman in a crowd of drunken Irish football fans on the Machynlleth train, who discovered I was a student and spent the rest of the journey telling them to shut up because she thought the long letter I was writing to a friend was an essay. The junior doctor on the train from Cardiff who noticed the book I was reading and fell asleep mid-sentence after a 49-hour week, and was sleeping still when I later disembarked. The girl who offered me a Twix on the Paris-Strasbourg train that I refused because I was embarrassed to have been caught staring in hunger, so long after breakfast and with dinner yet hours away. 

And all the tiny moments, shop assistants ready to chat during a lull, fellow-queuers at the door, people at the next table in a coffee shop or pub. Yes, the weather is lovely, the weather is awful, the cakes look amazing, the service is slow, how awkward our glances as someone unmoored shouts in the street outside, oh, what a lovely dog - may I?  

There are, too, missed connections I do not care to remember - the suddenly-seen discomfort of someone in the line of a self-absorbed scowl, the ghost of rejection from a person I just passed by unseeing, the smile withheld from the searching eyes. 

This is how it is. We are not islands unmoving as life streams by, nor are we the big fish that shape the world's tides: we are the little fish flashing silver and speckled and olive dark, each in our own little eddy and every so often nudging another, creating tiny legacies of muddled stories, mind-caught, water-woven images of you, and you, and you, captured as you were in that moment, on that day, at that time, before the waters closed and we moved on.

Why I became a Secretary instead of a Writer

 

I have recently written a blog post on my professional site about where my Executive Assistant career began: as a little girl, meeting the woman who got to spend all day with my Dad! That had to be the best job, didn't it? 

So why did I not follow the plan my Dad actually spoke over me: that his avaricious little reader would be a writer one day? It was a great idea. Except I didn't figure I needed to participate in it to make it happen. 

I'm no sports person, but I'm going to use the idea of hurdling to figure it out. That's a writer's prerogative. 

Hurdle 1: No time to write 
Until I was 16, the opportunities came via school. Compositions during English language lessons. RE where the nuns, for reasons God must know but I can't fathom, had us transcribing every verse of the book of Luke, one by one, into our own words. Drama even saw me writing a play about pirates. When all that disappeared out of my timetable, I didn't make new time to write. I read instead, nurtured myriad relationships, worked 40 hour weeks, participated in my church community, did the chores, watched TV. 

Hurdle 2: Discouragement
The writing for school earned ticks for proper use of language and no comment for creativity. My one attempt to carry on beyond 16 was dropped when I allowed a friend to read the first 2 pages of a planned romance and saw that within seconds she was staring into space. "Is it boring?" I asked. She nodded, embarrassed. It went in the bin. I didn't pick up pen and paper again. 

Hurdle 3: Lack of self-belief
This is what made me so vulnerable to discouragement, intended or not. I was cripplingly short of self-confidence and paralysed by perfectionism. If I couldn't get it right first time, it was just another way in which I was no good and there was no point trying again. As for writing, I needed to write something no-one had ever written before. It took me a long time to realise every writer starts out comfortable in the knowledge there's nothing new under the sun.

Hurdle 4: Lack of a dream
I only knew what I did not want to be. Disapproved of. Scorned. Laughed at. Most of all - someone who let others down. I could not help but be me, but I spread myself too thin and wore myself out trying to be someone people could bear to be with because I did not believe I could be lovable in and of myself. I didn't have the energy or courage to aspire to more. 

Yet, it seems I have been running without knowing it...

Leap 1: Writing by stealth
Friends during my University years will remember fat letters dropping through their letter-box, up to eight pastel pages of illegible scrawl, peppered with exclamation marks and ellipses, requiring a deep breath and a coffee in hand to read. Later at work, I drafted reports and letters to go out in someone else's name, conveying the intended message, telling the story that would persuade customers to buy and board members to make the decisions the executive needed. I became the go-to person for proof reading and editing. And I learnt to cope when it didn't go quite right.

Leap 2: Collecting other people's flowers
I learnt to hear encouragements, to believe them and to hold on to them. I learnt to hear admonishments without going into crisis and to use them to grow. And then, there were the stories I gathered - from friends over coffee and cake, afternoon teas, and supper-times, while walking or shopping or sightseeing together; from strangers on trains and buses and aeroplanes, in queues and at shop counters. I took their stories, snipped them, arranged them into bouquets, and offered them out to entertain, to encourage, to philosophise, to empathise. .

Leap 3: Learning to be me
I stood on the brink of ending it all and Jesus stood by me and said, "You go through whatever you need to go through, but don't forget, I am here and I shall hold you fast." I got help for depression and started to get to know the only person I will ever see in the mirror and to befriend her. I've listened when God has called me "Beloved" and whispered to me my name, and let his love sink into my heart. And then I have, I hope, got over myself a bit. Not that you'd know it reading this "all about me" piece, but it's my blog, so you'll have to take my word for it.

Leap 4: Waking up the dormant dream
Sleepless at 2 o'clock in the morning after losing a friend to a brain haemorrhage decades before her time, I got up and wrote down how it felt, this heavy, dark cat that had squeezed into my heart, painfully stretching it and settling down to sleep, starting awake at unexpected moments, eyes wrapped wide around its head, to lash out with claws extended and unleash searing pain. My pen wrote on, unbidden: one day the night would have passed, and the cat would wake and stretch and pad away through one of the ribbon cuts in my heart into the wild garden that had grown around it, and keep walking until it was lost in the light of the early sun. It would not look back, not once. And the heart it left behind would be expansive and unfurled, blooming in memory of my friend.
      Just a few weeks later, I was at a slimming class of all places, and found myself next to someone I'd not met before. Within minutes, I discovered she was a colleague, a Christian, a poet, a writer, a stand-up comic. She gave me her number and invited me to the Association of Christian Writers. At the first get-together, I read out a piece I had written; there was a stunned silence and warm acceptance. My new friend smiled. "You are a writer," she said.

The finish line?
Well, it's a long way off yet, God's plans aside. Some of those hurdles are still there in slightly altered forms, some of the leaps are careful steps I'm still making. But you've just read the result of my trying to run the race, even if it is at a slow walking pace. I hope there will be more words to come, and that you will be there to read them.

Resilience for Perfectionists

From my professional blog: a reflection on how perfectionists need to develop resilience, but if they approach it with perfectionism, they'll soon run into difficulties. 

Priory Secretarial Blog Post - Resilience for Perfectionists

Elephant

Last year I visited my sister in Namibia and went on a short safari. When I saw my first wild elephant, a young lone male, I burst into tears and promptly had a nosebleed. 

To those around me, it probably seemed a bit over-dramatic. To those I was travelling with, it was the natural result of the few days I had just spent at altitude in Windhoek. But it makes a good story. 

Like the elephant, I have a reputation for having a phenomenal memory, which I have mentioned before. I also have a reputation for having a brain like a sieve. I will forget to post a birthday card in time, or that I have arranged to meet someone for a coffee, or to go to the dentist. But I can bring back at a moment's recall the stories I created to capture something that at the time felt worth remembering. I am not the slightest bit unique in this: it is a quintessentially human way of navigating the world and fixing our place within it. It is why we have our myths and legends and histories: long before man first scraped animal skins to vellum, or beat plant fibres to paper-pulp, we passed on knowledge through stories that echo around us still.

Story-telling might be a wonderful way of capturing memory, but it is also deeply flawed as a way of capturing the facts as they have a tendency to shift with every re-telling. I have taken a while to come to terms with this. I knew I couldn't trust my day to day memory, but the veracity of my longer-term recall was part of my identity. If I couldn't trust my memories, then is anything true, and who or what am I? I wrestled with the idea for months, and then stopped thinking about it until I sat down today to write and found a half-written piece about elephants and memory. And as I picked it up to finish it, I realised I've made peace with my brain's unreliability. I accept that sometimes I will tell a story and someone else will say, "It wasn't like that at all." I accept that sometimes someone else will tell me a story and I will say, "I don't remember that at all." And that's OK. Those stories might be full of inaccuracies, but they preserve what is important: the lesson we took away with us and what it means to us now. And they are written, not in stone, but in the fleshy folds of our mind and as such may be adjusted to allow for the extra facts and perspectives someone else brings.

In the elephant kingdom, matriarchal groups preserve shared memories and use them to teach the young. I suppose that for young bull elephants, these memories have to be embedded well, because they are destined for a life wandering largely alone. When elephants meet, they connect or re-connect in low sounds that rumble through the air and sound like the earth shaking. So it is for us. No matter how lonely we wander, cloud-like or otherwise, when we connect with others and share our stories we may feel the world shift around us, but we also discover ourselves to be rooted and anchored after all. We find that we can move beyond the insularity of our own narratives and gain a sanity-saving sense of perspective without which all our carefully-constructed edifices will crumble and bury those we love beneath their stones. 

Whole New Worlds

Hello from Namibia! At last I have made it to long dreamed Africa, visiting my sister who is living here for a while. I am experiencing a very different life from home: my sister has children whereas I do not, and we are enjoying the school holidays together. First, a few days in the interior seeing giraffe, elephant, rhino, zebra and antelope in a brown savannah, where trees were caught in perpetual autumn under a too-hot sun.  The rains hadn’t come last winter and the sky remained empty of clouds. 

Then, we drove to the cool coast where the Atlantic breaks against the Namib desert and salt is harvested in white industrial pyramids amid cormorant and flamingo that gather on the brackish waters.

 

My opportunities to travel the world are limited, and even when I do, how deep can my immersion be? But stories, they open up the worlds and times to me I cannot travel and stay.  They challenge my assumptions, broaden my mind, develop my compassion.

I recently listened to Jaspreet Kaur's "Brown Girls Like Us" on BBC Podcasts.  As she told her story she challenged me to reflect on the times I have othered others.  She freed me from the squirming embarrassment of those recollections because I am one of those she appreciates have learned - are learning - how not to make unintended micro-aggressions.  She generously opens up her world, her experience, culture, beliefs, family, friends, childhood, her present life.  She demonstrates how much we have in common in our human experience, the silenced childhood emotions, the fears we took too long to face, the parents we took too long to understand, the joy of reaching the now and the curiosity for the years that lie ahead.

Jaspreet’s was not the first story I have immersed myself in from another culture, and it won’t be the last.  She has been added in my heart to countless others who have opened up new worlds to me, including those that have let me live in the past and in extraordinary possible futures.  They offer me a kaleidoscope of lenses through which to look and feel.  I am the left richer for it, and am ever grateful. These books, whether fiction or true-story or somewhere in between, provide doorways I can return to again and again and to all those writers I say thank you for taking the courage and time to welcome me in. 

Story Eaters

This is the book my father’s mother gave him, and nearly half a century later he gave me. A tatty old book that opened up to me bright rivers of words that sing in my mind still.

 

As a solitary teenager, I read anything I could get my hands on. My mother went back and forth to the library while I was at school to keep me fed. I scoured my parents' bookshelves and read whatever caught my eye, age appropriate or not.  Why? Because I loved stories, because I wanted to escape, because I wanted to taste existences I did not have courage or lifetime enough to inhabit.

In these habits I was just being human: we are story eaters and can never have enough.  These endless permutations of words are sand whispering along a breath that began in the beginning and never stopped.  They are waterdrops streaming through fingers that will hold their memory as long as flesh lives on the bone.  They rise from their river beds to become clouds on the dusty wind, that will fall and reassemble on the grateful earth below. They gather in pools that shiver with facsimiles of the stories they once were, and we take from them and give each other to drink. And the thirsty ground takes what is left and pushes forth green shoots that become the crops on which we feed.

I have a reputation among my friends for storing memories.  How?  Because they became stories.  Schoolfriend Helen, aged 13, wrote in her Battle of Marathon essay, "There was much death on both sides.  And in the middle."  I told this snatched delight to my family over dinner.  I'm still telling it to this day.  I make sense of life’s challenges by finding the narrative. I trace my feelings back to their origins and mix them with remembered things and those ever shifting stories are me, whether I enjoy them or not. 

I am a story eater and I can never have enough.

Life's a beach, curated.

Under Devon blue skies and the too-hot sun we have had a happy and busy week marking our first anniversary here and the launch of my new business venture.  A year ago we were in the Midlands and a long way from the sea.  Now that has all changed.  One late afternoon we went to the beach for a walk just because we could, and I walked in the breaking surf where it meets the exposed sand.

There have been conversations about how we present curated lives to the world on Facebook, Insta, Twitter and the rest.  Mostly perfect moments with a few carefully selected honesties thrown in, that may show vulnerability but rarely show us at our truly black and awful worst.  But we've always done it.  Handprints and hunting scenes drawn with ochre and spit in sacred caves.  Fearsome deeds and heady frolics in ritual dance on pots and urns.  Philosophies on parchment and diary entries on pages that fade.  Photographs taken with care so as not to waste the film.  Home movie memories with voice-overs recorded in telephone tones.  I am talking, of course, about when we take the time to capture our images, not the unguarded moments when we leak the bleakest sides of ourselves.  That is a whole other conversation.

I've collected stories since I was a child.  Even as I leafed through my paternal grandmother's black and white photographs of dogs and big houses and sunny Cornish days, I pieced together from other sources dark tales of a beloved brother lost at war, a baby sister spoilt to passivity, an arranged marriage, glorious eccentricities and petty spites, a life that ended alone in alcoholism and tears.  

So please, enjoy this perfect moment with me.  I hope it makes you smile.  But do not envy it me.  My life is exactly like yours.  There are moments like these that melt my insides to sugared liquid sunshine.  And there are moments when I just get it all wrong.  There are vicious spiked moments of self-loathing that raise my fists against me and spit nasty at those trying to care.  And there are moments when I can lift another person simply with my smile, and notice their new hair, new coat, new shoes and remember to thank them for a passing kindness.  In the midst of such inconsistency and the power of all that is dark and bad, these moments of nobility and joy and truth and compassion keep us moving on, and it is good that we pin them down.  Because from out of the bottom of the casket of evil things rises Hope triumphant, and she unfurls her vast and shining wings and is bigger and higher than all dark swarms below.  The dark cannot put out a light.  But the light will always lift the dark, however small.