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.

on unresolved grief

'I cannot hear you anymore.'
'Is that a bad thing?'
'I think so.'
'What can you feel instead?'
'Stomach pain.'
'What does it say?'
'That I miss you.'
'You are so sweet.'
'No. Very bitter in fact.'

~ Alicja Pyszka-Franceschini

Living honestly and beautifully with oneself

I like stalking authors online. I love listening to their stories of effort and creation, and about the moments that they’ve discovered that writing is what they want to pursue in life. Cheryl Strayed, the author of the memoirs called ‘Wild’, is one of the author’s whose voice is often heard on different media these days and it is the voice that so many people look forward to hear. It’s not difficult to identify with Cheryl Strayed. Her story is a story of loss, grief and self-destruction, but also a story of self-redemption, a story of coming back to one’s own ideals and life-path. The book is her true story of the lonely hike down eleven hundred miles of the Pacific Crest Trail that she took in order to deal with the sudden death of her mother and in order to pull herself out of a period of self-destruction that followed her mother’s death. Her walk is a rite of passage. It’s a source of reconciliation and strength. In her book she writes that the wilderness, the landscape of the hike, was

“A world I thought would both make me into the woman I knew I could become and turn back into the girl I’d once been.”

Cheryl Strayed’s book wonderfully shows how we deal with the most complex and emotionally-unbearable situations in life. Loss and rebelliousness (to the point of self-destruction) often go hand in hand in life. We can easily see for ourselves how our refusal to accept and awake to the life that is triggers our self-destructive or other-destructive tendencies. I’m not talking here about big things, but about small ones too, like over-working or not-eating, or even refusing to be kind to people. This is what I call self- or other-destructive tendencies. Realising that we have them is probably one of the things that we learn about ourselves when we truly decide to grow up.

What Cheryl Strayed’s book taught me was that after every major transition in life we need a rite of passage that would help us to somehow zip-up all the loss and rebelliousness associated with it and leave it behind us. I’ve been looking for my own rite of passage, for my own way of dealing with personal junctures. From Cheryl Strayed I’ve learnt that you need two things: nature and being on your own, on your own in doing something. I needed to feel discomfort and I needed wide open spaces. My family and friends joined me in my exploration of open spaces, but I gained my solitude through a very simple exercise. I’ve asked my husband not to help me with looking after our house for one hundred days, and as a result the house is dirtier than ever, and only on occasions is it delightful with colourful flowers in its various corners. You see, I’m a reader. I choose a book all the time. In my solitude I choose to study (or to chat to a friend on Facebook). There. That’s it. For a long time I’ve been trying to make myself into a mother and a wife that I thought I meant to be, but as my neighbour says, You cannot be what other people expect you to be. You are who you are. The solitude tells us a lot about our desires. Tells us a lot about who we really are.

I’ve been challenged in many areas of my life in the last few years, health-wise including. I think I went through a period of slight despair. Despair of not being able to conform to whatever I thought is right to do for a wife, a mum, a young researcher, a good patient, a good friend and a good daughter.

Wendell Berry wrote once that despair and pride are two sides of the same coin and the biggest enemies of creative work, I think that they are probably the biggest enemies of an honest life in general.

When we admit to our needs and desires, when we own them, we start creating space for them and the wide open space that we visit during weekends becomes all that we need to create spaces of fertile solitude during the rest of our week. And ironically, the better we use this space, the better companions we become.