Getting used to change is a bit like growing used to regularly being slapped around the face with last week’s unfinished to do lists, left out in the rain and still dripping when they hit your cheeks. Yes, there are worse things that can happen; yes, it sometimes brings the wake-up call you really need; but it is an experience to endure, not enjoy, when you are actually in the moment.
Change erupted within my household this week, catching us unprepared, bursting onto the scene in the shape of a red cassock, topped by a very self-satisfied grin. The Paleontologist is now officially a choir girl, and has been corraled immediately into a gaggle of rehearsals, services, and outings to Greggs. As her parents, we are of course delighted, and keep reminding each other of that as we search for the give in already stretched-to-bursting timetables that will allow us to officially transition from independent adults with some control of our lives into stereotypical glorified taxi drivers.
The Cowgirl is not delighted. Don’t get me wrong, she’s very proud of her sister, and very happy to announce her pride at the top of her voice in a crowded church. But she is also having the security that has always surrounded her shaken to its foundations, and she quite frankly Does Not Approve. Her sister is, in many ways, more of a constant than her parents: the one she conspires with after lights out; the one who held her hand in the long and lonely lunch breaks when she first started school; the one she worships as she treads the road less travelled, her footsteps, like King Wenceslas, breaking the terrors and harshness of winter and setting a clear path for her sister to follow. And now, sometimes, she’s not there. She’s singing when she used to be helping to imagine a zoo, an aeroplane, an exploration of the Antarctic; rehearsing when she used to fight for control of the remote control; absent when she should be walking into the swimmig pool and giving her sister courage by her mere presence. And so swimming lessons are avoided; TV choices change; shouting matches and clingyness both increase in equal measure.
As a parent, you know that one day, you will no longer be the centre of your child’s world. They will no longer believe you have all the answers, and they will be right. They will ask for your advice, and mock the answer you give them. Their hearts will break and kisses and cuddles will no longer fix anything at all. But when one of your children falls apart because the other is growing up very slightly faster than they are? All you can ever do is love them as hard as you can, and hope that will still be enough.
Two children in matching jumpers, carrying matching Lego, travellating together into the distance.
Five year old Cowgirls are not the only ones who don’t like it when their familiar realities shift under their feet. Those still fighting the transitioning reality of climate change are in the same position. Everything ahead of us is concealed in a haze of uncertainty and the disagreement of experts. Everything behind us is not only familiar, but also heavily weighted in the favour of those who most like to cry nonsense at the mere idea of climate change. Everything is about to come crashing down on our heads and their profit margins. And like a five year old, they are losing their tempers and overindulging in their freedom when they have it and spending a lot of time pretending they are not huddled on the sofa hoping this is all a bad dream.
Speaking truth with love is a phrase often used, and often misused. Sometimes it means “I’m going to explain everything that is wrong with you, but say it with a smile and terribly earnest eyes.” Sometimes it means “No offense, but…” Which is inevitably followed by a list that is likely to make you curl up into a ball and hide in a dusty corner until the middle of next summer. What it should mean can be just as difficult to face. It should be an honest reflection, a clear and unblemished mirror, held up without judgement or pain. But it is not speaking truth if you say only what your audience is already aware of, just as it isn’t loving if you say what they are utterly unprepared to hear, then leave them alone to deal with the consequences. Love is not an easy thing to feel, to offer, or to accept. But honestly offered and willingly accepted, it is a thing that can open minds and hearts and bank accounts, and is probably the only thing left that has a hope of saving the world.
A fence crowded with padlocks, looking out over a deep blue ocean.
“It isn’t so much that hard times are coming; the change observed is mostly soft time going.”
A week ago today, millions of people went out on the streets, chalking their hopes and furies onto walls; pavements; each other. It was one moment in an evolutionary story. It was a chance for weary prophets to draw in breath, feasting upon the energy and optimism of those not yet broken by the inertia of others who will not care. It may be a turning point; it may be another marker on a chaotic scattergram of things the youth of the 21st century choose to care about; it may be seen as mass hysteria if we discover that the dramatically changing climate is not, in fact, in any way affected by our presence on this world, and it is just humanity showing off its crazy-huge ego once again.
I couldn’t be part of that striking moment, which to me is an unexpected diamond in the string of plastic beads that thread together the realisation that doing something to reduce humanity’s negative impact on the world around us is a no-brainer. To make my contribution, I spent 7 days keeping track of the actions I take, trying to consider their greater impact. As any fluctuating participator in dietary fads and avoidance tactics such as myself will be able to tell you, nothing holds you to account quite like writing down what you are doing – both the positives and the wrappers you’d rather hide behind the back of the sofa. Even better, telling other people about it allows shared stories and mutual re-invigoration. So here’s what I’ve been doing, diesel-car driving and all. How about you? What’s your story?
Day 1: Saturday dawned bright, sunny, and a perfect start to a renewed way of looking at things. Full of enthusiasm and with a family day ahead of me, there were plenty of wins today. We went to the library (got to love a guilt-free book fest), hung the washing on the line to dry, put together a bag of clothes to donate to charity, watered the plants using water from the butt left behind by our predecessors (which obviously meant that it started raining about 15 minutes later). It was not a day without its downsides, though. These would become the features that, on good days, bad days and just a bit meh days, would form a constant muttering behind me, the monotonous burble of “actually, never mind the rest of it, are you ever going to do anything about us?” Overusing my lovely diesel car, moving slightly too fast, trying to combine tasks into single trips but consequently driving round and round and round and round, depressingly frequently in rush hour traffic jams full of everyone else in the same town also trying to fit errands and clubs and emergency shopping into the 15 minutes of unscheduled time they have squeezed in that week. Energy-boosting, energy-crashing, pre-packaged, plastic-wrapped snacks eaten when not hungry because it feels the only way to get from home time to bed time. Tumble-drying school uniforms and only checking the labels afterwards because frankly, even on good weeks I don’t have the energy for 15 rounds with The Cowgirl when I have the temerity to suggest that, in a lack-of-washing emergency situation, it might not be the end of the world if she wears a skirt instead of trousers.
Day 2 arrived and saw me waving the flag for multitasking vicars’ wives everywhere, as I represented the college I work for at a civic service in my husband’s church. (Getting TOIL for going to a service I was going to attend anyway, you say? That is what I call winning at life.) My positive actions for the day started with a rather lovely outfit, if I do say so myself, bought second hand and already worn by someone else from eBay, with accidentally matching shoes. Later, we looked at food as a family, and made a set of lolly sticks to try to balance the variety I need to keep some kind of sanity around cooking dinner with The Paleontologist’s need to be the boss of Everything In The World. They should also be a way of cutting down food waste, avoiding too much of today’s negative action: having to throw away a loaf of bread that had been sneakily lurking behind some gorgeous flowers gifted to us by a parishioner, and was now mouldy beyond salvation or freezing potential.
Other highlights of the week (by which I mean other actions playing on repeat because that is what life is like on the days I’m at work) included walking between different teaching sites and eating leftovers for lunch instead of taking trips to Aldi. They also included this week’s champion success story: taking my winter coat to have its zip changed. To put this into context, I sewed up the scuppered zip as a temporary fix the night before catching the train to Paris for our tenth wedding anniversary. My colleagues have been mocking me for the year and a half since then that I’ve spent struggling to get it on over my head. This gold-medal-winning moment happened as a result of seeking concrete actions to put in this post. The act of observing and recording genuinely did change my behaviour. Please don’t ever let OFSTED hear me say that.
Over the week, I tried harder with some things, and noticed my own hypocrisy with others. As a lifelong vegetarian who has been resisting giving up dairy with the passion many meaties show in the face of giving up bacon sandwiches, this is not an unfamiliar feeling. This is a process, for all of us. I’m not ready to give up my car yet, and neither is my local transport system. Reducing food waste, on the other hand – that is something we definitely can do. And let’s face it, with the utter unknown of Brexit just round the corner, wasting less food and working better with whatever we happen to have in the house might just become something we all need to go back to being better at. Chaotic uncertainty does have a way of making us appreciate what we used to have. Let’s just hope we all get there before we reach the point that no one will have anything any more.
I have steered clear of talking about politics here. Well, a bit, anyway. This is partly because simplicity is the polar opposite of any form of current affairs (though messy has certainly come into its own), and partly because when I think about politics at the moment it gives me that clenched up feeling in your throat that you get when you’re arguing about something you really care about with someone who just won’t listen.
This morning, I accepted that I couldn’t ignore that lump in my throat and keep on trying to breathe through it. Why? Because the start of the teaching year is just around the corner, and so, possibly/probably/definitely/never in a million years (delete as appropriate) is a General Election.
A mobile polling station in an area with no community buildings. With nicer weather than the next election, I suspect.
As anyone who has ever been in a classroom with me for more than 10 minutes will know, I quite like talking about politics. In fact, make that anyone who has spent 10 minutes with me in any situation at all. (Overhead yesterday was The Cowgirl, the roll of her eyes evident through her voice, muttering “Not boring Brexit again…” Sometimes struggles to work out which way round her trousers go, but already knows about Europe.) We have discussed Brexit, immigration, budgets, whether education should be free, climate change, the NHS, and so many other things besides. Sometimes they come up naturally. Sometimes they are shoe-horned in to tick a box (you want me to talk more about British Values? Well…) Sometimes they are deliberately planned because I think it really is so much more important than a bit more on how to pass an exam.
One thing that falls clearly into that category is teaching students about elections. I first taught a lesson about voting back in my first year as a trainee teacher, and agonised over it for hours. I have honed it, shaped it, vastly improved it, and used it again for every election since. I teach adults. They need to know not only that they can vote, but how voting works, and how to choose who to vote for.
And that is the key problem I am having now. The first part of the lesson is very straightforward. Take my usual rant about why everyone should vote, tone it down, remember not to do it with a large glass of gin in one hand, tone it down again, and job done. Then things get harder. Normally, at this point, I would go into a variety of things that should probably be obvious, but, apparently, are not. My students leave either bored out of their minds or fired up with new-found enthusiasm, and I can sit back and know I have done my bit for democracy, compose Facebook updates detailing the most interesting things to come out of the lessons, and feel delightfully smug.
Not this time, I suspect. My usual list of What Students Probably Don’t Know runs into neck-deep quicksand by about minute ten:
You do not vote for a party; you vote for a candidate. Well, I suppose that is still true. More so than normal if yours is one of the more than 30 MPs to have changed party this year. (I admit, that figure is based on Wikipedia, which lists every shift in allegiance, expulsion due to scandal and bigotry, re-admission, and re-expulsion in dizzying detail.)
We do not elect our Prime Minister. So far, so accurate, of course. This has caused seismic incredulity every time, even in the days when we had a conventinal Prime Minister. The obvious question is always How are they chosen then? Um. He’s the one who can command a majority? On the day even his brother abandoned his party, I don’t think that works. He’s the leader of the largest party? By this time next week I’m half expecting the Tories to have been overtaken in number by the Lib Dems. He’s the one who has the confidence of the House? When it is both publicly acceptable and not even questioned to say that Boris Johnson will change his mind as soon as it suits him, I doubt he has the confidence of his own reflection, never mind Parliament. Well, never mind. We always knew Boris would break the mold. Let’s move on.
Choose who you will vote for by what matters most to you. In a world with so many demands crushing in from every direction, who is going to be our R2D2 and stop the walls before they kill us? Climate catastrophe lurks in every shadow, questioning every choice available. The NHS is in crisis. Education is making our children less equipped for daily life as it overwhelms their resilience and their ability to make independent choices. Brexit hovers over us like that spaceship in Independence Day, and none of us really know which worldwide icon it will consume next. Given all these paralysing priorities, I’m not convinced it’s fair to put anyone in the position where they have to decide on the spot what is most important to their lives. I certainly can’t ask them to defend their choices to people they have only just met.
Find out what each party stands for. Quakers seek that of God in every individual; here, I seek that of God in every party. I have to provide materials on each one for my students, as none of the parties produce their manifestos in a way that can be understood by low-level readers who are also politically inexperienced.* I attempt to read them, summarise them without bias, make up my own too. It does, however, require manifestos. Or at least, it requires people to say things and then stick to them for at least as long as it takes to teach one lesson. This taxes my time, my neutrality and my patience with current affairs at the best of times. These are not the best of times.
It feels more important than ever to teach about the next election, precisely because it is so unpredictable, so unusual, so contradictory. We need to teach each other, our children, ourselves. We all bear responsibility for getting into the unfathomable fiasco facing us now. What do we do now to take responsibility to get out of it again?
*You can get easy read versions, but they still run to about 50 pages and tend to be even more biased than the standard ones. She says, with no bitterness at all.
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?
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.Â
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.
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?
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.
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.Â
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…
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.
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.
Can anything really be freely chosen if it is introduced to you at gunpoint?
Quakers have a series of Advices and Queries. They are phrased very gently, whilst pointing out in no uncertain terms that it is probably worth re-evaluating at least some of the fundamental principles by which you have chosen to live your life. If books could speak, they would be heaving a heavy sigh and murmuring “I’m not angry, just disappointed…”
Part of Advice number 41 says this:
Try to live simply. A simple lifestyle freely chosen is a source of strength. Do not be persuaded into buying what you do not need or cannot afford.
Weaving into my mind like bindweed – beautiful, clingy and impossible to get rid of – is this question: Is it actually possible to freely choose a simple lifestyle?
It is possible to live a simple lifestyle in order to reduce your personal impact on the environment. But if you are compelled by the driving terror of global catastrophe, is that really a free choice?
You can do it as a way of living within your means, on a limited budget. But when I think about that, I think about counting coppers out of a jar to buy bread, and borrowing from friends to be able to call the bank and find out why I had no access to any money at all. I am very lucky, and have only been that desperate once. It might have been living simply, but it was not even close to a choice.
You can stand as counter-cultural, deliberately rejecting what is seen as of most value to the modern British mindset; refusing to buy into societal norms, rejecting capitalism with acts of rebellion. But if you define yourself by what you don’t participate in, can that be either a free and personal choice, or a source of strength?
Maybe the real question is what am I thinking when I talk about a simple life? Whenever I think about it, I mostly think about how my life is the complete opposite of simplicity. I think about the chaos of everyday routine, pushing the whole family out of the door Every Single Day before any of us really wants to even be out of bed (except The Paleontologist, that is. It seems that being willing to get out of bed as early as possible is another of those things that skips a generation. It missed her father out by a country mile and landed straight on her. Unfortunately, she inherited the full measure from her Grandad, leaving none at all for her sister.) I think about balancing homework, cooking, phonics, play time and downtime in the witching hour between getting home from After-school Club and sitting down to eat. I think about the school holiday we have just had, balancing church commitments, family time, lesson planning and jobs that never get done in term time, leaving us all more tired at the end than we were at the beginning (and with the washing baskets just as full. How is that even a physical possibility?)
Given all this, I am clearly the perfect person to talk about freely choosing a simple life… I often say, when justifying being a family with two cars, that it is necessary for us to have two cars in order to meet all our obligations. What I actually mean is that we need two cars in order to live the life we have chosen. Could we both get to work without them? No, not with the public transport we have here. Could we move closer to the area we both work in? No, not when the Church chooses where we live. Could we form local connections to help pick up our children so that we can lift share more? Um, yes, but I may have already mentioned that I’d rather chew my own arm off than ask for favours I might not be able to repay. Could we change our work patterns to avoid the necessity of two cars? Yes; but only by one of us leaving a vocation we have both sacrificed a lot to pursue. And we just don’t want to do that.
Given the fact that so many people live lives balanced between chaos and breaking point, how can we picture what a simple lifestyle would even look like?
The need to be better – better than Them, better than ourselves last year, better than our wildest imaginings – drives many of us to never just be. We must always be doing something, because we must always prove, to ourselves and the world, that this is the best moment ever. It is drummed into us from the days of Paw Patrol onwards that that is what is required for a day to be worth living, or recording, or remembering. It is, of course, an entirely unachievable ambition, though the pursuit of it can lead to beautiful moments, as well as the inevitable meltdowns that come when, for instance, this year’s Easter Egg Hunt was not quite up to last year’s standard…
The only way that a simple lifestyle as an achievable desire makes sense to me is to think about what I want to be choosing, not what I would be avoiding. Choose community. Choose fun. Choose habits that lead to satisfaction with yourself and those around you. Choose to be happy with what you have and not compare it to other people’s Instagram lives. Choose local food and playing in the garden. Choose giving away things you still like to others who can’t afford them.* Choose to think in a whole new way, that looks at what is there to enjoy not what is not there to envy. Choose to learn from others’ acts of love and generosity, not sulk that their house is bigger (or cleaner…) than mine. That’s the simple lifestyle I am looking for. And it is only achievable through determined choices, day by day, year by year, one picture, one blog post, one memory at a time.
*For those of you who are my generation, and now can’t get a Scottish voice saying “I chose not to choose life. I chose something else” out of your heads, yes, it was deliberate #sorrynotsorry
A stunning autumn day; The Cowgirl, just learning to run, heads off into the distance.
Scooters. Phones. Toothpaste. Glasses. Roller skates. Fridges. Ankle Foot Orthoses (mobility aids, usually known as AFOs – so inevitably, my family only ever use the term UFO. In fact, I just had to Google the proper name…) Bicycles. Hearing aids. Cars. Lego (said in a growly, so-excited-the-hyper-just-screams-through kind of voice. The only way to say it properly; trust me.) Plastic is everywhere. It makes everyday life more accessible. It is a key ingredient in making modern living as (relatively) cheap as it is. It is used to make a marvellous mosaic of machines and games that have no purpose other than to just be fun. The Paleontologist, in particular, would not want to live in a world where 280-step Lego rollercoasters were not in existence. Of course, she would probably have picked up far less swear words too, but nobody’s perfect…
I give you Lego Jurassic World. With a snow mobile in the background, because frankly, why not? This is normal decoration for a dining room, right?
But plastic is the villain in every good story about the oceans, city parks, farms, even Mount Everest. Bags that sea creatures mistake for tasty jellyfish nibbles, or nappies that will still be around a hundred years after their wearers have themselves grown old and died, or teabags, for goodness sake – is nothing sacred? We have all been part of the creation of a culture of throwaway values, of putting convenience before worth.
I have been trying to cut down on plastic – particularly single use plastic. I have, of course, put as much plastic into the kerbside recycling as possible for some years (increasing dramatically when I realised I could rinse it out in the dishwasher instead of doing it by hand 😳) Recently, I have increased my efforts: toilet roll now magically appears on our doorstep, wrapped in paper and made from bamboo; milk arrives in glass bottles; and it turns out it is possible to get through a period without plastic. Well, except the ibuprofen boxes and chocolate wrappers. Oops…
The problem is that cutting down on plastic does not just mean saying no to throw away Costa cups and regifting Enchantimals. (No, I hadn’t heard of them either, until The Cowgirl got given some for her last birthday. Half skunk, half girl, and a build so skinny they make Barbie look rotund. So of course, the children love them.) Cutting down on plastic really means cutting down on the things that make it possible to work, have fun, have kids, have a hobby, all at the same time. It means forward planning, and being willing to go to different shops for different things, rather than just doing a Morrisons shop online and accepting that peppers and aubergines will arrive in polythene netting encased in shrinkwrap. It means aiming for a picnic bag that puts Mary Poppins to shame, filled with metal straws, collapsible cups, cloth handkerchiefs and bamboo cutlery. It means having the disposable income to invest in reusable options, and the disposable time to put in the groundwork, find the alternatives, make cleaning products at home, grow your own food.
As real life kicks in the questions get harder. Should I avoid plastic altogether, buying new non-plastic storage containers, or is it better to keep using old ice cream pots and takeaway tubs, which at least mean they are getting more use than they were intended for? How about going to a plastic free shop? Should I go there to do my shopping, even if I have to drive miles and end up wasting a huge amount of time and fuel? I always intend to buy vegetables without packaging, but then I have a week of mocks to mark and end up buying ready-cut vegetables in even more plastic than usual. Can you get medicines without plastic; and even if you can, should you? Children make their way round zoos and aquariums, entranced by the occupants and engaging with fantastic interactive displays educating them about the impacts of plastic waste on the environment; then they stock up on Haribo and Fruit Shoots for the drive home.
A few weeks ago, I helped my mother clear out her loft. Buried near the back, under 30+ years of slate dust, were a few bags of the toys my brother and I had outgrown a lifetime ago. We put them onto Olio, and after the usual confusion of not quite managing arranged pick-ups, they were passed on to someone intending to share them between her son and his nursery. When she saw them, her response was “They’re gorgeous. Almost too good to be played with.”
Almost too good to be played with? Toys that were second-hand 35 years ago and have been abandoned for years in a way that fills me with guilt (Toy Story has a lot to answer for) are still remarkable for their quality? What have we done? We all, as consumers, have a part in this. We have accepted as the status quo toys that become worn after 6 months – but that’s ok, because after that they will have been forgotten anyway, and something else will be in favour. Our phones last 18 months if we’re lucky, but that’s great, because the blistering pace of progress means we’re already eager for faster processing and better cameras after half that time. With a daughter so keen on excavations, I can’t help wondering: if there is still humanity on this planet in 500 years time, what will they find if they excavate a 21st century dwelling? What of our lives would be on display in museums of the future; and is that the picture we want them to form about us? It is a baffling contradiction that the things we consume break so easily, yet are made from materials that take centuries to degrade.
I don’t know how to fix this. I think it’s time to start making these links out loud, and talking about them more. It’s time to get back to looking for a form of protein The Paleontologist enjoys that doesn’t come wrapped in single-use, non-recyclable plastic. It’s time to acknowledge the power and responsibility we all have in these things, and use that power wisely and collectively. And after that? I think it might be time to sit down with my super-smart children, over a snack that doesn’t come double-wrapped in plastic, and work out together how we can possibly make this a better world to live in.
Messy Simplicity 