Stress loads and paper

Every morning I drive through a broad road. Now, this is worth noting when you live in England and in my city where many streets are very narrow, traffic quite intense and an average street is heavily parked on both sides. This may not be a natural state of affairs if you live in open spaces where front gardens are not obstructed by tall vans and houses are built on somewhat raised grounds. Here, we primarily see the cars but when I drive to a more affluent part of the town I can actually see the houses and have my own side of the road for myself. It feels airy, calm and informative – in a sense that you can actually see the trees and notice that that the seasons have changed.

Anyhow, back to the topic of a broad road vs the narrow road. I must admit I find it hard to handle the claustrophobic city planning. It makes me unhappy. It is not cosy. It feels like aesthetic deprivation or aesthetic discrimination but in reality it also feels like the actual love we have. It is depressing at times though as much as building houses in one style in the same street is. Lack of variety is dull and I guess that some people think this is unifying but in fact it is drab. I used to like Wales for its uniqueness in building and developing areas, I liked its variety and then recently I went to visit some areas and they all look the same with houses red-bricked, unrendered. I know it has its visual climate, it has its distinctiveness, but shouldn’t the architects be seeking their own roots to self-expression? It feels like some talents are squashed under this sameness and with their talents squashed, ordinary people are too because they become aesthetically deprived and there is a lot of value in beauty – we know that.

Back to the broad street. I am thinking now a lot about such issues as stress load and judgements. How we are prone to judge people for their life choices and to accuse them for having a nicer lifestyle than us or with us when we actually do not understand what is contributing to their daily stress bucket or how we contribute to theirs. I was thinking about the caption that I placed under this blog ‘stress-free blog’ which is tempting. Come with me and your life will be stress-free but in all honesty I do not know what your current stress-load is and if my lifestyle or the examples of lifestyles I share here would contribute to your reduction of stress. It feels dishonest, to some extent. I also am not sure anymore if what I thought in the past or I think now, would make you happier or more efficient or better in any way because we are unique and our life is very context-dependent and what fits one person, tightens the other.

But I know what move I need to make to feel better and to feel healthier and I think it’s called ‘focusing on emptying’.

A friend of mine told me years ago that she has problems with papers and with organising papers around the house. I did not share her problem at the time but I think it was because my tolerance for living with papers was much higher than hers. Plus, my husband says that I pretty much bring to the house everything that has a photo on and a nice font plus I never said no to any international friend who was leaving the UK and had to part with their well-read children’s books. These are also on our shelves. And on the floors and on our windowsills and behind the beds. And paper is what I spend my money on too and I find it so hard to part with it.

By the way, what book has dropped behind your bed recently? I am curious to know. Will you keep it? Sell it?

I have been reading quite a few texts recently online and it seems to me that if we do not talk about money in some way we do not participate in any debates. It makes me sad to a large extent as I did not want to talk about money on the very onset of this blog but then I appear unreal to people if I do not tackle the topic in some way. I read that most frequent question asked by people on Mondays is how to save. This I presume is because they overspend during the weekends or could you think of any other reasons for it? Maybe discovering that something needs to be fixed at home?

I think the unexpected expenses are those that trip us up most. For example, one of our roof tiles was loose and we had a low level of water ingress for a very long time. When my husband was trying to prepare one of our rooms for our daughter before she was born he had to remove a lot of plasterboard and noticed that there was a lot of mould growth happening underneath. We had to have our roof repaired which was a significant additional cost to what we had planned before the birth. When our flight from Poland was cancelled, we had to take seven trains to the UK to get there on time. In the first case, our parents helped us out with the cashflow issues, in the second case we had insurance. Better to have insurance, since parents like to know that we are mature enough to handle our life threats.

So that’s it for now.

I have to focus on emptying. But for how long?

I am curious to learn about your challenging life situations and how you’ve managed to do what has to be done. Did you negotiate the cost?

A friend of mine is very good at that. Was it part of your culture when you were growing up to do so?

By for now.

And a tip for self-aware humans: what for you is worth noting down?

Love lessons hard to stomach

Love lessons hard to stomach

I wish someone told me at some point: ‘Maybe it is a good time to visit your family.’ There was no one there to tell me that. There was no one to remind me, to encourage me, to make that decision for me. Perhaps we were all too comfortable with WhatsApp chats and occasional phone-calls. All too comfortable with not needing to clean up the house before the guests arrive, make time for each other. We are heavy together at times, true, but we are also good managers of each other’s moods if we choose to be.

I chatted to a friend recently online. I was almost breathlessly listing all the troubles that do not belong to my dream life and that are not possible to escape from. With every point listed, I felt that I was adding a stone to her basket, making her life as heavy as mine. I felt she listened through reading the messages in our chat but I had an impression that I was making her body posture bend, just as mine was bending at the time. I felt horrible for being so needy and then I thought maybe she thinks differently about it all. Maybe… she has a bag in front of her and all my stones end up in that bag and then perhaps she will use them to create borders for flowers in her real or imagined garden. Perhaps she will make something useful out of my pain. Perhaps every point listed needs support to be enlisted.

I am feeling quite lonely now and strangely I have this urgent need to care for the world, feeling that I messed up big time on a few seminal life tasks in the last ten years and I’d like not to be doing it forever. Regrets pour out of me through holes in my head and chest and where the holes are I have a vision of green grasses growing. When I was little I used to help my dad with guarding our cherry orchard. Every so often I would sit down in the very early morning hours and I would watch the dew on the grass blades and their shimmering in the morning rising sun. I remember thinking then that there is no hope for me as there is no job that would pay me for looking at the light piercing through water. Children know little about the job market, don’t they?

Above my desk, on a shelf, I have a mug depicting the hedgehog character from Beatrix Potter’s story, Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, illustrating also a piece of cake on a plate, a tea cup, a butterfly, a ladybird and twig and her in the garden with a bird perched next to her apron. She looks at the cake invitingly with an expression saying: ‘I hope you will like it, my dear’. Next to it there is an old battery (which my husband tells me off for using because he correctly thinks the rechargeable ones are much more environmental, he knows his stuff) and a small electric candle that shimmers when I put it on. The candle is reassuring, albeit it is not a real one. I can’t stop the temptation of being cynical about world advancements. I think I am missing the poets of Grasmere, the guys that would say no to developments and preserve grass fields so that we could do the job of the poets, writers, politicians, film-makers, recovering androids, whatever. Who wouldn’t like to be the good android on the cards of human history? One that gives the air back to people.

I like Beatrix Potter a lot but this inviting expression ‘I hope you will like it, my dear’ is not necessarily what I need right now given that in the last 7 years I put on weight over 30 kilograms of precious mass mostly because I changed my lifestyle a lot and moved my bottom into a car seat fed up with pushing the pram. I haven’t made reasonable adjustments taking into account the needs of the body and the needs of bossy kids. At some stage I also worked in a very challenging school witnessing a lot of misbehaviour and violence at times. I remember I was so stressed after work that I would stop in front of Tesco, buy a huge pack of Pringles and I would eat it all in one sitting in a car even before I entered the house. My stress levels at the time where beyond what I could handle even after having completed a course in Stress Management and I was working with a former football coach and someone who trained in boxing. The unpredictability of violence – this I could not stomach and neither could he.

My health collapsed then again and I saw that there are limits to every training and every theory and every good intention. I wasn’t the right person for those kids, but who was? Do they ultimately need to see for themselves that they are going in a wrong direction?

That said, I think there is some ridiculousness about the way we judge kids, about the way we name what we are doing. For example, back there at the school, the long lessons for kids with difficulties in attention were changed into 20 minute tasks and then a break, but then you read any guide on good lecturing and this is exactly what it recommends, for anyone who attends a lecture to keep the students engaged, so how come one measure is labelled as students engagement and the other one as a strategy to manage disruptive behaviour. Ultimately, it is the same thing and a brain to feed at regular intervals. Wouldn’t business leaders call it the Pomodoro technique? Is it possible that we are all unruly kids with a tendency for violent behaviour if we are kept in cages for too long, be it the cage of boredom, deprivation or permanent interference?

I thought I was on a staircase to heaven back then, trying to handle as many social issues as I possibly could tackle at the time and now I am more conscious of looking for steps that could really make a difference. I am limited in scope.

That said, when we try to stay on that staircase and we put our foot on a wrong step and our leg is sinking, does it do it to get burnt or to heal? Are there any other substances in material science that do not have the same effect on the body as concrete? Mud baths, perhaps? Sometimes the step is this. The mud bath that puts our feet in recovery. That heals the legs to make things safer.

The radio reported this morning of the Pope’s operation and that it was successful and he is recovering. Illnesses are dissatisfying companions, that perhaps remind us that we should be taking our wishes into account while we are still living and breathing. {By the way, if you are working in an office, have you also noticed that the word ‘operations’ is one of the triggers for your colleagues and employees and yet we use it for our admin offices. An anxiety trigger that perhaps is worth noticing when things get a bit stuck at work.}

I think that’s it from me today. Just remember to keep on cuddling your kids, those inner ones and those nearby. Love to all, A.

And my prayer for today.

God, with clenched teeth I rest today.

May I remain silent about how much I love you or fear you. Just in case…

The voice cruises towards you…

I can feel it too.

But you are on your own timeline.

Thank God.

By for now,

Alicja Pyszka-Franceschini

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A wiser choice to make

A wiser choice to make

I travelled to my country of origin for a funeral. A family member died.

An ice-cube formed inside me and there is no one to argue with about this turn of events.

And the screaming about it also feels wrong at this stage.

But I feel I need to talk about it as otherwise my internal timeline or calendar will start ripping and I would have gaps in memory rather than the lived experience so let me talk about it in a manner that is as shallow and as deep as I possibly can at this stage.

I do not want to have memory losses.

I want to own my timeline.

So let me speak…

Ironically, my daughter is sitting right next to me right now and is watching You Tube shorts on endangered animals. These losses we can still prevent.

I flew from Birmingham to Warsaw Modlin in Poland. A friend accommodated me, gave me a warm meal and a warm breakfast, took me to a florist in the morning and dropped me to the little village near Warsaw where the funeral took place and where my family was waiting.

The night before the funeral I wrote a message to the President of Warsaw enumerating all the good things my auntie and her husband did for the city of Warsaw hoping that a bench with a plaque on with their surname would never make her and her husband vanish from memory and then I deleted the message remembering that my aunty liked being a private person, so she would probably not appreciate me butting in in that way. She liked the Moon more than park benches and I do not quite know how to honour her interest in it yet.

Grief hardly ever makes us holy. We know that. It pulls our teeth out making us restless and faithless as denial wraps around a belief like a frost around an unsealed shoe. It is trying to be pally where honesty would be more appropriate: I have taken from you your beloved and I am not willing to return them to you in any other form than a chain of complex emotions that you would need to learn to handle by not acknowledging that you do have a heart.

Life is giving me a workshop in distress tolerance.

Cheers.

Thank you.

It seems to be my staple at the moment.

My kid had altercation with another student on a bus. Now, I am taking him to school in the morning. The daily early morning car chat is what we both need, it seems to me. The teenage world is not easy to enter or navigate. I feel at times I do not have the necessary graces to guide my son through it.

I decided to be a friend to myself though and I signed up for a short online course in Creative Writing run by Falmouth University. It is delivered by Jamie Popowich and I feel very supported by his delivery and demeanor so far. I like his energy. I know that this is me being a good friend to myself and I also know that being a very good friend would mean doing filming or cinematography course too but I have not figured out the way forward with this yet. Things are not getting any cheaper year by year and I am not getting any younger so I figured that it is the right time for me to cover that gap in learning. I did my first degree in English, Spanish and American Studies but I always felt very deprived of the creative writing edge that would come with Creative Writing degree.

But maybe everything gives us an edge. Just the fact of being on the edge of our own life experiences makes our edge uniquely edgy.

Turning sour now.

Too much salt.

It’s been a week too hard to handle, in all honesty. And I wish I could cry but my left eye duct is blocked so even that in not possible now.

I’m turning sour now, where caring would be a wiser choice to make.

Stay or move in grace.

Lots of love, A.

Below Grief and Anger, drawn by me.