EducationGroundwork

Sometimes patient, sometimes not so much

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Flowers from the harvest festival. Murcia, May 2018

Patience takes courage. It is not an ideal state of calm. In fact, when we practise patience we will see our agitation far more clearly.

Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You

It is inevitable that from time to time as part of my teaching, some student, who is struggling to make a phrase sound accurate and is conscious of the time, will remark on my patience. I smile, accepting the compliment, though the truth is that I have never found being patient with my students difficult. While they’re thinking, I’m watching, trying to decipher the confusion. I wonder what little suggestion would get them to the bullseye, and in fact if any suggestion at all is needed.

Most of the time, students can self-correct. If they can’t identify the problem immediately, they might need some guidance as to where to look, but most of the time, once you’ve given a hint of where to look and possibly the nature of the mistake – for example, by asking them what tense the verb is in – the student can find the answer. The only other ingredient they need is time. Time to look, time to reread, time to think, time to remember.

Slowing the process down is not a frustration, it is the method. The only alternative to pausing on the errors is to rush ahead, with my voice giving the correct English and the student obediently and embarrassedly scribbling down note after note. Notes which will unlikely ever be read and even less likely be remembered in the natural flow of next week’s conversation.

But this patience isn’t something limited to the realm of learning another language, it applies to life. Allowing ourselves time to pause, stop and think is the only way that we can stop from making the same mistakes week after week after week.

With a student, there’s a sense of responsibility and care. When my students open their mouths they are taking risks, speaking a foreign language, uncertain of their own pronunciation, conscious that their word order is often disordered, that they miss words, that I might misinterpret their jokes or opinions. We must show the same vulnerability with ourselves when trying to reconsider and learn from the events of our own lives.

Except being patience with someone who is paying you and looks up to your guidance is a whole lot easier than being patience and staying in that point of vulnerability with oneself. To be patient with others takes courage, as Pema Chödrön rightly declares. It can be frustrating keeping your mouth shut. When the student falls silent my ego wants to fill the gap and it can be work keeping her silent and attentive. When the student is silent and thinking, and my ego wants to speak, I’m acutely aware of my own agitation.

But this is all good and necessary practise. My patience has to be a strong muscle, built with daily training otherwise, how could I ever find the courage to pause and listen to myself.

Groundwork

On Solitude

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The valley. Yes, that’s the Mediterranean down there. Sicily, November 2016.

The heavy rain that woke me this morning ceases and is replaced by fine droplets,  barely visible to the eye, but there’s a quivering in the light between my window and the dark hedge telling me that it’s still falling. The sky is the sort that photographers detest. It’s one solid pale grey block. It’s not that it lacks character, dull can be a character trait too, but it’s so consistent that it gives nothing to draw the eye. There’s no spontaneity. The rain will keep falling and the sky will stay grey and not even the wild cat will show up today. She’ll be hiding somewhere safe and dry.

Last week, curled up in my father’s rocking chair in front of the roaring fire, I felt a sudden pull of nostalgia for the two weeks I spent in the south of Sicily. It was the fire that did it. I stayed in Sicily, near a town called Noto at the end of November in 2016 and although during the day there was frequently warm sunshine, in the evenings the temperature suddenly dropped. We had no central heating and the electricity was limited. If it had been sunny in the morning, we might get enough energy through the solar panel to run the washing machine, but dinner would have to be eaten by candlelight.

For some, such an environment might feel somewhat limiting, but for me it was a remarkable moment of quiet. A quiet that I desperately needed. In the evenings I’d take a book from the library and curl up in one of the guest bedrooms where I’d light a fire in the wood burning stove and contentedly read, write or stare at the flickering flames. Contentedly alone.

Staring at our fire here, lit because the windows had to be propped open as they’d just been varnished, I couldn’t help but think about Sicily and the perfectness of those quiet, solitary evenings.

Some people, I know, hate being alone. It makes them uncomfortable. They actively avoid solitude. I’m not sure what it is they fear or dislike about being alone with themselves, and I guess it’s something I’ll never quite understand, but still they talk of being alone with great distaste. Other people cling to their isolated-ness as an identity. As if somehow being able to survive being with themselves somehow makes them not need a thriving active social life. I fall into neither category. It’s the combination of quiet moments of solitude and comfortable connection with people I love that make me thrive.

That evening, in front of our fire, I picked up my Sicilian diary from the bookshelf and flicked through it, wondering what I had written about. I’m not sure what I expected, maybe that my diary would be me writing all about me. That I’d be self-pitying or excessively analytical. It wasn’t. In my diary I write about the flames, how the logs burnt and the heat warmed my skin, I quote passages from the books I’m reading and muse upon the writer’s thoughts. There’s a long paragraph where I’m sitting out on the patio in the sunshine watching a lizard devouring a grasshopper, I record the battle with an obsessive fascination which falls into a contemplation of the act of dying and how the grasshopper fought back.

Page after page, I write about the steam in the shower and the sun on my skin. I write about arguing with a god I don’t believe in. I write about the beat of the hammer falling in the yard of the villa the far end of the valley where a Sicilian man laboured.

And I’m not normally the nostalgic type, but sometimes when life is busy all around me, I think of the incredible quiet that I felt those few days in Sicily. And I long to go back to it.

Here, meanwhile, the rain continues to fall.

Groundwork

Orichette pasta and other solutions

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Sunset at the Ponte Vecchio, Florence. July 2018
[Written earlier in the summer.]

This morning I go to switch on my computer and it fails

The computer used to belong to my father but knowing I couldn’t afford to buy myself a new one when the previous one died, my dear father gifted me his own. My mother had something to do with it.

The agreement between myself and my mother was simple, she would see that I had a computer, in return, I had to write.

This is because my parents are the best

Whatever I seem to throw at them they breathe very deeply, swallow their surprise, and then work out, amid all the chaos, what matters.

As daughters go, I’m sure I’m a bit of a nightmare; I don’t provide my parents with the easiest time. I’ve been known to go from sulking around the house helpless victim of my circumstances to announcing I’m heading off to the other side of the continent, alone, on a train. I get bored, book a plane ticket, and disappear to borrow someone else’s life. One moment I’m sending back photos of glaciers, then next I’m calling with a “Please help.”

I work too hard, or not at all, and my plans can’t exactly demonstrate evidence of a long-term stable future. I expect everyone else around me to have the similar binary attitude to working, but the reality is that most people seem to just do what it takes to get by and then have a weekend.

On Friday I decided to cook a pasta dish from my Italian cooking recipe book

I read the recipe and it required a certain type of pasta. I could have replaced it with any packet pasta. Tubes would have worked fine, as would spirals or those fancy little butterflies. Instead, I decided to make the pasta.

In the process covering every surface in the kitchen with tiny pasta ear shapes of varying quality. I read recipes and watched videos and dedicated myself to this crazy task.

It took me hours

But now, after doing hundreds of them, I can say that I can flick off orecchiette pasta with my kitchen knife and they really do look like little ears.

Sometimes I get angry at myself for being like this: stubborn, driven and facing an unexpected direction. I don’t have a paralysing perfectionism, but I’m not willing to compromise on what I want. Yes, it comes at a cost – I have a tendency for going a little crazy in the moments in between – but I don’t really understand how to be anything else.

My problem is often boredom

Boredom is a problem that I’ve never been very good at admitting to. I have the Spanish error of mistaking ‘bored’ for ‘boring’ in how I think about the two concepts. I assume that if I am ‘bored’ it must be because I am ‘boring’ and being boring is so very shameful to me that I would never admit that!

As such, I never leave any space in my life for feeling bored. My brain needs to be hot with plans, excitement and energy or if nothing else works anger. Then I write furiously and plentifully although not anything that you might want to read. Boredom is an absence of engagement with one’s surroundings and sometimes I counter it by trying to fight the world.

This isn’t perhaps helpful – boredom is apparently an essential component of creativity although I’m not sure I quite believe that. However, it’s not my creativity which I tend to worry about. For me the threat is the lack of engagement. After all it’s not a long step from boredom to apathy and from apathy a short skip to depression.

Orecchiette pasta shapes are a good example of me trying to find the new in the everyday

I’ve got the sort of hands that are used to making shapes. I was good at play-dough as a child, papier-mâché at school and although I rarely do any craft, it tends to come easily to me. Orecchiette pasta therefore although a challenge, is a fair challenge for me to tackle. I know how to get the information I need, and I genuinely believe that there’s no reason why I couldn’t do it as well as an Italian nonna if that’s what I so chose.

Groundwork

The Pros and Cons list

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Saint George and an unfortunate dragon, Prague, 2014

My mother was making a decision the other day, whilst we were hula hooping, and I asked if she had made a pros and cons list.

One of the characteristics of the decision she threw out was that it is ‘scary’. Twirling around the living room I stated, “so that’s on the pro list.” To which my mother grinned in a silly fashion and concluded that, “perhaps it could be on either.”

–

In May I took a five-hour spontaneous drive in a hire car, across a desert into a quarantined zone to catch an aeroplane home. I wasn’t sure if I’d make it on time, but I knew I had to try.

Fear didn’t pay much of a part in all this. Or, it did, the adrenaline rushed around my head and while I was waiting for the chap at the desk in the hire car agency’s offices to learn how to use the computer, I paced up and down. Fear came along for the ride, sitting in the back seat, but fear comes along anywhere I go. Fear is an innate part of life.

If fear had had its way, I would have sat on my bedroom floor and cried.

However, although all my fear responses were screaming like sirens, I maintained a focused calm. I’m not trying to pretend that I wasn’t speaking at ten thousand miles an hour or that my body didn’t shake and twitch, but as soon as I decided to drive, my thoughts calmed.

The beauty of being human is that we can make a decision that isn’t solely dictated by our physical response.

I knew that I had to deal with the problem one step at a time. First, I had the get the car, then I had to drive north. At some later point in time I would worry about my lack of boarding card and the police cordons and how to actually get to the airport. Mostly, I had to keep myself together for the next 96 hours because this trip I was doing alone.

When I sat down in the car, I touched the gear stick and smiled to myself that at least it wasn’t an automatic. Never mind that the gear stick was on the wrong side which inevitably results in me bashing my wrist against the car door. I hadn’t driven a car at all in months but for some reason it didn’t seem to matter.

–

When the midget turned twenty-one, I took her to Europe. In a café in Vienna, after many protests, she ordered coffee with the shakiest of hands. It was a large central café and I was pretty sure that the waitresses would understand enough English to give her a coffee, but the Midget was terrified.

My dad did the same to me when I was a child. He gave me money for a burger in an airport lounge somewhere and told me I could have one if I bought it. The Midget was with me then too, but she was smaller than the counter. Stuck between my dad’s generosity and my sister’s pleading eyes I somehow managed to be brave enough to order the food. We both ate burgers that day, with fries.

By the end of our Europe trip, the Midget was asking at the desk for international rail tickets with more confidence than she’d managed for that first cup of coffee.

–

Sometimes you don’t however realise how many small steps you’ve taken until you look back at something you’ve just done – like a spontaneous 5-hour drive to catch a plane in a foggy desert – and realise that as a big picture it all looks rather brave.

But bravery is often not something big, but merely a small step against the current. A mere shuffle forward in fact. Shuffle after shuffle after shuffle.

I sat in that car and pulled out of the supermarket carpark and realised that I didn’t need to try and coerce myself into feeling better about the situation. Nor did I need to cry. My sole job was to pay attention to the road and get myself home. And all at once I knew that however ridiculous my situation was, I was going to be able to handle it.

I’ve dealt with worse.

So yes, when you make your list of pros and cons anything dangerous ought to be on the negative side of the page, but just scary… I’d leave that off the list entirely. Fear will always come along for the ride, just don’t let it drive.

Groundwork

How do you hold yourself to a beneficial routine?

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Viscacha, Machu Picchu, Peru. January 2020.
[I get asked some challenging questions sometimes… here’s my attempt at answering this one.]

That’s an interesting word isn’t it… ‘hold’, because it can be quite severe as well as protective. It can be restrictive as well as supportive. And I guess that in some ways I’ve ‘held myself to a beneficial routine’ with both senses of the word.

The preferred method is the supportive one

I try to do those things, like sleeping regularly and eating healthily, because I’m trying to support myself. I’m on my own side. This isn’t a fight where part of me wants something that’s not good for it and the other part is angry about that. No. I’m a team within myself and I fight on my own side.

But that wasn’t always the case and in times when my mind was at risk of self-collapse and the idea of the different parts of me working together in some cohesive team quite an alien idea, holding myself to the necessary routine was severe and restrictive. Sometimes you have to stop negotiating with yourself and set a simple clear boundary – particularly I think when it comes to the things that have the easy power to send you spiralling into a pit of self-loathing.

I was given a gift during my greatest moment of lostness in my mother

After all she made sure that I was receiving three healthy meals a day and it was she who woke me up each morning from the never-ending swamp of nightmares. Waking up at a normal time resulted in me going to bed at a normal time, and so she did a lot of the holding, protectively so.

Meanwhile, I focused on remembering to clean my teeth and wash my face. My sister will attest to the fact that when she calls me feeling less than 100%, the first question I tend to ask is likely to be nothing more complex than “Have you cleaned your teeth?”. I hold myself to a beneficial routine by focusing on the small but necessary. The basics are non-negotiable.

I tend to then focus on accepting that I’m a mess and that I need to do something about it

Even though on a typical day now I’ve got a gentle grip on my routine, when the anniversary of being raped came around I woke in a fog with the echoes of nightmares inhabiting my limbs. The painful recognition of how close I will always be to feeling like I’ve been smothered by the impossibility of existing can be terrifying. I was alone.

I was alone and with my biggest ally and greatest friend: I had myself.

I got out of bed and focused on two very important things

One, this was temporary. Even if such feelings lasted months rather than days, I knew that it wasn’t a feeling that would last forever. Two, I focused on the fact that I could do something about this very real feeling. I got up and made my bed. I then went in the shower with a biro gripped horizontally between my teeth and under the hot water I lifted my arms and struck a fighting pose. You’re thinking that this sounds very simplistic – it took most of the morning.

I know I cannot flick a switch and make myself happier just like that, but I’ve already decided that apathy towards myself isn’t something I can indulge. Even though my parents are amazing, at the end of the day I’ve got to take responsibility for me. If I want a happy life, I’ve got to get on with putting happiness in the world.

How do I hold myself to a beneficial routine? With all the depths of my human heart.

Groundwork

How The Wise Woman Taught The Power Of Choice

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I found this post unpublished in the archives. I don’t believe it’s ever been read so I thought I’d pop it out now for people’s entertainment. It was probably written some time in 2015…

This is me staring at Los Perros glacier. To my horror, our Torres Del Paine trip involved an excess of early mornings.
February 2020.

When the Mother met the wise woman

Once upon a time, the Mother went to America to meet a very wise woman.

It was during the summer. There was no school, no rules and no food in the fridge. The Father was quite incapable of functioning without the Mother, not because he couldn’t look after himself – he can. But he didn’t seem to be able to do anything. He walked around the house, went to work, came home and walked around the house some more.

It didn’t matter. We bought some food, filled the fridge and cooked dinner for the Father. The Mother was busy doing something else, something very important.

She was listening to the wise woman, and learning about choice.

The Mother returned. The Father stopped pacing around the house.

And like the kitchen had taken on a different look, so had the Mother.

Because the wise woman had taught the Mother a tremendous skill. A skill so simple that it’s often over looked.

She taught my Mother to choose.

The difference between goals and choices

When you make a choice, you’re acknowledging the alternative.

If I chose to travel, I am letting go of a lot of security.

If I chose not to travel, what is the price I’m paying?

This is what I see as the big problem with goals. When we write up goals we’re articulating our dreams, not what we’re willing to lose, and it’s loss not gain that we feel more strongly. Inevitably, the loss is what makes achieving our goals so hard. It’s the time that has to be committed, the strain in our legs after a long run, and the bitter cold on our skin before. The loss of options, the loss of comfort.

How choice changed the Mother

The Mother has embedded in her children a sense of awe. However hard we try, we are simply not the sort of girls who can have two loads of washing on the line and dinner cooked before 7am. If either of us open our eyes before 7am, we’re ahead of schedule.*

The Mother is like a whirlwind. As children we would have to run to keep up as she walked down the street.

She’s like a humming bird, whilst I’m more like a tree. Or at least in my eyes. The Midget accuses me of doing to much. The father accuses me of allowing myself to burnout, again.

When the Mother returned from visiting the wise-woman, she brought back with her the simple fact that her exhaustion and inability to sleep was her choice. Just like my ulcers, stressed skin and headaches are my choice. When we keep pushing ourselves the cracks are going to appear.

When we set goals we have to acknowledge the cracks. When we keep pushing despite the clawing tension in our backs, the aches in our shoulders the strain in our fingers from hitting this keyboard time and time again, the cracks widen.

So when the Mother returned from the wise-woman, she slowed a little and started thinking a little more about the consequences of doing everything.

Which is why the wise-woman, who I’ve never met, is my hero.

*Actually, my sister seems to be more than capable of such ludicrous behaviour.

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