Open to them

“If you don’t make the time to work on creating the life you want, you’re eventually going to be forced to spend a LOT of time dealing with the life that you don’t want.” Kevin Ngo

I do not usually like quotes that are somewhat threatening in tone, but I do like this one as it reminds me to be responsible for looking after my life. My life is in my hands and I need to give it meaning and purpose if I want us to flourish.

But looking after my daily life is just part of my personal responsibility. Another part is to make meaning out of my past.

”My mother was the love of my life.” – is a quote from Cheryl Strayed that I embrace warmly.

I adore this sentence so much for so many reasons but mainly for how well it counters our blame-oriented culture of today, the culture that seeks to blame our parents for who we have or have not become. The culture that renders us deficient in will and efficacy because of who our parents were or weren’t. The culture that teaches us to point fingers at the people whose youth, intentions and histories we cannot possibly experience. I think it’s good to work through childhood traumas, it’s good to examine our responses to them, but I do not think that we should succumb to the culture of blame. Because by doing that, we see our childhood as poorer than it actually was. I saw people being poisoned by the blame-oriented mindset more than by their actual childhood experiences. I saw people being stuck for years because of it. ”My mother was the love of my life.” – this sentence does the opposite. It gives meaning and sense to our childhoods. It shows that adults are fragile but also wonderfully capable of loving each other. Capable of loving deeply and dearly, and isn’t it what we all want? To be capable of such love for many people in our lives.

Sometimes I wonder what’s the purpose of the blame-oriented culture. To break, to divide, to render someone insecure. To cause grief? I know that many people would not be able to be so candid about their own mothers as Cheryl Strayed was. I know that for many their childhood experiences are too painful to even hear such words being spoken. But this quote is not only about the mother, right? But about the loves of our life. Beyond the question of our relationship with our parents, it nudges us to ask: What are the loves of our life? What can we do to be truly open to them?

The Uncertainty of Parenthood

When my son was born, I was overwhelmed by the enormity of tender-hearted love that I felt but I also felt shocked, I mean TOTALLY UNPREPARED for the amount of anxiety and uncertainty that characterizes these very early moments and then the subsequent years of parenthood. This uncertainty is caused by different circumstances for each one of us, sometimes it’s lonely mothering, a child’s illness, a changing work situation or a move to a different country, and sometimes the well-known sleepless nights or feeding problems, and sometimes by all these things at once. The fear and anxiety is present and experienced by all – it’s the given and the universal to our parenting experiences.

We deal with this uncertainty in many different ways, we cling to books, we cling to people, we cling to ideas, we cling to our identities or we withdraw, we withdraw from books, withdraw from people, withdraw from each other, withdraw from ourselves. All of this is supposed to help us handle the physical exhaustion and the cocktail of emotions that appear in the early phases of parenting. Pema Chödrön once quoted a Times article which said that we are more afraid of uncertainty than we are of physical pain.

I think she was right here.

She also wisely advised that in order to deal with uncertainties we must learn to smile at fear. To accept all the complex thoughts and feelings that engulf us in periods of uncertainty. Because it is only then that we will be able to understand what it means to be a human. Because it is only then that we will be able to understand and empathise with other people, but also with oneself. Yes, with oneself.

When we stay open to what’s ahead of us, the road widens and our curiosity grows and that’s what gives us courage to be together with our children and with our loved-one on each section of that road, walking together, with calm curiosity little by little, one intriguing section at a time.

On Valentine’s Day my husband, son and I went for a walk to an area of hills and valleys close to where we live. We just wanted a short walk down the valley and I was wearing a dress and everyday shoes (and my heavy camera without any charged batteries, grrr). Certainly not a type of gear to do any climbing in. I did not know that we would climb, with our son on my husband’s shoulders, in many ways unprepared. We were stepping higher and higher… curious what the world would look like if we went up just another ten more metres. We enjoyed the walk up, checking we had good footholds and letting each other and others know to avoid the wet and slippery bare rock that sometimes presented itself in the path. We enjoyed being given helpful suggestions by passing walkers and most of all we enjoyed the freedom and exhilaration of the climb up into the fresh and gentle cold breeze, periodically heated by a bright but distant winter sun. And then little by little we smilingly reached the top, sat for a moment on the highest point, and stared at the other rocky peaks that we one day might want to climb.

When I return to the time when I gave birth, I see myself as ‘unprepared in so many ways’. I still see myself now as ‘unprepared in so many ways’, but I am convinced that even unprepared we can still climb.

, an

Sea Monsters

“The sea snail slithered all over the rock
And gazed at the sea and the ships in the dock.
And as she gazed she sniffed and sighed,
“The sea is deep and the world is wide!
How I long to sail!”
Said the tiny snail.”

~ Julia Donaldson, The Snail and the Whale

At the beginning of the year, I found myself complaining about our house perhaps a bit too much, finding faults in pretty much everything, including the ceiling. I know that when I complain about the house, I do not really complain about the house – but about a lack of time and breathing space, generally about being overwhelmed. It’s intriguing how our attitudes to our spaces often reflect the states of our souls, don’t they?

Early in January we drove to Devon to spend a weekend with family and while being there we headed towards the sea, to Dawlish Warren. Maybe even to remind ourselves what it is to experience vast open spaces and the freedom that they offer. Winter sea air is wonderful for taking deep lung-stretching breaths and for carefree runs towards the sea. The runs are necessary if, just like a very curious three-year old, you want to find out where the beach sand is soft enough for your feet (or shoes) to sink in.

There are many attitudes that we can develop towards our personal spaces, we can project ourselves on to them, but the sea is too great and too majestic for us to do it and as a result it projects its greatness and dignity on us. That is why, having seen the sea, we come back to our homes with greater respect, awe and appreciation of ourselves and the whole humanity.

Wish

At the beginning of last year I had a number of ideas that I was wanting to explore in my research. I dismissed them, a whole bunch of them. Throughout the year they were reappearing, in my conversations,in my (sub-) consciousness, in my Fb feed. Some ideas just do not want to leave us, a bit like that jacket that you really liked and talked yourself out of buying but keep on visualizing wearing it. Certain visions just do sincerely like us and perhaps the fact that they haunt us really means that they are for us. That it’s time to answer them.

I am in the process of gathering all my crazy visions and ideas of the last year into a draft for my supervisor. Of course, I am afraid of being criticized and rejected but I think that I came to realise that at this stage I cannot offer anything else – as these are the ideas and the truths that I am in possession of right now and my consciousness cannot venture further without those truths being explained and captured.

If there is one thing that I would wish for myself for this year, it would be to become more courageous. To not wait for a year for my ideas to reappear to trust them to be good, to accept them quicker and to just work with them as they are. I think I was quite courageous in my early 20s, by coming to the UK on my own and creating my own life here, but somewhere during that journey I got a little disillusioned with things and courage ceased to be one of my top-cherished values. This I intend to change this year.

I often think how to encourage my son to be perseverant. What should I say? What should I do? It only occurred to me recently that it’s courage that I should be imparting on him. That I need to teach him that he should be courageous because perseverant people are courageous and they know that failure is just a call for redirection. To embrace courage, we must embrace failure for “The physics of courage is such that if you brave enough, often enough, you will fail.” ~ Brené Brown. Perhaps, that is why my mother was always so insistent on us being courageous. On being courageous all the time.

A December Soundscape

We’ve made an early start in our preparation towards Christmas. My little elf and I decorated our living Christmas tree last Sunday and we made the house smell of oranges, cinnamon and cloves with our very simple house ornaments. I’ve been having a very strong need of embracing peace in this very last month of the year – to counterbalance the madness that’s reported daily in the news but also to create a distance towards all the imposed deadlines and obligations that we have towards the end of year.

There is nothing worse than getting ourselves wound-up and exhausted during the time when our hearts are supposed to be expanding with peace, love and kindness, during the time when we should be filling ourselves up with all the goodness of the world that allows us to give and love fully in the year to come.

A while ago my husband and I promised to each other that we will live with the seasons, that we will allow ourselves to experience every month as nature wants us, with the goodness that each month brings. December with its candle-lit evenings, warm blankets and the purity of snow, invites peace. Early darkness frees us from disturbances – it is almost as if we’ve been encouraged to go a little deeper into ourselves to look for peace and remove the noise from our heads and hearts.

What I found, however, is that recently I have been coming home with some odd Christmas jingels in my head or snippets of disturbing news and conversations and I’ve been struggling to quieten these earworms in my head, but Thank God for good music. Music brings me to life and balance. The magical music that sends me where I want to be… into the cosy arms of the magical peaceful world of love and hope (and a little bit of nostalgia to complete it all).

If, just as me, you are a seeker of mellow contentedness and you love soulful, heart-opening (sometimes acoustic and instrumental but often also lyrical) music, here are my recommendations for you (click to open them in You Tube). I cannot have enough of these albums – my life would be emptier without them. Who knows… it might be the same for you.

Peace.