(...)
When ego bursts
It makes space
For the other...
Alicja Pyszka-Franceschini, Autumn 2024
From the anthology On Immaturity (not yet published) by Alicja Pyszka-Franceschini
Photograph: Alicja Pyszka-Franceschini, Ambergate, The Birches, Derbyshire, UK
Irrespective if you are someone flamboyant about your gratitudes or modest in expressing them, Tuesdays seem to be the right day to create a list of blessings and positive experiences. To ward off the anxieties that might be resurfacing midweek and to keep our mind calm and to make our heart palpitate gladly.
The Life with The Crew started The Thankful Tuesdays. I want to cultivate this blogging custom. I believe it serves us all well. Do you want to join in?
Here I go with mine. Today I am grateful for:
– the snow, the snow, the snow… that did not melt too quickly and the fox that appeared in our garden just after midday
– my friend’s successful knee operation and his quick recovery and our chat over a cup of coffee and his sharing of insights and wisdom from life
– for a very considerate friend who dropped Castor oil at my doorstep to improve blood circulation in the shoulders
– a husband who made a lovely Mediterranean style lentil dish with leek and green pumpkin and parsley (on the blog soon)
– translators who translate children’s stories and allow us to move between languages but within the same storytelling sphere: Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson, La Strega Rosella – translated by the incredbly skilled Laura Pelaschiar, and the Polish version entitled ‘Miejsce na Miotle’ by translated by the excellent Michał Rusinek
– Jodie Wilson from Practising Simplicity for encouraging Yoga as a gentle exercise for busy lives, very useful for frozen shoulders too and any problems with posture that result from attached monkeys to our hips (be it kids or cameras) and also for her indirect encouragement to contact blog readers
– for Adam Phillips’ book On Getting Better and his ability to put into words what we tend to hide from ourselves, i.e. that our transferences and regressions intensify with our resistance :)
– for our daughter who said today that she wants to do her homework on her own and allowed me to load the dishwasher in the meantime
– for the recent Outdoor Photography Magazine and the glorious portfolio review by Massimo Leotardi and their reminder that we are soon going into a National Tree Week that is uniting all the tree lovers in the UK (see treecouncil.org.uk). This is one of our favourite magazines at home and we like to have a conversation over the photographs in the morning either by exiling tensions over the landscape photographs or by giggling and wowing over aquatic creatures or mice hiding in a hollow apple
– our morning routine that has just greatly improved due to a managerial trick, i.e. a checklist with all that needs to be taken to schools. Seriously, we need it. Our working memory is only capable of remembering six items at once. Everything else is an excess. We also use a simple linguistic change of words. Instead of saying ‘Speed up’, we say ‘Focus on buttoning up your shirt’, etc. So we focus on the actual activity that we want the children to complete and use the verb ‘focus on’. In that way, the morning routine is smoother for all of us and we have nicer starts to the day.
– for a glorious Journey Through Time and Light event at Crich Tramway Village that has put us in a festive mood and brought a huge anticipation of joy for the coming Christmas season
– for finding ways of preparing our son for his weekly Polish dictation tests at his Saturday School.. gosh this was a hard nut to crack..
What would you put on your list?
At Crich Tramway Village, A Journey Through Time and Light, Derbyshire, 2024
“Mum, I do not think that people lose talents. I think that they disconnect from them and then God gives them tasks that will help them come back to themselves and make them reconnect with their talents again” said A. the other day as if answering the question set to him by the universe while looking at the passing clouds through our orangery’s see-through roof . Kids, they just get it, don’t they? Often much earlier than we do.
It was already very late into the evening when we navigated through the German town of Stendhal last summer. When the telephone collapsed and the printed map, as if on purpose, showed us only the major streets and nothing nearby. No navigation. Both mobiles off. Just the drizzle and two small kids at the back of the car who really wanted to be stretching their feet in the warm beds after a long drive from Antwerp. We had one scare already when we got stuck in the queues for miles and after an hour our gears refused to cooperate and we were lucky to steer over to the hard shoulder of the motorway. My husband, unable to engage any gear at all and without any working phone, started to panic. Then he bent down and moved the clutch with his hand. This worked, but we were still scared as we carried on driving – confident at that stage that we would find our destination.
Stendhal greeted us with almost empty roads. No human in site, shops put to rest for the night, and no petrol station to stop by or a taxi driver to talk to and a detour around the city because of roadworks that completely took us off course and messed up the organization of the town that I had in my head. There must be a way of figuring out where we we staying, I thought to myself, trying not to lose hope just yet even though I was increasingly getting agitated and restless. The children’s tension mounted and then it broke out with joy as a Burger King stood there lit like a lighthouse in the stormy sea. We parked the car and checked if there was anyone in. We saw people moving but they could not see us. The doors were shut. We were searching for alternatives in our head. We had none. If it was about petrol, we could walk there. No problem. If it was about distance, we could call a taxi, but it was primarily about our lack of direction and no one who we could communicate with. There was no one to whom we could have talked to, until of course there was.
We spotted two people who had just walked out through the back door of the Burger King in a joyful and chatty mood. Did we just miss them? Were we too late? We ran to them for rescue and we explained our predicament. They glanced at our kids and willingly typed the address of our accommodation into their smartphones. We still couldn’t navigate it as all the mobiles seemed to refuse to cooperate with us that evening. As if we meant to talk for a bit longer and learn where we were all from. And so we’ve learnt that they were from Syria and they’ve been settling down there slowly, and they asked for our origin and whereabouts and we prayed together for the phone to give us the direction that it refused to give. Nothing was changing, the postcodes were not accepted, the network circulated in a loop. We grew in frustration and we almost resigned to spend the night at the carpark when all of a sudden a third person came out of the Burger King, attentive and quick, just in a few seconds asked us what has happened and without hesitation took the postcode and typed it into his car’s navigation. ‘No problem. I will drive you there.’ – he said. We couldn’t believe it. He was so quick to help. What’s your name, I asked: ‘Hadi’. He said. Where are you from? Syria. I smiled. A long time ago I was dreaming of taking a Syrian family to safety and it was a person from Syria who took us to safety. Maybe God takes into account good intentions, too, I thought to myself, while we reached our destination being guided by Hadi.
Thank you, Hadi. :)
“Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
― Mary Oliver
Postcards Without Stamps 