The Big Bad Maybe Later

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This will come as a surprise to absolutely nobody: I am rather inept at saying no. Slightly more unusually maybe – or at least, slightly less talked about – is being equally bad at saying yes.

So how do you go through life saying neither no nor yes? By becoming a master of the unholy trinity: We’ll See, Maybe Later, and I’ll See What I Can Do. Used effectively, they will answer any situation known to humanity, and are as useful in a classroom as they are in any number of parenting conundrums. In fact, The Paleontologist has started predicting my response, and has changed her questioning technique, asking open questions whenever possible: “Why can’t we have bubblegum ice cream?” is a frequent opening gambit. Other favourites include “When are you going to let me have a phone?” and the wonderful “Why does our Tooth Fairy give less money than the Fairy that goes to [insert the name of absolutely any other classmate]?” The Cowgirl, predictably, approaches things totally differently, dodging asking questions altogether by doing things she thinks she won’t be allowed to do as secretly as possible. Thankfully, subtlety is not as much her forte as, say, running headlong through any obstacle, from rose bushes to recalcitrant authority figures. The time she ate a whole pack of chocolate coins, hiding the wrappers in her pillowcase so that I didn’t see them in the bin, showed particular insight and forward planning. At least, it did until she asked me to plump up her pillow the next evening. Oops.

So I have one child who has developed excellent open questioning techniques, and another who has mastered the art of independence before mastering her 3 times table. This is good, right? Nothing wrong with a bit of healthy noncommittal… Except, of course, we all know there is. And not just the kind of wrong that leads to my more decisive friends and relations (looking in no particular direction, but we both know who you are!) wanting to throw me out of the nearest window fifteen times on any given day. Avoiding both yes and no is a great way of dodging most forms of conflict: if no one (including me, particularly in busy times, or September, or first thing in the morning) knows what I want, they certainly can’t get in a grump if I disagree with them. But it has a deep darkness as a cost. It also means avoiding contentment within myself. Saying yes means saying this is good; saying I’m happy with this; saying this is enough.

There is often a feeling that living a more sustainable life means saying no. You say no to flying and take your chances on holidaying in the UK – may be amazing, may be the end of your marriage and feel like December. You say no to plastic and no to frappacinos, to deodorants bought in your lunch break because you forgot to put any on this morning, to sanitary towels, to the basic fundamentals of everyday living. You say no to meat, to cheese, to takeaways, to many of the things that make busy lives both enjoyable and achievable. You say no to all the things other people are doing, heart pounding as you say it – will they think you’re judging them? Are you judging them?

What if, instead of saying no, simple living was all about saying yes? It would change my perception of it dramatically if I could navigate that mindshift. Here’s an example of when I’ve tried. A few days ago, I went on a train journey to the very North of Scotland – and, as if 7 hours on a train (plus delays, of course) wasn’t enough, three days later we came back again. I was, obviously, not optimistic about the whole experience. Two children, one tablet, tired Mum, Dad away with work; what could possibly go right? But then came the magic. The first bit of magic was my previously-mentioned saintly mother saying yes to buying magazines for both children. Hooray for plastic toys! Hooray for Ninjago mini-figures! (That’s Lego, if you’re not up to speed with the latest lingo the kids are using.) Hooray for activities, and quizzes, and facts that keep science-crazy munchkins engaged for… well, actually for hours. We also had activity books, Top Trumps (cathedrals in one pack, dinosaurs in the other – only in my family…) and an ancient game of Master Mind that involves breaking a code set by the other player. And with that, we survived. We not only survived, we thrived. Both Mum and I managed to spend time reading; in fact, I stopped when I was ready, not before. I genuinely can’t remember when that last happened. It turns out that saying yes to what is directly in front of you, being present and answering questions, reading instructions, then letting the instructions be followed without interference (even when they Do It Wrong), works terribly well, something I used to know, but had let myself forget.

View from a train window, looking out over a very wide river. In the bottom corner is the reflection of a child playing on a tablet.
The beauty of the Scottish coastline. The wonder of a happy child who hasn’t run anywhere for several hours.

Sometimes, I say we’ll see because I don’t know how to even conceive of having the energy to do what is asked (particularly when I’m being asked to build a working robot out of toilet roll wrappers, to take just one example…) And at other times, I say we’ll see because I mean no. Just no. In fact, I frequently mean I’d rather do the school run across hot coals than even think about doing what is asked. (Building a robot isn’t that bad. A whole afternoon of joining in with watching Peppa Pig is.) So I’m setting myself a slightly late #ChallengeAugust. To say no when I mean it; to say yes when I want it; to say we’ll see when I genuinely mean I don’t know yet whether it’s yes or no. Well, apart from when discussing birthday parties. With four months to go until the closest one, any resolution needs a touch of realism and some hard-won messy survival techniques, naturally.

A long bridge curves across a wide estuary, big enough to almost look like the sea.
The rail bridge approaching Dundee. An utterly stunning sweep of countryside.

Everything is connected

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One of my all-time favourite films is V For Vendetta. Apart from the obvious moments (after all, right now, is there anyone who would object to Westminster being blown sky high, particularly if empty at the time…) one scene that really resonates is a montage where investigator Eric Finch says “I suddenly had this feeling that everything was connected. It’s like I could see the whole thing, one long chain of events… It was like a perfect pattern, laid out in front of me. And I realised we’re all part of it, and all trapped by it.” His companion, of course, asks if that meant he knew what would happen next, and with typical bluntness gets the response “No, it was a feeling. But I can guess…” And tragedy plays out, giving the film the chance to leave those horrors in maybe-land: did they happen? Did they not? Can the girl with glasses be saved?

“V for Vendetta” by Marko Manev is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

We live in a time when every problem is treated as though it stands alone, and every individual is trained to see themselves as an island, with, if they are lucky, causeways connecting them to others, appearing and disappearing with the tides, with never a hint of where the mainland might be found. If you are ill, you get tablets. Tablets for blood pressure; for cholesterol; for headaches; for coughs, colds and not being quite at your best; for anxiety; for depression. Tablets for each individual symptom, as though all of these things are somehow caused separately, interacting independently with the body they have found a home in. Sorting out your work-life balance is a task for every individual, who is then held personally to blame if we get lost in the middle of a perfect storm of demands and expectations and can’t do it by ourselves. Saving the world means cutting your personal carbon footprint, giving up plastic around the home, individual action and sacrifice. The question is always: what are you doing? You as an individual; a family household; maybe, at best, as a town.

Seeing individuals as worthy of value and respect, with God dwelling within them, whatever they have done or thought, however they look and regardless of the capacity for good or evil weighing down their actions, is a gift and a curse and a thing we should all be aiming for. Seeing the individual as the height of all our ambitions, personal glory over a community rising together, has caused lives to fall apart, an ever-widening gap between the rich and the desperate, and Boris Johnson moving into number 10. How much further does this road have left before it splits into so many individual footpaths, some smooth and wide, some rocky and overgrown with nettles, but all leading inexorably into the wilderness of isolation, getting further and further apart, until we can no longer see, smell, hear, any other living things around us?

Talking to students has made me realise how unhealthy expectations in this country can be. One told me that she works so hard that she buys clothes and doesn’t have the time or the energy to wear them. They lie in the bags they came in at the bottom of the wardrobe until, packing for an extended journey home, they resurface, bringing with them the hope they first entered the home with; hope that will now be enjoyed elsewhere, because there is no time for it here. It is so different, she said, in the country she was born in. People there value and enjoy their possessions, their friends, their time. For someone who barely has the energy to brush her teeth at the end of some days, I confess, that sounds like an idyll beyond price.

How have we come to value ourselves and each other so little? Why do we value money so much more than time? During my first year as a teacher, I got used to a day that left the house running for school at 8am and didn’t finish until the next day’s lessons were just about thrown together, usually at about 11pm. I put up with the hours, the expectations, the lack of any life outside the walls I had prepared for myself. I boasted about how bad it was, as we outdid each other with stress levels and caffeine intake around the staff room kettle. But why? The expectation is that in order to have a job with meaning, with satisfaction, that changes things, however small, you put up with what is thrown at you. And acting alone, my choices are suck it up or sack it off, give up, do something else. But what if we all stood together? Not just my union (though we are working on that one); not just those working in the public services; all of us, walking together saying we, and our lives, and the planet are all worth more than mindless, individual busyness?

More time means more ability to slow down, to make from scratch, to take care and do, buy, say the right thing, not the easy thing. To have a sense of achievement from that. To tell someone else about it, and work together so that they can do it too. More life in that notorious balance means more opportunities for joy. And more joy means less greed; less need for eternal, all-consuming growth; more options.

Living within our means is a phrase that has been used for the good, the bad, and the blatantly discriminatory within society over the last decade or so. But when it is used, it is always used to talk about living within our financial means. What would it be like to live within all our means? To live lives where we use the time, the emotion, the energy we have to live our best lives; where nothing is asked of us that we cannot freely give? What would it be like to be able to look ourselves in the mirror and know that we are enough?

It is the summer holidays: traditionally the point that teachers look at their lives and try and sort out all their problems at once, now that they suddenly have space to breathe. I find myself looking at the chaos I create around myself and wondering what we would have to do as a family to live within our time-means. What would we as a country have to change in order to do the same?

Challenge 2019: we’re halfway there (on a wing and a prayer)

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I know I say this every year, but seriously, how is it July already? As ever, time is not merely marching on but racing by, blue lights flashing and siren fading into the distance as it leaves us all on the pavement, gawking after it and wondering what it will find when it gets to wherever it is headed. However, as it is undeniably July, and even the weather has now caught up with the general principle that it’s time to grow up and act appropriately, I thought I would take this opportunity to glance into an under-used side room and dust off my Not-a-New-Year-Resolution. The beating heart of this collection of Things to Try and See If They Work is the intention of testing out in real life ways to live more sustainably; to shift the focus of what we as a family are doing away from excessive consumption or environmental fire fighting, and into a way of living a happy, meaningful, love-driven life that makes the most of what we have, allows us to have what we need, and helps in however small a way to show that life is about so much more than consumerism and out-living our mental, emotional and physical means. Good thing I didn’t aim for anything difficult, really, isn’t it…!

As was almost entirely predictable, my goals started off well and dwindled into dust around Easter time:

  • Challenge January: Not buying anything non-essential. Doing this for a month did make me more aware of what I buy, particularly the impulse buys. Do I still love buying new things? Yes, I really do. The change that has stuck is that I have rediscovered the joys of charity shops and used items on eBay, at least reducing the impact of making new clothes in the first place. Halfway there it is…
  • Challenge February: Gentle decluttering in a big way. So the tidying up happened. I’m not about to say that it spread to the rest of the house, or anything absurd like that, but at least some of the bigger improvements made that month are still just about noticeable now. It also helped me to consider which of the many things that I keep out of habit I actually need or actually like, what might be useful in future, and what would be better finding a new home where it has a chance of being loved; or, failing that, at least getting out of this home where it will never be more than a burden.
  • Challenge March: Fixing everything uncovered in the process of Challenge February. There have been some good successes here. A couple of skirts, some bags and coats, and several bras are all on the list of things that are no longer abandoned in a mending pile, out of sight and mind and will. Excitingly, this mindset of just do it has sneaked into everyday life: I found myself grabbing a needle before the school run a few days ago, quite happy to do an emergency button refastening then and there. Unfortunately, we are breaking/tearing/growing out of clothes so quickly, the reducing the mending pile goal itself hasn’t actually happened at all.

Then we sank into the depths of Lent. Challenge April existed only in my head, and May and June didn’t even make it that far. There is an unavoidable lesson there. Writing a promise down, making it public, having witnesses: these are things that help us to stick to the commitments we have made. Marriage, manifestos, Slimming World – part of the thing they all have in common is the idea of asking people we care about to hold us to our best intentions. Or at least, they should do, and we should be taking up that responsibility. Maybe that’s where politics has been going so wrong recently? But that’s a rant for a different post…

Challenge July certainly needs to be written down, then. It’s time to get back on the horse. To learn from what I’ve done so far and find ways to keep getting better. So here is my plan. This month, I am going to challenge myself to create a warm, welcoming, organised and functional hallway. No longer will it be a dumping ground of bags, shoes, gloves, sunglasses, drawings, takeaway menus (bless them, do they not realise we always use Just Eat anyway?), musical instruments, wellies, pipe cleaners, clerical collars… We are all guilty of coming in and crashing at once, layers and bags and lunch boxes falling behind us like a trail of crumbs, showing every step we have taken until we are found flat out on the sofa watching other people being energetic on iPlayer.

Given the level of chaos routinely to be found in our hallway, deciding to tackle it in itself is quite an undertaking. But it’s July, which means I’m not teaching much, and so I am reaching beyond the sensible, the brave, the wise, and finding myself halfway between the sublime and the ridiculous. I am going to do my level best to create that homely, warm, inviting and functional hallway space without buying anything. At all. Everything will be repurposed or upcycled from things already in the house. Pinterest, of course, is full of ideas to start with (though I’d be very happy to hear others too!) I’m thinking smashed up CDs, cloth-covered cardboard boxes, and wall hangings made from discarded jeans, and that’s just for starters. Who knows where this will end?

So far, I have emptied a few of the bags that have been lining the stairs for a little while now. (By little while, I mean that I found an old-style £1 coin in the bottom of one of them.) I have made plans and schemes and got excitable. I have worked out that using things from around the house frees two birds with one key, reducing the clutter around the rest of the building and also creating a more happy space in part of it. On paper, it’s all good. What happens when that paper is glued onto an old pizza box and turned into storage for sunglasses, plastic giveaways and treasured works of love and glitter is yet to be seen.

A tower of Very Important Things that need to be sorted including papers, bags for life and PE kits. Next to them is the mountain of things that I happen to have lying around my house anyway that I can use to create a more enjoyable space. And I thought there would never be any advantages to being a hoarder…

When grief and guilt collide

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This is a bit of a secret, but here goes: I can never hear “Let It Go” without smiling. There are reasons, I promise. (Admittedly, I like a lot of other songs without the reasons, but some things are meant to stay secret…)

When Frozen was the new big thing, The Paleontologist was still at nursery, and only knew the names of about 3 dinosaurs. Picking her up each lunchtime, we often found ourselves walking home with another little girl and, as often happens, the two became fast friends. It would take us twice as long to walk home, of course, but it was worth it for the company, for the grown ups as much as the small people. As we walked, we discussed everything from religion to the trials and tribulations of having little girls with ridiculously curly hair. It was mundane, often slightly stormy, and utterly lovely. A few journeys home stand out particularly clearly in my mind. One was the walk where we spoke of my friend’s family for the first time. She was from Yemen, and these were the days before the war there was particularly spoken about. It was from her that I heard about the conflict, and her who told me the story of a nephew of hers, lost in the fighting. She never said what side he fought on, and I saw no reason to ask. She did tell me his last action was to call his mother, pray for her, and tell her he couldn’t get out. She stayed on the phone until the line went dead.

Image by Sarah MacIntyre, published on Twitter in response to the attack on the Charlie Hebdo building in January 2015. A beautiful picture of two young girls, one in a hijab, one with uncovered hair, weeping as they draw a heart between them.

My other memory is made more beautiful by the tragedy that walked with us at times. The Friend could barely speak English, growing up as she had in a bilingual household that spoke Arabic at home. The Paleontologist had never seen Frozen, or listened to any of the songs. But there they were, skipping down a backstreet, dodging dog poo and abandoned tyres, and belting this song out at the top of their voices, The Friend singing, The Paleontologist echoing. It remained their song until they left nursery to go their separate ways, to different schools and, soon enough, to different cities. In my mind, it will always be their song.

At this point in the academic year, Let It Go becomes a bit of an anthem. That and The Final Countdown. There are a lot of reasons for this, to say the least. Mistakes are always made, by teachers, by students, by other departments who frankly should know better. The time to sort them out has passed and we are left with no choice but to accept whatever outcome we are left with. Students who have failed who deserve to pass; students who have passed who did no work at all; students who have faced circumstances that mean they have dropped out, at the last minute quite often, because of exam terror, or sudden eviction, or losing their Home Office appeal and facing deportation. And we, their teachers, are left saying goodbye, looking at a year of slogging our guts out, summarised in a row of 50 or so little words: Pass. Fail. Pass. Pass. Fail. For me, at least, those words are filled with emotion. Grief for the things I planned to do, but didn’t quite manage in the heat of yet another Ofsted year. Guilt for the times I wasn’t focused enough, didn’t get that marking back with enough feedback; would that have made the difference? Grief because, for all it is an overwhelming relief when the end of the year finally comes around, it is also a goodbye, to the groups you have really enjoyed as much as the ones you have struggled with, and I have never been any good at goodbyes.

Loss. Goodbyes. They always seem to be bad things, to be avoided at all costs with Hollywood-style endings and Olaf having “his own personal flurry”. None of the heartbreak of The Snowman for younger generations, please. And don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favour of happy endings. There is a reason I’ve never made it to the end of Watership Down. But we know that growth, beauty, fulfilment can only happen if some things are lost. The more you prune roses, the more will grow in future. (I think, anyway; though if I’m wrong that explains why my roses keep dying…) Students must finish with us to leave and move on in their lives and achieve whatever they are able to. Children must grow up, grow independent, make choices and mess things up for themselves. Loss surrounds us, from monumental landslides that make life after them unimaginable, through to little disappointments, more hurt pride than moments to mourn. Beautiful moments you don’t want to let go of. Moments that went wrong, and leaving you grieving for what you hoped they would be. Every breath draws in new life and releases what is no longer helpful. Accepting those losses is the only way to release the weight of carrying the world on your shoulders, eternally. But isn’t that so much easier said than done?

How can you accept your children no longer seeing you as the most magical person to ever exist? How can you accept students who once saw you as their salvation seeing you now as the teacher who let them down? How can you accept the passage of time robbing you of health, energy, self identity? How can you accept a political situation that fills you with fear of what may be lost, and anger at the price that will have to be paid by those who have nothing to pay it with? How can you accept the loss of your parents, your partner, your siblings, your children? Grief never disappears. It sneaks into your gut when your shields are down, when you sleep and dream they are still alive, still around, that you are still able to change and correct the situation. And resting underneath the grief, gurgling maliciously, is guilt. Have you let them down? Could you have done more? Do they know you could, should, tried to do more to change things? And then that guilt surges to the surface, forming a suffocating barrier between yourself and acceptance.

Making a choice means closing down opportunities and saying no. If you commit to one course of action you are saying no to all the others. Sometimes it is just a delay, a maybe next time, or an I’ll try that when this other thing changes. But sometimes the choice is absolute. The choice to move countries; the choice to have children; the choice to get married, or to get divorced. Some decisions will forever change the direction your life will take, and you will never be the same person as you were before you made them.

But when we make these big life choices, we rarely pause to grieve for the things we are leaving behind, even as we celebrate the things we are moving towards. Nor do we acknowledge the guilt that can be associated with those choices. Getting married will always be a point where everything changes, and I added to that by moving halfway up the country at the same time. Oops… And then my father died, 3 months after my wedding. Publicly celebrating our intention to support, aggravate, annoy and enhance each other for the rest of our lives was utterly beautiful, and I will never again have a party that is so much fun. But it meant I was giving up my father’s name, changing documents so that he was no longer an explicit part of my identity, as he lay dying (even though we didn’t know that was what was happening). But I had just got married! How could I feel guilt, feel grief, for that? But seriously, looking back, how could I not feel All The Emotions at such a time?

You can have anything. You can’t have everything. And admitting that, whilst being one of the hardest things ever to do, is almost certainly key to surviving everything else, acknowledging the grief, the guilt, and moving beyond both into genuine acceptance.

Poppies at sunset. Image by danigeza, via Pixabay.

Why I wish I could break the rules

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A long time ago, in a life-stage far far away, I did something unbelievable. The kind of thing that, looking back even a few days later, I couldn’t believe I really did. One Friday afternoon in sixth form, a group of us decided to leave school early and head down to Glastonbury Festival. We had tents and sleeping bags (well, most of us did. If I remember rightly, one individual named very aptly after a capricious Shakespearean character decided all he needed was a change of socks. Probably best not to ask, really.) We did not have tickets. Crowded into the back of a car, a bit terrified and very excited, listening to Britney Spears and laughing at how terrible the music was, was probably the closest I ever came to feeling like I had a part in the action. 

We parked up and started off in the direction of the fences, which suddenly looked rather more official than they had in my head. Close to the car park were a few scary-looking individuals who had cut holes already, and were charging a nominal fee – sometimes rather aggressively – to get through. We walked on. None of that nonsense for us, they said, though at that point my heart was pounding like mad, imagining that all these eighteen year old lads would be literally jumping over the fence, leaving unhealthy and unfit me on the other side, unable to get in, unable to leave. As was the case far more often than I realised, I suspect, I had underestimated the leaders of the crew. They kept going until we found a gap we could all squeeze through.

You are probably wondering why I am admitting to this now. The truth is, that is just about the only time in my life when I have not only broken the rules, but also refused to feel guilty about it. (Not long after this, the same classmates and I had the choice of jumping a queue or missing the Vatican Museum. We jumped the queue. I still feel guilty about it now.) Even when the news broke, shortly after our return, that so many people had broken in to Glastonbury that they were cancelling the whole festival the following year, we still felt proud rather than ashamed. Proud, and just a tad smug. 

A gorgeous image of the beauty and chaos of such a huge gathering of people.
By jaswooduk from UK – Glastonbury 2011, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18498961

Breaking the rules is absolutely not something I do. Even my acts of teenage rebellion were all within the stereotypes. We not only got our parents’ permission for the Glastonbury trip, for example, we also got our teachers’ permission to leave early (though there is a very good chance we didn’t tell either group we didn’t exactly have tickets…) When I started smoking – sorry, Mum, but I realise now you’re not daft and probably knew the whole time – it was an act of rebellion against my parents, my teachers, my goody-goody reputation; but I waited until I was legal before I started, and always used money I had earned myself to buy them, not money from my parents.

Breaking the rules genuinely makes me shake. Even bending the expectations fills me with quiverings. I seem to have passed this on to The Paleontologist too, unfortunately. When she was much younger and we were living somewhere very different, I took her to the local Eid celebration. It was the kind of party that had 20000 people attending, and its own funfair, so I was expecting her to be in her element. Instead, as we walked the familiar route to the local park that had been transformed into a place for prayers and celebration, her feet got slower and slower until eventually she stopped altogether. “What if they don’t want us there?” she whispered. “What if people like us aren’t allowed?”

I watch people who break the rules with a mixture of awe and horror. Extinction Rebellion have achieved amazing headlines, but my gut rebels at the idea of praising their methods. Greta Thunburg I’m happier with; strikes fit better within the language of revolt from my staunch Labour-supporting upbringing. But do we have to break the rules to be noticed? Does that mean that those of us who feel unable, morally or practically, to take that kind of action have no part to play at all? 

And it turns out that being congenitally incapable of breaking the rules has even deeper consequences than feeling unable to take full part in movements fighting for the things I most believe in. Breaking the rules should be a deliberate act, knowing what those rules are and rebelling against them. Middle class adulting in modern society means following a set of abstract and unwritten rules and keeping yourself and your loved ones within them, accepting the inevitable fallout when you step over a boundary no one ever told you was there. There are rules that deserve nothing less than annihilation; and yet, breaking the rules has consequences, not just for me, but for those dependent on me. And I can’t take that risk. So I struggle on, trying to work them out, only aware of them as they lie in ruins behind me. Have a home. Your own home. Keep that home tidy enough for a photoshoot at all times. Apologise profusely for the way your home looks if anyone pops in unexpectedly, even if it is spotless. Record everything – if a day out isn’t on social media, it didn’t really happen, right? – but whatever you do don’t go getting all self-obsessed. Value all things by their economic worth, whilst also bemoaning that stay at home parents are not treated with the respect they deserve. Recycle everything possible. Talk a lot about climate catastrophe. Own two cars. Go on holiday. Drink plant-based alternatives to milk.

What happens when you can’t keep to the rules? They are so many, so varied, so hidden under layers and layers of obscurity and obfuscation that even in trying to stick to the rules you end up shattering a lot of them. In fact, I’m fairly sure that one of the cardinal rules is to never acknowledge their presence. Some have never seen the rules in action, never understood what is expected and what you are expected to ignore. Many don’t know the rules, have never been shown them, have lived among people with different guidelines and spend every interaction expecting to be called out as a fraud. Some know the rules intimately, using them to their own advantage, manipulating the system to create a world that no one quite knows how to challenge. We have created a system so intricate, so all consuming, so woven into the mesh of our society, our economic system, our values, that we are no longer able to tell apart the rules that do good from the rules that do harm.

There are some rules – morality, decency, love – that deserve to be followed with the rigidity I use when waiting for the green man before crossing the road. Somehow, though, these rules seem to be the ones most neglected within the structures and confines of our everyday lives. Some need to be broken in emergencies. And some deserve to be wiped off the face of the world for all eternity. Particularly the one that says your worth as a person (and especially as a woman) is somehow inherently linked to your ability to keep up with the washing up. I really don’t like that one.

Saying it like this makes it sound so easy. Follow the good rules. Ignore the mediocre ones. Send the bad ones into oblivion. Trouble is, it’s really not always obvious which is which. And the likelihood is, some rules are life-giving for one person and a prison for another. One of my students, for example, the thing she is most proud of is keeping her house spotless. It gives her self-worth in a life that has consistently stripped it away, in a society that would cast her to the bottom of every heap going. How can I say it’s a bad rule that makes me feel terrible, when it gives her acceptance?

Some people see Christianity as full of endless rules. But Jesus didn’t just break the rules. He turned them upside down and ripped them apart from the inside out. He set down a way of life that is still more radical than anything we imagine today, and made it sound so easy to follow – just take your eyes off the rules, and follow love instead. Like every religion, one interpretation tends to dominate media consciousness, and it is never the whole picture. For me it is not about rules. There is one clear commandment, set in three parts (God does love threes…): Love your God, love others, love yourself. Do that and everything will be OK. It broke the rules then, it breaks them now. It seems to me that, thousands of years later, this is still the best advice we have. If we followed these rules, wouldn’t it be marvellous to be able to shelve the rest?

Please make me angry…

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A lifetime ago, when staying up all night was something I did for fun (or essay deadlines), and TV marathons had to be planned in advance, I used to serve on committees. A lot. In fact, I never really felt part of a group unless I was wearing at least two hats within it; I’ve always enjoyed knowing how things work, what needs to happen behind the scenes. It’s probably why I enjoy being a treasurer. There’s nothing like it for finding out all the gossip how everything fits together.

Then I had a baby. A few years later, I had another. And the first baby was now a mobile, bloody-minded force of nature in her own right. And everything changed. That was the point that I felt I had to give everything up, unable to commit to anything for fear I wouldn’t be able to see it through.

So it is quite a big deal for me to feel ready to do something for my Quaker Meeting once again. The advantage of being closer to a Crone than a Maiden is that I have slowly started to develop a modicum of common sense – something that does not come naturally to me. Start small, I said to myself. And do you know what? I actually followed my own advice, limiting myself to signing up to do teas and coffees after Meeting. Just for one week. It doesn’t get smaller than that – well, unless your Meeting has a deputy plant waterer, anyway. (Yes, that apparently can be a thing. I’m not the only one who sometimes runs low on common sense…)

Sunday was the big day. So, inevitably, on Sunday I slept through my alarm and set in train a chain reaction that I would love to say was unusual, but is actually the definition of “lazy like Sunday morning” in my household. I woke up an hour late, scrabbling out of bed before my eyes were fully open, holding my breathe for screaming from the girls’ room, worrying more when instead there was absolute silence. As I got out of the shower, The Cowgirl came to find me. It had all been The Paleontologist’s idea, she assured me, which is never a good start. They had decided to eat all the sweets from a birthday party goody bag. With big, mournful eyes, she explained how hungry they had been, waiting for me to come and get breakfast for them. And now her tummy hurt and she was going back to bed. So now I’m angry with them (not for eating the sweets – who can blame them, when they were sitting on the kitchen table; more for not stopping before they got ill and not getting cereal, which they’re quite capable of doing when they want to). I’m even more angry with myself for not being downstairs when I should have been.

The Paleontologist assures me she will eat porridge if I make it. That’s ok, I think. It’s healthy, I think. We can even add a portion of fruit to it, I think. Will I never learn? She starts to eat, at about the speed of that fight scene in the Matrix. You can almost see the trail of the spoon as it inches its way to her mouth, her body bending away at the same time as mouth and spoon somehow never quite make contact. So now I’m hanging on to my shouty voice by a thread, desperately trying to reason with them and explain why I would appreciate them moving slightly faster. Pleeeease. I just about hold it together until The Paleontologist, one sock waving vaguely around her head, started talking to me about what we might need to buy for our holiday. The one in two months time. When we needed to leave the house five minutes ago. So now I’m using the growl that bypasses my throat and comes straight from my chest, and both children are looking at me like I’ve grown a tail and finally, finally, they start to move, but only because now, they are worried too.

We finally make it into the car, remembering the milk, which almost certainly qualifies as a miracle. Once we are most of the way into town, the red haze fades enough from my ears that I start listening to what The Cowgirl is chattering about. “And there’s another one. I’ve got one, two, three on my tummy, and two on my legs.” “Have you counted the one on your chin?” pipes up The Paleontologist.

They’re counting spots. Of course they are. The spots they’ve both noticed, which, in my hurry, frustration, anger, I had completely missed. So now I’m sitting in a car with a five year old counting spots, remembering the message about chicken pox that came through from school, playing through my mind could it be? Would it be? Would it be worse to take a child with potential chicken pox to a Quaker Meeting, or to leave them with no milk for their After Meeting Drinks? (I decided to go to Meeting. You should never ask people to live without tea. In the end, it was chicken pox, but not the kind that slows a cannonball down. At least I am now much clearer about what chickenpox looks like when it’s not just on Google…)

Anger. It controlled me that morning, blocking my experience of the world around me and every moment I walked through to get to the point that I would not let anyone down. Anger. It stands, seemingly indestructable, a barrier between me and life. Between life and joy. Between joy and peace. Anger. That feeling of frustration, gnawing at my belly, gnashing my jaw, scrunching my spine. It is an everyday thing for me, a whirlpool that sucks everything within itself, driving towards oblivion until all that is left is tension, radiating through my bones and stopping me seeing beyond the moment.

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Image of a fireball exploding from a volcano, seen through burnt trees. Image by geralt, from Pixabay.

But this isn’t solely anger. Bleeding into it, blended together until they are a new and augmented all-consuming fug, is fear. So much of being a parent is about fear. Sometimes I feel that living in modern times at all is the most terrifying thing, but being responsible for others gives that terror pinpoint focus. My grandparents lived through the Blitz and the Great Depression; my parents, through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War, the Thatcher years. In my time I cannot point to a moment in history which will be remembered with the same capital letters; and yet I also can’t point to a time in recent years when I have not been afraid. Fear for my children and fear for the world and anger that any of us should be put in this position merge together. Trying to be body positive to two girls with entirely opposing builds feeds my fear of how children are being taught to see themselves from the outside in, with the perfect photo being the hallmark of success. The Paleontologist telling me, only half in jest, that she is already worrying about her end of primary school exams (in several years time)? That makes me furious with the education system as we know it, and scared for the pressure she will put herself under when the time comes. They are ill and I plan for hospital; they are teased and I fear for their mental health. They tell me what they want to be when they grow up, and I get scared and try to hide it, wondering if either paleontology or caring for animals will even be an option in twenty, thirty, forty years. Then I get angry with the people saying it won’t be; surely no one in such a progressive, capable world will really let things get to that point? But stopping it means taking a hit ourselves for people who are not us; who may not live in this country; who are not even alive yet. And taking a hit for anyone else is not something our society does well. So then I get more scared, and more angry, and the haze builds up around me. 

Life is tough, and made tougher through the pressures of society to balance everything in the world. None of us are good enough unless we are working full time with a full-time commitment to our children. We must be creative whilst doggedly seeing through all our commitments. We must be committed to every good cause going, whilst single-mindedly pursuing one goal. We must look perfect whilst paying no heed to our appearance. We must be warriors, nurturers, educators, pastors, volunteers and generals. Once upon a time, this was solely the domain of women. By demonstrating that was not fair, we have somehow set up a system we call more enlightened: rather than treating women more gently, instead we hold men to the same impossible standards.

At work, I have been called an oasis of calm (yes, I laughed too the first time someone said it to me, but isn’t it lovely!) But calm cannot be recognised without storms, just as silence is only apparent after noise. Somewhere within me is that oasis, waiting to be discovered. Maybe it can only be found by walking into the storm.

What does walking into that chaos look like? It simmers below the surface, lava waiting to get to boiling point before exploding out into an atmosphere where it is lethal and destructive. It is strong. So very strong. Can it be harnessed? Can it be used for good, for transformation, for evolution? If all the anger, the fear, the turbulance and hate felt within the core of our communities could be harnessed, what would it not be possible to achieve? If righteous anger guides our actions, there are no monoliths, however immutable they may seem, that would stand before us all acting as one.

Text: If anyone ever asks you “What would Jesus do?”, remind him that flipping over tables and chasing people with a whip is within the realm of possibilities.
So true! It’s the linking it to righteous anger that gets me at times, though…

Learning a new language: privilege, self-examination and hope

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Privilege is a word that has only fairly recently become part of my vocabulary. About time too, but that leaves me, like many others, feeling like I’m playing catch-up, with guilt making me question all the benefits I have gained – am still gaining – without ever consciously asking for those advantages.

When we talk about privilege, are we talking about things that make us feel proud? Feel loved? Feel lucky? Or are we talking about things that give us an unearned advantage in life, purely based on something we have little control over – our gender, our race, our physical ability?

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

Joseph Campbell

The problem with language, glorious though it is in ever so many ways, is that here we are talking about both; and sometimes what we are talking about is equally part of both meanings. This post is my attempt to process things that are still new, confusing, and sometimes seem contradictory to me. If I get it horrifically wrong, please do correct me. Nicely, if possible, but if not I’ll try to understand.

In the process of writing this post, I also accepted what should probably have been self-evident: privilege is not an individual thing. In a culture dominated by individualism, this is a topic that, like faith, football and community action, can only really make sense when it is not practised alone.

One of the things I value about Quakers is their ability to ask open questions that expose more possibilities than they expect answers. One of the things we sometimes fall short on is remembering to talk about the myriad ways in which these questions might be answered. One such set of questions was asked at the most recent Yearly Meeting. I found them both helpful and challenging, and though I appreciate why they were not answered at the time, I look forward to hearing where other people might be on many of these issues, as Britain Yearly Meeting continues to explore, deepen, and act on these ideas over the next few years.

If I was to answer those questions now – well, some of them; I can’t remember them all – here is what I would say.

Q: Have you ever been the only person in a room with your skin colour?
A: Yes. But that doesn’t mean I understand, in my tummy and through my own experiences, what it is to be isolated and categorised purely on the colour of my skin. My own experiences of this are themselves steeped in the privilege that surrounds me, that made these experiences possible in the first place, and underlined by the worldwide impact of Britain’s colonial past:

  1. About 2 months into a transformatory period of volunteering, on the coast of Kenya, I was invited to the home of one of the staff, to talk about writing essays and to meet his new wife. I was the only white person not only in that home, but in the whole village, at that moment at least; and I was feted as a result to an extent I found deeply uncomfortable. Noticed, yes; judged or sidelined, definitely not.
  2. A few years later, the dire conditions in the refugee camps near Calais hit the headline news. I was invited to a fundraiser for the people living in The Jungle. It had a bouncy castle, a Frozen tribute act, and candy floss. I had two daughters who were under 5. Obviously, we were there in a flash. So were around a thousand other people. And for some time (until my husband, far better known in the area, arrived) there were only five white people in the room: Elsa and Anna on the stage, my daughters, and me. Some people looked at us in distaste. Some people looked with anger. Some people said nice things. Under it all was a palpable feeling of what are you doing taking over even this space, that is meant to be ours?
  3. Now, I am frequently the only person with my skin colour in a room. But I am at the front, the focal point of the room, and my language and experience shapes every lesson. My students – adults and often older than I am – are uncomfortable treating me as informally as I ask them to. One student was amazed when I wiped the board myself, instead of asking her – my senior, and someone who had also been on her feet at work all day – to do it for me. This unequal position is not due solely to my skin colour – they would have equal respect for any other teacher – but still, even when the only person of ethnicity in a room, my privilege is never left at the door.

Q: Did you grow up in a house with more than 50 books?
A: Yes. Oh, yes! I grew up in a house that probably had 50 books in every room. I live in a house now that definitely has 50 books in every room. It doesn’t feel like a home without them. But what does that mean in terms of privilege? Not that I grew up in a wealthy home. Although we never went hungry, as children, we weren’t well off either. I learned the meaning of “frugal” pretty early on, and in a supermarket at that. So being surrounded by books isn’t the same thing as wealth. Is it the same as being middle class? Again, no. Growing up, the books were my parents’. Although my father was middle class, my mother was proudly not. Her parents, who worked hard with their hands, in trades that might now be artisan but back then were not, instilled in her the belief that the education she could have and they did not was the best way to change her world, not by leaving behind her roots, but by being the best she could without anyone saying otherwise.

And yet, if privilege means unearned advantages, to me, coming from the household that I did gave me privilege. My parents read to me as a child: in Dad’s case, the whole of the Lord of the Rings. With the voices. They helped me with homework – and between them and my terribly smart, depressingly laid back, older brother, I had help with every subject up to A Level maths. My parents never said that reading was for losers, and didn’t have to hide their own fear or uncertainty behind making it sound dull. They never suggested that I couldn’t do science or maths because I am female – in fact, quite the opposite. University was an expectation and the household timetable was organised around enabling that. And now, a qualified teacher with a mountain of debt and the option of working in a variety of fields I care about, I know just how many doors are opened to me not because I am smart, not because I sound posh, but because I have good GCSEs, and a few letters after my name. Did I work for them? Yes – some a lot more than others. Did I get there purely on my own merit? No. No more than Jacob Rees-Mogg or Donald Trump are self-made men.

Q: Can you publicly display affection to your partner without fear of the reaction?
A: As a heterosexual, happily married, cis woman, yes, I can. I do not fear that people will hurl abuse – or worse – at either of us. They will not mutter, stare, or even notice us. Unless, that is, my husband is in work clothes. As an Anglican priest, he spends much of his time in a cassock. Which means that I have walked through shopping centres; held hands with; even kissed a man in a cassock in public (though maybe not quite as often as he might want me to…) And that means that I have been stared at. I have heard people questioning around us, full of judgement and negativity. I have heard people shout abuse and accusations of paedophilia at the man I love and not had the courage to do anything back. We are Christians, in a culturally Christian country, and with that comes a lot of things that make life easier. But living in a society that sees you living out your faith as an outmoded throwback at best, and an active participant in a horrific period of failing within a worshipping community that should always have been better than that, guilty by association, at worst; that is not the normal picture we paint when speaking of privilege.

Q: Have you ever been blamed for your own illness? (They didn’t actually ask that. I think maybe they should have done.)
A: As I have said before, I am overweight. I have always been “big boned”, but being tall helps it to not dominate people’s first impressions of me. But recently, I transitioned from that to someone who has high cholesterol. This, apparently, is the point that you start being a thing, instead of a person. Someone who gets told that you should “think about eating 5 a day” to make yourself healthier. No one asks what I’m already doing. No one checks why it’s hard. The assumption is that I am this way because I am lazy or ignorant of how to look after myself. End of story.

Is being thin a privilege? I don’t know. Does it open doors? Yes. Does it change how others see you, well before you open your mouth? Yes. But is it unearned? For some people, maybe, but for others, no. They have worked hard for the bodies they have, and have to continue doing so to keep them that way.

There are some things, protected characteristics that clearly carry with them discrimination and privilege. But this is not a straightforward subject. There are grey areas, uncertainties, confusion. I do not yet have all the language I need to discuss and learn from others’ experiences, and my own. What I can say is that no one is only privileged (well, almost no one, anyway). For those of us who have benefited more from privilege over the years, though, it is time to step up to the mark, own our own lives, and roll up our sleeves to start serving those who have not had as many open doors and step ups as they deserve. Not because we need to, but because we want to. Not because of fear, but because of hope. Not because of guilt, but because of love.

Picture from Pixabay: https://pixabay.com/users/ivanovgood-1982503/

Waste not; want a lot

Simply Messy2 Comments

I have just come back from a little time at the Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain. It’s hard to explain what this means to people who have never experienced it, but here’s my current best attempt. Over 1000 Quakers from all over Britain (and a fair few visitors from all over the world) gather in one building in central London for 3 days, and worship and work together to discern where we are at the moment, and where God needs us to be, in ourselves, our community, and the world. It is the very definition of organised chaos – there are never going to be enough toilets for that number of people to use in a 20 minute session break – with a lot of hugging (not a fan) and a lot of gin (bit too much of a fan). Before this year, I would have described the group as fairly homogeneous, but I wouldn’t do that now. Although it is not yet close to being the embodiment of diversity in action that we would like it to be, I think as a Society we will be healthier, happier and able to welcome others more sincerely if we continue and deepen the work done so far, speaking as clearly about how we are already different as we do about how we are the same.

“Quakers Meeting” by Thomas Rowlandson is licensed under CC CC0 1.0

As part of a wider exploration of Privilege and Power, we were also thinking about sustainability in the face of the climate emergency. The words currently ringing through my mind, pushing me out of my comfort zone in all the right ways, are “I need to do everything I can do. Then I need to do a little bit more.” But I don’t want to do a little bit more. I feel like a lot of the time I’m at breaking point already. How can I do more?

But, of course, I can. No, it won’t be easy, or I would have done it before. But as the same speaker said, I can’t look my children in the eye and say, in 30 years time, that I’m sorry I didn’t love them enough to leave them a world they can enjoy with their own children, in the way I can enjoy this world with mine. How can I deprive them of sharing the thrill of rolling headlong down hills covered in wildflowers (and plenty of things we all pretend are not hiding under the grasses); of counting the spots on ladybirds; of always knowing there will be enough food in the cupboards to keep them safe from hunger (even when half a loaf of bread has once more gone fluffy in the bread bin)?

So I need to do more. What can I do? How am I being called to change my life, and through that, help to make being more sustainable part of the collective default?

A phrase that I always associate with my grandmother (who was born into extreme poverty, lived in London through both World Wars and lost her parents-in-law to the Blitz) is “waste not, want not”. She also loved “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.” In my head, whenever I hear that, I hear it in my own mother’s voice, with that slightly horrified tone of “did I just turn into my mother?” When I say it (and I do), I would imagine I say it with exactly the same inflection…

Waste not, want not. It has a visceral memory of rationing running clear through it. And it is in direct opposition to most of the way that things are made and marketed in modern society. But what does it mean to me?

The main areas of unquestionable waste in my daily habits are buying clothes I do not need, and eating too much. And in both of these areas, saying no to wasteful habits means saying no to things that I really, really want, if only in that moment. Saying no to consuming more than I need, more than is healthy, more than is right, is saying no to waste. It is also saying that I have to learn to resist the yearning that floods through me for that moment of indulgence and zoning out when tucking into a doughnut or three in the gasp between lessons; or the siren call of inhabiting that body and luxuriating in that lifestyle slithering its way into my subconscious as I dash into town for pens or the chemist.

I am a firm lover of lists and making plans (and usually slightly weaker at actually actioning those plans), and so I have been thinking about how I can create ways around me of reducing waste, and in particular, of stopping throwing away so much spoiled food, and eating so much food that I really don’t need – ways that are sustainable long term, by not adding straws to our already-creaking camels’ backs. I started this year intending to do something different and sustainable every month, a lifestyle change I called #Challenge2019. This (admittedly quite overdue now) is its next installment. So here we go.

I have said before that food waste in our household happens for a number of reasons. I buy healthy food and then don’t have the energy to cook it, so it goes off. (I’m not talking about going past its sell by date here, incidentally – I’m talking liquid cucumbers and green yogurt). I buy chocolate and crisps as occasional treats, and we all end up eating them as the satsumas go hard and brown in the fruit bowl. I cook what feels like the right amount of food, and put too much on our plates, so that we all end up either throwing some away (The Paleontologist) or eating until our tummies hurt (both The Cowgirl and me). I come home from work or days out, full of good intentions, and then snack on cheese because I need a quick boost and everything else takes effort. Then I put too much food on my plate when tea is finally ready and the cycle continues.

Working on all these things at once is impossible for me. Trust me – I’ve tried it I don’t know how many times, and it has never worked. Small changes, embedded one by one and built on slowly, is the only way I can see this working. This week, we’re looking at 5 a day. As a family, our challenge is to eat 5 portions of fruit or veg a day. If we do, we each get to put a cork (reused, of course 😉) into a pot. When there are a full week’s corks in there, we get a family treat.

How does this help sustainability, I hear you ask? I’m hoping, in lots of ways. It will mean snacking on the short-lived fruit and veg already in the house, instead of crisps and sweets. It will encourage me to incorporate more veg into meals, and hopefully give the girls the incentive to eat them instead of them going straight from the pan into the food waste canister. As we all get better at adding daily corks to the family total, I’m also hoping to bring in ideas about where our fruit, in particular, was grown, and how it reached us. And yes, it’s also about encouraging us all to eat more healthily, which might also help me to fit into more of my old clothes, meaning I don’t have to buy more when I have a whole wardrobe of clothes already that I don’t want to admit I may never be able to zip up again. Wouldn’t it be great to address both areas of waste in my life at once?

Is this going to save the world? Clearly not, with just me on my own, saying the same thing over and over to my nuclear family. Is it going to help? Yes. It will help me, but it is also a way of living my faith and my conviction, making the choices and sacrifices I can right now, helping my children and myself see I mean what I say, and that hard choices for me can look everyday and commonplace for others around me. And that’s ok. They may have their own hard decisions which I can support them with, which if we’re all lucky may be something that someone else they know has already overcome, and can show them the way around.

This is me doing everything I can, and then a little bit more. When this is normal, I will do a little bit more of the little bits more. What do you do that is a little bit more? And what can I do to help?

Leaders should be made of stardust.

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Many years ago, in a marquee somewhere in the South of England, I listened to Jocelyn Bell speaking about her work, and the magic of the universe. At the time, I had no real idea what an astonishing woman she is, and how lucky we were to have her speaking to our Quaker community. Now, I love that she is a hero of The Paleontologist’s, and magic in her own right as she lives her faith through her work.

After she spoke, she joined us in worship. I remember others sharing feelings of awe and insecurity in the face of the vastness of the universe, and I certainly felt that too. For me, though, that feeling was tempered by another that was somehow both complementary and, simultaneously, in direct opposition. It was not a recognition of overwhelming stellar entities, but rather of the incredible nature of the minute particles that group together to make them. Those particles that also make us, and everything else around us. We are eternally interlinked with mosquitos, with mountain ranges, with far-flung galaxies, and we are all unable to be anything at all unless all those miniscule dust specks work together in harmony.*

Over the years, I have been part of a lot of rants discussions about leadership, particularly in politics. I’m not going to lie, a lot of them have involved Jeremy Corbyn, and whether he has an effective leadership style. I know he has been slated in the press for being a weak leader, but as someone who thinks very little of command and control leadership, I tend to think that kind of slating is a good thing. In my not-even-slightly-humble opinion, the idea of imposing your own will on your followers is not leadership at all, it is dictatorship, and there are very few situations where it is ever going to bring out the best in a situation.

Good leadership to me might be better described as leadership by consent. A real leader – let’s call him Jed – is someone who is respected by his team, who collectively understand the direction they are travelling in. He encourages everyone to have a voice, before pulling together the best ideas, accepting he may not have got it right first time, and putting together a plan that everyone has faith in. Jed looks for the best in everyone, whether they have put themselves forward or not, and gives them opportunities to grow in themselves and try out new ideas, giving more and more people the skills and experiences vital to being able to lead well.

As I said, I had hoped Jeremy Corbyn might end up being a leader like this, which would certainly have been a breath of fresh air in the smog of British politics, then and now, as well as advertising on a huge stage that there are other ways of doing leadership, especially somewhere like Westminster. I hoped for a politician who could set aside ideas of personal grandeur and old allegiances and find ways of building consensus among those who, ultimately, are all there to serve their country and their constituents. Jeremy Corbyn has done some wonderful things, before and after his unexpected rise to prominence, but pulling people together to form a collective movement for positive change is sadly not something he can claim to have achieved.

Daily life in my household is universally frazzled, as I may have just hinted at before. The school run is consistently accompanied by a discordant symphony of shrieks, dinosaur roars and grumbles, and is always done in the car, so that we can scootch off after generously donating our chaos-makers to their breakfast club, and still get to work in time to not be horrifically late; or scoop them up, yawns, chatterings and all, with just enough time for tea and bed. This afternoon was rather beautifully different. It was a glorious day, so I decided to do the utterly unthinkable, leave work a little early (and the sky didn’t fall on my head. Miracle!) and walk round to pick the children up from school. Double bonus, I got to stop off and vote on my way, and even had time for a chat with the Guardians of the Big Black Box.

On our way home, staggering behind my super speedy offspring, laden down with bookbags, violin and PE kit (there is always some truth at the bottom of every stereotype) as they scooted away with quicksilver grace, I watched them repeatedly stop, bend over, shake their heads, move on. We got to the traffic lights and I got close enough to hear The Cowgirl muttering to herself at one of these stops, bent double with a squashed plastic water bottle in her hand. “I need to talk to all my class about this. We need to do a litter pick At Once. We need to all Work Together or it will get Worse and Worse.” (I promise, you really can hear the capital letters as she speaks.) Her face was scrunched with concentration, and determination and anger radiated from her in equal measure.

What a difference there would be if that was the reaction we all had in similar situations. This is bad leads to something must be done often enough. But she went so much further than that. She went on to I must do something about this, and then, even better, and I must ask other people to help me.

A lifetime ago, in a marquee in the middle of a field, I first realised the beauty and power of an infinite number of interlinking particles working together in a harmonious single unit. Walking home from school, The Cowgirl demonstrated that she has learned the same lesson, and woe betide anyone who doesn’t go along with it. Maybe it is time for us all to find a new kind of leader. She is unlikely to be someone who speaks loudest. She may not be someone who speaks at all. But she will understand that this world only works when we all act together, and she will live her life in the knowledge that we are all made with stardust.

*Yes, I know. My science is a little shaky, but I’m going for a metaphor here, people…

Rocks form an arch framing a silhouette. The sky is crowded with stars. Image by skeeze, on Pixabay.

Take a deep breath

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

A couple of years ago, we went on holiday to Valencia. Whilst there, we learned many useful life lessons: beaches and dinosaur museums are almost as good for bribery as Haribo and ice cream; Spanish meal times are the way forward (breakfast until 11 as a normal thing? It makes life so much more civilised!); never expect a child to walk more than 3 metres in direct sunlight, unless you have earplugs or there is ice cream at the end of it (at which point, running and leaving you behind, panting in the heat, becomes way more fun). The most lasting lesson, however, was one I learned alone, on a sun-filled stressful family adventure to the beach. The children were finally old enough to be watched by just one adult, and having a fabulous time getting covered in as much sand as possible, so my husband and I took it in turns to go out of our depth and actually swim in the sea. It had been so long since I’d done this, my body had completely forgotten what to do. Waves came towards me and I panicked, freezing and fighting to stay in control. The wave passed. I remembered I can actually tread water pretty well. I looked out to sea, saw there were no immediate waves, and took a breath. The next wave appeared, and my body started to remember that it knew what it was doing. By the third wave, I had it, relaxing into the incoming surge, focussing on the moment, accepting that when the waves came, they were not there to be fought but to be ridden, to be felt, endured sometimes. And then they passed. There was a moment of stillness in which to breathe.

Take a breath.

It is advice I dish out with joyful abandon, and almost never take myself. I say it to my students: if you are getting panicky in an exam, look out of the window and take a deep breath. Let it out. Count the beats to make sure you are breathing more slowly than normal. Keep going until the voice in your head stops repeating “I can’t do this” at the top of its lungs and lets you listen to the question in front of you instead.

Take a breath.

I do this with The Cowgirl, whose emotions regularly consume her entire being. Excitement needs to be jumped and wriggled out. Exhaustion has her curled in a bundle like a nesting cat. Fury cannot be contained in her tummy but comes out in screams and flying fists. Actually, I think this is probably more healthy than the volcano I often have bubbling in my gut, but that doesn’t help if you’re on the receiving end of one of her deceptively strong left hooks. So she screams for a while until fury turns to fright, and then she huddles on my lap and we recover together. We take a breath, feeling the air together, bypassing our lungs and going straight into our bellies. We compare who has the biggest tummy, and I stop holding mine in. We blow out and try to blow each other over. And we keep taking breaths until the anger has passed.

Take a breath.

Trying to get up when it takes everything in you not to cry at the pain running like acid down your spine, you suck air through your nose as hard as you can. Controlling your body as your instincts control you, you pant through contractions before a long low exhale and a baby’s first, faltering inhale. Laughing like maniacs as you lie on your tummies, sharing secrets, you inhale in whoops to try to limit embarrasing consequences. Learning how the world works and what your interactions do to it, you gently breathe out bubbles, whoosh away dandelion clocks, puff out birthday candle flames.

Take a breath.

The thing about taking a breath is that, however perfect that breath is, however much it gave you exactly what you needed in that moment, it can never be enough to stop, to not need to do it again. In the next moment, after a few heartbeats, you need to do it again. And again. And again. The cycle is always necessary, and endlessly repetitive. Most of the time we pay no attention to it at all, until something comes up that gets in the way and makes us focus by breaking the rhythm.

Take a breath.

Today may be an amazing day. Today is allowed to be the day you get it all right. Today can be the day you have the right answer to a crisis at work, or you get home with the time and energy to chat about discoveries, sorrows and playground shenanigans before the bedtime conveyor belt starts. Today might be the day you keep going with fighting bad habits or finally take a step towards building up better ones. Today might be the day everything goes entirely as you wish it to. And then tomorrow comes, the cycle starts again, and the mystery and mayhem of a new dawn takes over. And tomorrow may not be perfect. And that’s ok.

Take a breath.

Everything that matters in life follows that same pattern. Breathing. Eating. Learning. Loving. Growing plants and making memories. Reading, teaching, worshipping, praying. Sometimes it is perfect. Sometimes it is not. Sometimes it gives you everything you are craving. Sometimes it does not. Sometimes the answer appears in your heart before the sentence has even made it past your lips. Sometimes your cries echo for years, unanswered and seemingly unacknowledged. And whatever the moment, the feeling, the answer, next time, you get to do it all again. We want to see results, to know there’s a reason for all this. The rhythm keeps repeating and we look for meaning from the centre of the cycle and cannot find it.

Take a breath.

That answer will come. Every time you do this, it has an effect that cannot happen without what you have done. Each repetition is important, even when the results can only be seen after a long and cumulative journey. Creating a sustainable future; learning the alphabet; trusting that you are actually doing quite a good job of this whole life thing: all these things are made up of tiny moments, none of which are turning points, all of which are important.

You have this. We all do. Sometimes we can see it in ourselves. Sometimes we need others to find it in depths we are too tired to dig through alone. But it is always there. You’ve got this. If not in this moment, then in the next. Or the next. Or the next.

Take a deep breath.