I went to a Quaker shared lunch today. If you’ve never been to a Quaker shared lunch, this may not make sense to you; but this shared lunch was about as Quakerly an event as it is possible to get. The food was all vegetarian or vegan; there was plenty of quiche; there were as many puddings as there were mains. The only thing missing really was a pot of hummus. It was yummy (if you like vegetables); there was enough to go round (plus extra puddings for the Cowgirl and the Paleontologist, who, decidedly not liking vegetables, had not eaten very much up to that point); and there was a speaker afterwards. And, this being an event that was about as Quakerly as it is possible to get, the speaker was speaking about the climate crisis.
I had to twist the Paleontologist’s arm quite heavily (and yes, there might have been threats of surgically removing her headphones from around her neck involved) to get her to stay. She’s a mardy teenager these days, but mardy teenagers are passionate about climate change, right? I hoped this would be something she could get involved in, bringing a youthful view to the proceedings. She told me it would be boring, and she’d rather be doing her homework. Yes, I know that what she meant by that was definitely lying on her bed with her headphones still surgically attached and doing as little actual work as possible; but still. She was prepared to suggest homework in half term. That’s how little she wanted to listen.
I was wrong. She was right. It was boring. Not because the speaker didn’t know her stuff (she really did, despite being pushed on it in unexpected directions). Not because I don’t care about the subject. But because there was nothing new. Nothing I didn’t already know needed to happen. No moment of revelation. Just more of the “we should have been doing this for a really long time; we haven’t been; we really need to do it now.” And I, like everyone else in the room, had heard much of that before; had even said it to others plenty of times.
Coming home, frustrated but thoughtful, I asked the Vicar (who is not, on the whole, an inherently evil person) why, despite knowing all we know, he still eats meat. He told me a few reasons, some more valid than others, and then asked me why I don’t have a fully plant-based diet myself.
It shouldn’t have taken that, but it did. That’s what it took for me to look at myself and ask why I, not why they, keep acting this way. I quite like the Earth, in fairness. On balance, it’s nice that we’ve got it. Quite like London, and don’t want to see it all underwater. Quite like the sun and would love it if this rain could just stop. Quite like people, on the whole, and would rather we didn’t tear each other apart in a fight to the death for the resources we consume so excessively but that are, in fact, vital to our survival – water, clean air, food, little things like that. So why, for myself, do I not actually act in every way I can? Why do I see cheese as more vital than water; see flights as a right not a privilege; keep two cars even though we could probably go down to one these days? What is the disconnect between my conviction that action must happen, and my lack of action for myself?
Maybe it’s because I’m still waiting for the Hollywood moment, when the surly but inspired scientist gets called into the White House to explain everything, graciously accept the apologies for the mockery he has spent his life fielding that are now all that stands between humanity and annihilation, and saves the day and his marriage all at once. Maybe I’m just a people pleaser; I don’t want to be the one saying we can’t go on holiday; can’t eat chicken nuggets any more; can’t spend Christmas money in Primark. Maybe there are a wealth of complex reasons; or maybe I just don’t have the time, the energy, the personal resources to make the changes I know need to be made. I don’t know why that disconnect is there. But I suspect that until I – we – do, real action is going to hit stumbling blocks that all of us put down in our collective way, but none of us want to own.
Recently, a friend mentioned the big red guilt button he carries on his back. I imagine this button as implanted somewhere between his shoulder blades, ready to growl an alert if, when he sits down, he relaxes, rather than answering emails or ticking off items on his To Do list; monitoring closely for movement away from responsibilities towards the committees we both serve on, and towards family time. This mention came about in a surreptitious conversation filled with me whinging us commiserating about how hard, sometimes, Quaker committee work can be (similar, I imagine, to volunteering to help with any faith group, or possibly even with any group at all). It can certainly bring with it an impressive array of opportunities for guilt. Guilt if you say no to service (we all have to do our part, you know); guilt if you say yes (particularly if you can’t, as it happens, respond to all emails within 24 hours, and all those that need careful consideration, research, and consultation more widely within 48); guilt if you say yes and you do everything “expected” of you and as a result you have no family time, no relaxing time, no personal time.*
My big red guilt button is not on my back. It’s buried deep in my more wobbly than I’d like it to be tummy. It rumbles when I eat food that will make that belly wobblier still; and it rumbles when I don’t, because what kind of example am I setting for my children if I buy into the Diet Culture? If I am not body positive, what chance do they have of overcoming societal limitations and recognising that every body is beautiful? (And yes, I do believe that – that every individual is amazing, and every body is unique and special and to be celebrated; every body except mine, that is. Oops…) I feel guilty and lazy when I choose reading over running; but how can I model living a happy life when I look upon movement merely as an unpleasant means to an impossible end, and never something to do purely for fun? Read the literature and it says, “all the studies agree that a girl’s attitude to how awesome her body is comes straight from her mother”, and oompf, there it goes again, my big red button shrieking in glee as that alarm sounds yet again.
If I manage to talk down my social conditioning, born and embedded in an era when only young, thin, non-disabled women had any worth at all; if I talk that down, it’s time for the next level of guilt to kick in. A deeper rumble now, connecting to the back of my mind. You say your body is beautiful after all? Huh! You are so wrong. And even if you’re right, none of your clothes fit. What?! You want to buy different clothes? More clothes?! But you have a wardrobe of clothes you’re too fat to fit into. A wardrobe of clothes you would have to replace. Think of the cost! Think of the environmental impact! As though eating food you don’t need – what a waste! – wasn’t bad enough, you’re now going to buy new clothes just because you’re too lazy to exercise into your old ones? Are you trying to single-handedly destroy the entire world?!?
And so it goes on. Guilt for putting work before family; and its equal and opposite guilt for not making the time during my holiday to mark the work my students need feedback from before their exams. Guilt for spending so much time prepping lessons, and not giving my colleagues enough time to adapt my lessons for their own use; guilt for not making every lesson more individual to each one of the unique individuals my students are. Guilt for choosing to spend time just with my husband and not always spending down time as a family; guilt for not supporting him more when his physical health needs it a lot more than it used to. Guilt for never putting my own needs first and then exploding when the weight of martyrdom gets too much; guilt for sitting here and writing this while my kids watch screens, the floor remains un-hoovered, dentist appointments wait yet another day to be made.
The title of this post, for any of you unfamiliar with it, comes from Dumb Ways To Die, an ad campaign that became a TikTok sensation that The Cowgirl and The Vicar both introduced me to (yep, there it goes again: guilt she knows TikTok trends already; guilt I’m not one of the cool mums who knows the trends without being told). Of all the dumb ways to die, surely suffocating under the immense weight of the guilt of everyday living has to be one of the dumbest. So many of us have one of those red buttons, buried somewhere about our persons, hidden under our shrugs and smiles and stimming fingers and falsely loud laughter. Some people reading this might even scour these words for signs that they should increase pressure on their own big red button, adding in the weight of what I may have written about them (spoiler alert: it’s not about you). So why do we still trap each other and ourselves into these needless holes we all so hate? And how can we stop being so silent about it?
*It is a truly odd thing that a community who are, on the whole, generally quite nice people, can ask so much, of so many, for so few. I’m not sure why this is. I think it may have been this way for quite some time. I really hope it doesn’t stay this way for very much longer.
It is time to face facts. I can no longer deny this fundamental truth about myself. I have become, to my horror and despair, one of Those People. I have entered into an eternal, doomed fight to the finish with a breed of monster which consumes all within its path, killing the things that keep it alive with no sense of self-preservation or restraint, and I am forever lost. I have become a Slug Hunter.
I’ve never been much of a gardener, choosing instead to enjoy the finished results with no real understanding of how they were achieved. Indeed, in one church-owned home in my past, a wonderfully green-fingered parishioner came for a garden party and was cast into such a mire of despair at my gardening handiwork that she was pruning back the roses within ten minutes of arriving. But this year, I felt differently. I invested more. I took the time to clear the ground; I picked stones out of waterlogged earth and used them to wall off different sections of my soon-to-be-planted herb garden; I dug in fresh compost to enrich and break up the clay-heavy soil; I lingered in garden centres to choose the best options to plant, not just the cheapest. I invested, emotionally and financially, in putting down roots. And so, when slugs arrived in their hundreds to lay claim to my labours, I took it personally. And I took it hard.
In my reaction, arbitrary and extreme though I admit it may seem to those around me (weeping over a parsley plant because the speed of its consumption took it from healthy plant to three bare stalks in just one night, anyone?), there are lessons I need to learn. And, like all lessons that are worth investing in, these do not relate only to this topic, or this fight. Thinking small and modestly, as ever, it seems to me that these are lessons that can be magnified, rippling on and on until they end up, quietly and accidentally, making all the difference in the world.
Let go of how you thought things would be. Before I started anything, I had a vision of where I wanted it to end. There would be a herb garden, full of mint, some strawberries, and a glass of Pimms other herbs I use regularly scattered neatly within their rockery borders. Elsewhere would be flowers that staggered their blooming naturally throughout the year without needing too much support, and maybe, if they couldn’t be killed off with too much rain or not enough tenderness, a few sprouts stalks that I detest and The Paleontologist adores. I started with what I wanted the end result to look like, not what was appropriate for this space, what was possible in this timescale, what would be supported by this ecosystem or this soil or this weather. I tried to cram my surroundings into a mould of my own choosing, and it Did Not Work. Living a simpler life, linked more to our surroundings and the natural flow of the seasons and less to getting exactly what we want the instant we want it, we must aim to be a part of the whole, not expect to impose our will and desires over everything, and feel personally affronted when the slugs fail to read the memo to cease and desist in living off a certain herb patch just because it makes me feel like summer is finally here.
Do your research. Then do it again. When you don’t know very much about a topic, it’s pretty important, it turns out, to do some research before you leap in headfirst. When the slugs first appeared, I realised I needed to know more. I started to investigate. I tried things out. They Did Not Work. (I’m looking at you, eggshells…) I did some more research. I tried some more things. They Did Not Work Either. So I did some more research. I’m trying more things. They haven’t worked yet, but there is still time, and that means there is still hope. Because sometimes, we have a great idea, and a couple of other people think it’s a good idea too, so that confirms that it’s worth trying. And sometimes it works. And sometimes it doesn’t. That doesn’t mean it was wrong to try. It doesn’t mean it won’t work for other people. It just means it didn’t work for us, in this moment, and so we can either accept defeat, or find another plan. Covid-19 has taught us all that when things really matter to us, we have to be able to be flexible. We need to take that lesson and run with it in the years to come; because giving up and accepting catastrophic climate change after the first hurdle or two just isn’t an option.
Ask for help. Honestly speaking, I didn’t start by asking for help. I started more by having a whinge and a cry and hoping that The Vicar would do something magical and just make the slugs disappear. (Did I secretly want him to break all my principles and buy the most industrial-strength slug repellent out there, on Next Day Delivery, leaving me with both a solution and plausible deniability in its execution? Maaaybeee…)* Very few of us have all the answers, and none of us have the constant energy or the consistent willpower or the sheer, unwavering bloody-mindedness to keep going perpetually. So find someone who is good at being up when you’re down, or who gets their second wind when it’s already gone midnight and you have to do the school run tomorrow (hypothetically speaking, of course), or will just help you to think of other ideas that you haven’t yet tried, and help you to work out which of the ideas you have researched are practical, and which might accidentally set off a catastrophic chain reaction that will destroy the space-time continuum, or, at the very least, kill the hedgehogs as well as the slugs.
Enjoy the unexpected successes. Seeing everything as hopeless is the quickest way I know to give up entirely. You won’t be able to change the world in the blink of an eye. You may not even live to see the world changed at all. So celebrate the small successes when they come. Celebrate the planting of an apple seed that actually starts to grow. Celebrate the mint plant that is still standing in the morning when, on slug patrol at 11:30pm, you were convinced all hope was lost. Celebrate the completed eco-bricks and the cycled school-runs and the conversations about how important this is to you that don’t end in arguments. Celebrate the legislation changing people’s hearts and minds one country, one company, one town at a time. And then keep working to do more. Let those successes spur you on, not make you complacent; because if one thing can change, so can many more.
*He didn’t do this. He did do something with salt that I didn’t ask too many questions about, but he didn’t do this.
A selection of the plants in my garden that have not (yet) been consumed by the local wildlife. In the interests of full disclosure, I should probably mention that the trees, as the most successful plants out there, were not planted by me. In fact, the most successful of all is probably more a weed than anything else, despite being as tall as the shed it is right next to…
In my mind and in my fantasies, Advent is a time for making memories, dancing from one perfect moment to another with well-fitting coats and knitted scarves and big smiles as we visit Santa, pick greenery, sing carols and romp together in the snow. The house is clean and shiny from top to bottom; all the de-cluttering jobs that have been nagging at me all year are miraculously tidied up into other people’s welcoming arms; and warmth, fairy lights and the smell of cinnamon and homemade sugar-filled treats fill the air. Presents are handmade and meaningful; cards are written with love and actually posted; decorations are natural, zero waste and beautiful; and the air is pregnant with expectation and spiritual growth.
What Advent actually is, in this household at least, is exhaustion. It is cold. It is hectic. It is children with runny noses and adults who rely on their voices for work but are losing them anyway, and an endless, nagging feeling of not being on top of things. It is hyperactivity and the screeching of “Fiiiiive goooooold riiiiiings” from every room. It is The Palaeontologist screaming in frustration because she used up all her energy five weeks ago and hasn’t worked out how to build up more. It is Zoom calls about upcoming SATS and last minute letters about Viking days at school and realising you have no suitable clothes for the end of term celebration because your children have grown two sizes since they last went to a party. It is waiting not for the birth of Jesus but for clarity over government rules and regulations, The Vicar writing and revising what church services will be possible and how, everyone bending their minds around who will feel safe enough to meet together over the Christmas week, and what the consequences of any actions we take might be.
My reality is overload. My ideal is overly saccharine. Neither of them have any connection to simplicity. And Advent is a season whose heart cries out for simplicity. It is a time when we remember waiting. It is a time that was first filled with the praying, and preparation, and solitude, and weariness, and fear, and uncertainty of a pregnancy and birth that would change the world. It is a time of hoping against all expectations that this year it will be different. It is a time that first ended in a dirty, crowded, love-filled overflow to an inn that was more welcoming than it had space to be. How might it be possible, in an era of moments engineered for the perfect social media shot and endless comparisons across the playground, to bring that simplicity into my own Advent rituals?
One way is resisting some of the many and increasing customs of Advent itself. Advent calendars are shared and re-used every year in this household, and contain acts of kindness and, this year, the Christmas story as well as chocolates (because let’s face it, without chocolate would anyone get as far as looking for the lovingly recycled messages to act on every day? Plus, that boost of sugar before getting out of bed in the morning is apparently exactly what they need to drag themselves into their school uniforms in these final, closing days of a term that has lasted at least two decades.) We avoid Christmas Eve boxes (easy enough when Christmas Eve is a work night, and a busy one at that) and buy Christmas Jumpers – an absolute necessity for any primary school child in modern Britain – second hand, and re-gift them after they are outgrown (or try to – currently, I confess, I have a large and growing pile of them I never remember to give away at the right time of year). And I flatly refuse, with everything that is in me, for the sake of my little remaining sanity and well-being, to do Elf on the Shelf.
Acts of kindness written on recycled Christmas wrapping paper. Two chocolates for every action (anything to avoid another squabbling match); one action for every Advent calendar compartment.
These moves are not enough to satisfy my hope of simplicity. Noise and lights and already-decorated Christmas trees still surround me at all times. The underlying fear that presents will not get bought has started to seep into my nightmares. The alternating fears that when my children look back on Advent, they will either remember nothing but chocolate and Christmas films; or that they will remember nothing good at all, make me seek out more to do and more ways, new ways, different ways to fit in with the expectations of those they are surrounded by and Make Memories by doing, spending, acting.
There is no perfect medium in this one. The things that would be my ideal would not be the ideals of my family. The days are long gone, if they ever existed at all, when I could work towards making my own perfect Christmas and simply expect others to enjoy it too. And that is a good thing. Not only because my perfect Christmas was unachievable, but also because, in moving away from my own ideals and accepting that maybe other people’s ideas have equal value, I have also moved away from thinking only about perfection, about service by martyring myself in a quest for everything to look like a Disney set, and started noticing the moments when we get it right, together; even when that means letting The Cowgirl “help” with making the Christmas cake, turning a 15 minute mixing job into an hour-long blow by blow account of every moment of her school day, interspersed with us both swiping tastes of the uncooked cake batter, loaded with brandy-soaked dried fruit, whenever we thought we could get away with it. I still want to try to read more of the Bible and less of escapist novels downloaded because they were free on Kobo. I also want my children to help me to make new family traditions, which are likely to involve a lot more mud, shrieking, and screen time (quite possibly simultaneously), than I would ever volunteer for. I still want quiet times and times of prayer and times when I intensively clean away a year’s worth of dust and grime and make our living space feel more like a home and less like a haunted house, wrapped in spiders webs and clogged with cat fur. And I also want to do one thing, every day, just for fun. Simplicity can be about what we choose not to do, not to buy, not to eat; it is also about living here, and now, and enjoying what is here and now, rather than focussing always on the future. And focussing on the here and now can be as much a part of waiting and preparation as anything else.
The UK Government appear to have noticed recently that there might be quite a lot of fat people in this country. This is a problem because one of the impacts obesity can have is making you more likely to suffer complications from Coronavirus. Therefore, it is now your moral duty to Lose Weight For Lizzie, England and Saint George! This sudden awakening has prompted ridicule, fear, anger, and frustration: partly because the headlines are very, very wrong; and partly because they are probably right.
Why are they wrong? The easy answer is that there is no easy answer to this complex situation. Just as there is no single way to exercise, worship God or decorate a home, there is no single reason that people are obese. There are many medications and health conditions that can result in weight gain; there are societal and cultural implications; there are lifestyle factors and financial involvement. To suggest that all of these can be overcome by stopping junk food adverts for children and providing bike maintenance is, to put it mildly, utterly missing the point. Instead, it is taking a cheap shot at a group that we as a country are already conditioned to demonise: an easy target for a quick headline, and don’t worry if it all goes wrong, it isn’t your fault these people are too lazy to help themselves.
Me on our last wedding anniversary. BMI: definitely in the red.
I am obese. I haven’t always been; for many years I was solidly overweight, unable to drop down into healthy, but equally able to keep my BMI below that scary red “you will die and it will all be your own fault” zone on the charts. I’m tall and in proportion with myself, so even health professionals didn’t always realise I had a problem. They used to look surprised and change tack abruptly when I stepped on the scales, looking slightly embarrassed and talking about the problems of “carrying a little extra” – like I’d just picked up one too many books at the library. I have most of a lifetime’s experience of hating the “little extra” I have grown used to carrying; but speaking about it as something separate to me, something inconvenient that can be put down as soon as possible and forgotten about, won’t help. These rolls of fat are as much a part of me as my greying hair, my automatic smile, my heart and my pancreas and my memories. They may stop me doing some things (fitting into old clothes and choosing the right sizes in charity shops, for example, or touching the floor instead of my toes) but so do my memories. So does my fear. So, for that matter, do my job and my family and my finances and all the other pressures that hold me here, for worse and for better.
Given all this, then, how can any of the current headlines about obesity be in any way right? Because, although the message is clumsy and temporary and turning a process of love into a glorification of violence, it is a message with truth at its heart. I do want to lead a more sustainable life, and that means changing the things that have helped to keep me, at least, obese. I don’t like buying more food than we need, and one reason for buying too much is because we are eating too much (or sometimes that we’re buying treats for our kids to get them through the craziest, scariest months of their lives so far and then eating them ourselves to get us through those crazy, scary months instead, and end up buying more). Food with fewer ingredients and less processing is in general more sustainable, likely to be produced more locally, is more linked to natural diets and more likely to keep us full for longer: better for the planet, better for our bodies, better for our minds. Making food at home and bringing it to work and picnics means less plastic, less food waste, less chocolate mysteriously finding it’s way into my shopping basket, my handbag, my bulging waistline. It’s not all about food, either. Sustainable school runs would mean scooting, cycling, starting a walking bus around our estate; not driving to school slightly over the speed limit, late and knowing that that will mean sitting in traffic as I continue on to work. Sustainable days would be activities that build relationships and boost oxytocin, having fun playing together, exploring together, working together; not only shopping, eating, watching TV together.
It sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? A lifestyle that is healthy, happy and reduces the risk of dying horribly while people explain to you how you could have avoided this if you had just taken a little more responsibility for your own choices. Why would anyone not choose that option? So why is it, then, that I, and so many like me, are still obese?
I don’t have the answers here. If I did, I’d be out there marketing how easy it is to do this: if I can, anyone can! Instead, all I can do is share the things I have learned so far. One is that blaming people who are overweight is about as helpful as a chocolate teapot, and likely to be swallowed just as easily. There are a few people who have made conscious choices to eat food that makes them fat. There aren’t many of them, and they’re not going to be paying attention to the advice given out by the government in contradiction of their life choices, so let’s not get caught up in that. Let’s assume instead that excess weight is usually the result of other influences, not a goal in itself.
Sometimes it is lack of knowledge and education. Knowing that things with high calories are bad but never having been told why can lead to choices like eating Quavers instead of nuts or unlabelled, un-traffic-lighted carrot sticks as a snack. Never having eaten freshly cooked food can mean it is overwhelming to think about cooking yourself. Local council regulations that say that a microwave is essential in a kitchen but an oven is not can prevent many people from ever having the option of eating healthy food. Educating, discussing choices, changing priorities can change these things, but they will not change everything.
Living healthy also means living slow; dreaming slow; cooking, eating, shopping slow. It means having time to plan your shopping, to cook from scratch, to eat slowly enough to know when you are full and have time to stop eating. It means having time to walk or cycle, not drive in a race to squeeze everything in. It means having time to think and reflect and reject, not just react.
Changing shape means changing priorities. It means looking at where your energies are currently pointing and being able, and willing, to change direction if you need to. It may mean putting less energy into working and less value into financial gains. It may mean laying down commitments, hobbies, roles at church or, you know, Quaker Trusteeship (looking closely in the mirror) in order to have the headspace and diary freedom to be more active. It may mean letting go of good things as well as bad. And it may be – for me, it is – that these are not sacrifices that feel right at the moment. I’ve worked hard to get my priorities where they are now, balancing self and work and family and faith. It’s a nerve-wracking balancing act as it is, and if I add anything more in, however healthy that may be, the whole crazy caboodle will come crashing down in ruins.
If we’re agreed that headline-grabbing contradictions are not going to win the good fight and free us from obesity, what will? It has to be an entire lifestyle shift. A celebration of each of us as we are, without the blame and condemnation that lead so many into disordered eating. A commitment to ourselves and our finite energy and time, that lets us say no when we can fit no more into a day, that allows decent sleep patterns and prioritising care for ourselves and for others. A commitment to model good practise in cutting off the stresses and strains of work when we need to. If the government wants to fight this, let’s see real action. Let’s see legislation that encourages employers to allow their employees to take mental health days off. Let’s see rewards in the workplace for volunteering, so that you don’t have to sacrifice yourself in order to both do good for others and earn enough money to put healthy food on the table. Let’s see town planning that builds exercise into daily tasks; that put fun into routine activities; that makes love and loyalty more rewarded than individualism and self-promotion. Let’s celebrate who we are and how we look just as we are. And you know what? When we stop interfering and just let them get on with the process of living a good life, it’s possible that our bodies will end up sorting themselves out.
Bus stop swings in Montreal, Canada – activity and joy in the everyday
Thumb idly scrolling, alarm clock snoozing for the seventh time, my day is starting with a whimper and a sigh. I tell myself to move before my back locks completely, but even while I am telling myself sternly to get up and get going, I scroll on. On through posts that I ignore – plenty of them, rightly or wrongly; posts that make me laugh – sadly few of them; posts that make me angry; posts that make me hurt. There are a lot of those, and they lurk behind my eyelids for the rest of the day, popping out of my subconscious and into my internal monologues whenever I stop for long enough to take a breath.
What is it that makes me hurt? It’s not the crisis after incompetence after tragedy typhooning through the world, though that does me no credit, I know. Those are the posts that make me angry, and my responses are either avoidance or self-destruction, as they consume my mind in a blinding supernova of rage. No, the things that make me hurt are the day by day moments that are so much more creative, more joyful, more full than my days are. Is it jealousy? Probably, in part, if jealousy starts with your throat and your eyes and your hope and moves on to your tummy, inching its way by repetition to your heart. I know those are the good moments, the islands in the storm for others, just as they are when I post the same. And yet, that litany of pictures, of family adventures, positive Lockdowns, weight loss, planning a holiday, making a difference, speaking out, being brave, achieving goals, taking a risk and getting it wrong, and just plain living – that cumulative scrolling makes my heart ache and saps my will.
This is not a post bewailing social media. Of course people should share their joys, their sorrows, their hopes and failures, if that is what they want to do. Indeed, for those of us who are congenitally incapable of maintaining relationships over a distance, Facebook is a marvel and a delight for much of the time. But when the presence of something is an expected norm, unquestioned and unquestioning, how do you share its absence?
I was one of the first in my friendship group to have children, so I won’t speak like I’m an authority on what it feels like to have none when your body and your mind and your soul are tearing you apart with longing. People I love have shared their experiences with me – of the fear and the pain and the praying, the debt and the hope and the impossible choices, but it is not something I can directly speak to. At the other end of life’s glorious spectrum, I have lost a parent when most of my peers were still living with theirs. I know that moment of jarring reminder when someone asks “Where do your parents live?” I have seen the dawning horror on their faces as the conversation progresses. I answer about my Mum, and they ask whether Dad will be joining us too.* Now my Dad died many years ago, so, although it still makes me sad to think of all he is missing and of all the things I can’t share with him, mention of those things no longer makes me cry. So if I’m asked, I answer the question. To be honest, I usually answer it bluntly. And then the person I am speaking to is left with no idea, at all, of what to say next. Because how do you respond when someone tells you that they are outside the box you expect them to be in and, no matter how much you want them to, they will never go quietly back to being normal?
Normal. Isn’t that an awful term? As though there is something we all started out as, and any deviation from that is somehow an error. But if normal is white, cis-gender, heterosexual, in a stable relationship, with children, able-bodied and neurotypical, with no mental health concerns and no traumatic events in their past – if that is normal, then normal is an awfully small collective. And where does that leave the rest of us?
It leaves us living with absence. It may be small. It may be life-changing or hope-destroying. It may be dictated by circumstances or forced upon you by another’s actions. But let’s not forget that it may also be a blindingly positive, proactive choice. How do you celebrate small, with the things you did not buy, the waste you did not create, the plastic you did not use? Or celebrate big, with the choices you made to not follow that expected path and the joys it has given you in the execution of your own vision? Living a more sustainable life, materially and emotionally, is as much about positive absences as it is about the presence of future-looking actions. It is about the counter-cultural refusal to cash into a society that tells you that the way to protect our communities is to buy and to fly and to keep on moving, spending, updating. It is the rejection of the message that if you buy this or avoid eating that or go there, you will be full and have no absences, because they are bad and must always be hidden from view.
Epidauros II by Barbara Hepworth. Negative space can be extraordinarily beautiful.
Absence is as real as presence in our lives. Sometimes it is more real than the furniture around us and the lives outside our windows that all look so very, very different to our own. It can be a fury-filled growl of silence and frustration; a blank canvas of waiting for something to happen; an exciting and life-giving explosion of self over expectation. If we could share those moments of absence without fear, or pain, or judgement, or apology; if we knew the whole of our selves could be seen, how could the world not be a better place?
*As a side note, please don’t do that. Don’t repeat language someone else has changed. It wasn’t an accident. They heard what you said and they changed it deliberately. If you ask about someone’s wife and in their response they use the word partner, or husband, or reply about themselves in the singular, that’s what you need to use too for the rest of your conversation.
In the first week of the summer holidays, I often get a burst of energy, of Let’s Do This, of tidying fever. I dare to dream impossible dreams, of empty washing baskets and Lego-less carpets. As the weeks pass, the fervour diminishes and the wading through treacle-ness of keeping a family home habitable overcome my enthusiasm, resulting in an enormous sigh of relief when the holidays end and our cleaner (yes, I admitted it) comes back and sorts us out.
This pattern repeated with Lockdown, as the busyness and purpose of the first few days slowly melted into a puddle of sameness and a gradually increasing collection of dust in the corners and Haribo wrappers under the cushions. Now, however, Lockdown is slowly easing, and, like a whale in a long, slow dive, we are coming back up for air and bringing those seeds of energy with us. Seeds of energy coupled with being trapped in a house overwhelmed with Stuff has resulted in plunging into the sorting of children’s toys, clothes, books, drawings, games, letters, shoes and random plastic bits that have been building up around us for as long as we’ve been saying that we’re just not here enough to sort them all out.
The dream result is newly painted walls, black furnishings for The Paleontologist, All The Games for The Cowgirl, and endless empty, hooverable space for me. The reality involves rather a lot more gritted teeth through conversations about the absolute necessity of keeping another half-lost Kinder Egg toy, whilst simultaneously demanding to give away every item of clothing in the wardrobe. My cunning plan to find things to get rid of has worked very well. The part about actually doing the decluttering? Not so much. Here is the pile currently waiting to be removed. If I said this was all of it, would you believe me? (Spoiler alert: you shouldn’t.)
Take one spare bed. Cover with 9 years’ worth of outgrown everything. Mix well and abandon to see what grows.
Faced with this mountain to dismantle, now feels like a good time to look again at decluttering strategies. It’s time for a radical approach, preferably one that comes with its own bulldozer. Never mind simplicity, sheer practicality says we must find new homes for things literally tumbling out of every storage crevice in the house. But sustainability says skips and dumps should be a last resort. So I thought I’d round up earlier resorts, to remind myself of the options and stop me hiring that skip. Well, stop me hiring it this week, anyway…
Car Boot Sales are a no from me, I’ll warn you now. The idea of getting up that early, and Being Cheerful into the bargain, in order to convince people to buy stuff I still care about a little is something I just couldn’t do, even without the social distancing and non-essential shopping rules currently still in force. Plus, it would probably rain.
Giving things to friends has to be my favourite way to declutter. In our early parenthood adventure years, we were given All The Things, a vast amount of which were beautiful, and some of which were, well, not. Not at all. (That’s just Vicarage Life With A Baby, in my experience.) As time went by and those delightful pooing vomiting bundles grew out of their Beautiful Things, it was a genuine joy to pass them on to other pooing vomiting bundles who were just starting out in life (and, yes, we passed on some of the rubbish too, naturally. What’s a little rubbish between friends?) Ironically, though, once the pooing and vomiting diminished and the grass and ketchup stains increased, the clothes swapping machines seemed to dry up too, at least in our household. Not so many Beautiful Things came in. Almost no Beautiful Things went out. We haven’t been able to get rid of our crap share our children’s outgrown outfits in this way for some time now.
Freegle is probably the best known sharing-stuff-you-don’t-want-anymore site. It has loads of people, endless offers of hangers and jam jars, and occasional scrums when people offer things that are actually still useful. I don’t know if I’d be more worried that our offcasts would set off a scrum or be ignored along with the blue and red plastic magazine racks, truth be told. Also, the app is clunky and people who say they want things don’t always turn up for them. This makes me a lot more reluctant to put things up there again.
Olio is similar in many ways, but I prefer how it makes me feel when I use it. The app is more fun, you can give away food as well as stuff, and in general the people who use it are terribly polite. (Probably due to the fact that it is mostly populated by middle class liberal lefties, it has to be said. Maybe that’s why I feel so at home there?) It is much smaller, though, which means there’s a good chance that the things you put up won’t actually be wanted by anyone close enough to you to make it worth picking them up, in sustainability terms or time and money ones.
Giving to charity shops is pretty straightforward (particularly if you just load up a collection bag and leave it outside your front door). Unfortunately, though, plenty of us are willing to give things to charity, but not enough people are willing to buy from them. So the things in charity shops build up, and build up. Sometimes they are shipped out to other countries because they can’t be sold here. Sometimes they are shipped to other countries and shovelled into recycling or rubbish tips once there because they are such bad quality no one would ever want to wear them again. So yes, sparingly, I like decluttering this way; but my current clutter-mountain is not what I would call sparing.
Facebook marketplace. I’ve done this once. Never, never again. The familiar platform is great, but you get an insane number of messages and the pressure is awful. My phone never stopped beeping and I started dreading yet another person showing interest. This is not a viable option for a fairly-overwhelmed introvert.
eBay is my preferred way of selling on used things, despite paying commission. You can donate some money to charity from the sales if you want to. You can let eBay do all the hassle of sorting out who is going to win things and how they will pay. But, you have to display things in a way that makes people want to buy them. You still occasionally have to talk to the people buying things. And you have to be able to make it to the Post Office regularly, which even without lockdown is rather easier said than done.
Looking at that picture, I feel so guilty. Guilty for buying so many things, some of which have never been worn, bought because they were on sale, or in charity shops themselves, or because they made me hope that one day I would be slim enough to wear them, or because they reminded me of something I used to love that fell apart. I feel guilty that we have so many toys that these can be removed without making a dent in the messiness of the girls’ rooms. I feel guilty that it’s all Still Here, that none of it has been given away already. But the fact is, being sustainable, even in a haphazard, messy way, is hard. It takes time. It takes emotional energy. It takes learning from mistakes and experience and accepting that some of the things you tried made matters worse, not better. It means realising that it is possible to be both part of the problem and part of the solution. It means doing your best, even when that isn’t enough, because it’s all we’ve got. So I’ll keep going with selling things to people who might enjoy them more than we have, giving them to people who would appreciate them, and avoiding Facebook Marketplace like the plague. And when all of this is over, I’ll look smug and tell stories of great daring, about the time I took on a decluttering mountain, and my best, as it turns out, was exactly what was needed.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the act of being observed changes the occasion under the microscope. By monitoring the food you eat, you change what you consume, and when, and why, and how. By sitting in a classroom surrounded by more paperwork than is present at an amateur writing convention, you change the lesson you are watching and constrain or inflame the relationships that make it come alive. And by considering a blog post of each day as it passed, you anchor yourself in the moment, to the passing of time, and to the repetitive, beautiful, mind-numbing moments that make up family life in isolation.*
Oh, the irony…
Lockdown with children: an exhausting joy
Family lunch in the garden = lockdown summer holiday
Lockdown begins and ends with the consciousness that, every minute of every day, we are responsible for the care and stability of our offspring. In many ways, I am very lucky. My children are old enough, able-bodied enough and grounded enough to take care of most of their basic needs independently. In the course of lockdown, they have even improved dramatically, if reluctantly, in everything from unloading the dishwasher to getting themselves dressed. They like playing together more than they like being apart, and they both sleep well and wake up late. I’m winning at lockdown parenting. And yet, even with all these odds lined up in my favour, it’s really, really hard. As I write this, hiding under the duvet in the spare room, a part of my brain is listening out for the next crisis, the next drama, the next reason to leave what I need to do to maintain my own equilibrium and dig out my whistle once more. Every certainty they thought they had – that school will always be there for the hating, that only grown ups do the boring chores, that even if the world is ending you are not allowed on the trampoline in your pajamas – has crumbled around them, and however awesome they are, they cannot keep themselves stable alone for any length of time.
Photo taken just before the umbrellas at dawn fencing competition started…
There have been some magnificent moments too. Being an entirely 21st century parent, these are, of course, the ones I have caught on camera. Being in the house, no excuses, no distractions, has given us the opportunity to make good memories, as well as more grey hairs. We have built a den. In fact, we’ve built several. We’ve done baking. They have gone jumping in puddles; I have not. We have experimented with more-dramatic-than-planned new looks and had make up and nail painting and flossing lessons (the dental kind, not the dancing kind, at The Paleontologist’s repeated request). We have spent endless afternoons in the garden and the girls have mastered flips on the trampoline, as every neighbour within a mile’s radius can probably attest. We have laughed hard and been terribly silly, and we have all eaten an utterly absurd amount of sugar.
Inside…
…and outside. Not quite sure why it’s Halloween and Christmas already in this den. I couldn’t quite bear to ask!
Working from home, or surfing through survival?
The second inescapable fact of lockdown in this house is that both of us have jobs, vocations, and obsessions with people-focused work. Church services with no congregations; lessons with no students; Quaker worship over Zoom (who knew a video of thirty people sitting silently waiting could be so moving, and so noisy?). All these things can be done, and they are done, and done as well as we possibly can. But they take so much energy. There is so much scope for one little thing – preparing a workpack late, or accidentally muting a service on YouTube – to adversely affect so many people. Hardest of all is that when you are there, in person, worshiping, preaching, teaching, you get energy back from those around you. It goes round and round and breathes sustenance into everyone it touches. Alone with a computer screen, none of that is possible. This is a finite solution, and the cracks are deepening, as broken as our back lawn was before the rains finally came.
My view during Quaker Meeting this morning #nofilter #filthycarpet
Trying to take photos of my working life as a teacher during lockdown has lead me to acknowledge the good, the bad, and the actually quite dangerous. The thing that comes through clearer than anything else will always be that this is a juggling act. Most of the time, it’s my work that gets dropped. Sometimes, it’s not. Most of the time, it’s just another thing to try and keep in the air.
Team meetings and monitoring assignments happening simultaneously. Me, jealous of everyone outside under that amazing blue sky? Why would I be jealous?!
This is what happens when you have children who are helping out in church services in the same house as parents who are working. Disclaimer: no Paleontologists were harmed in the taking of this photo. In fact, she was rather proud of herself…
Marking whilst “supervising” trampoline time. It’s not all hard work.
Lockdown and simplicity: focusing on the wins
Plastic free shampoo. Finally. I’ve been toying with the idea of using this for years, and have finally mixed it up…
It will be easy, my brain said. Let’s make a list of all the projects we can do, I said. We’ll be stuck in the house and can finally make a start on living a more ethical lifestyle, I genuinely believed. And, in some ways, we have. For example, we have managed to do much of our shopping from local suppliers – helped by the fact that they did not run out of flour or eggs, even when everyone else did, as well as that they bake the most astonishing chocolate brownies this side of heaven.
Delivery from The Good Loaf. Practically perfect.
Books. Oh, I do love books. As you will probably have guessed already, in fact. And one of the things that has made me most stressed since moving to this vicarage (yes, genuinely) has been that when we unpacked, we just dumped all the books on the nearest bookshelf to clear away the boxes, figuring we’d sort them out later. Turns out that by later, we meant in four years time when the whole country was in lockdown. Also turns out that as jobs go, this may be one I regret starting. Still, at least it’s given me the prod to set aside a fair few books for decluttering once the charity shops open again. Job done. Or at least, job will be done fairly soon when I finish clearing away the final pile to be sorted…
A few of our non-fiction books, roughly sorted and waiting to go back on the shelves.
Ultimately, lockdown has been harder than it has been easy; infuriating more than it has been fun. At no point have I questioned that it’s the right thing to be doing. At many points along the way we’ve all had an absolute ball. But anyone who thinks it’s not going to leave us all wiser, weaker women is, I think, missing something crucial in all of this.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, quite so amazing to me right now as grown up food, eaten alone and uninterrupted in the sun.
*Full disclosure: this is not, actually, a day by day account. It was intended to be, but then life got messy, as it so often does, and I ended up losing a week by blinking and sneezing at the same time (or maybe just by finally becoming accustomed to the not-so-new-anymore normal) and my plans changed. Oops.
“I know you are. But instead of getting angry, how about we think about why we were late, again, and try to find a way around it next time?”
“Not listening, not listening. OK, that was just pretending to be The Cowgirl. I am listening really.”
“Well [now speaking through gritted teeth] the problem seems to be that you see we might be late, but instead of doing something about it, you panic, get very stressed, curl up in the Wake-Up Chair facing the wall, and generally continue doing exactly what you were doing before. And that’s why nothing ever changes.”
“Oh. Well. That’s a bit like climate change, then. Everyone knows it’s happening. Everyone talks a lot about it. But no one actually does anything.”
From a girl who showed limited interest at best in the climate catastrophe before, The Paleontologist nailed it this morning. And I would have applauded that, if I hadn’t been driving too fast round the ring road on our way to church, being, as we were, late. As usual.
A couple of days earlier, I was teaching my students about motivation, and we talked (well, mostly I talked) about the difference between goals and dreams. Anyone can dream, and the bigger and wilder and more enticing your imagination is, the more fantabulous your dreams become. But goals? They have a cost. It may be money (nods around the room as they remembered previous discussions about the joys of student loans). It may be sweat and tears (a few were surreptitiously wiping away mascara run-lines at that moment, having just watched a heartbreaking and challenging clip from The Do Something Movement, so that wasn’t about to be argued with). But the hardest cost of all is giving up the things we have worked so hard to achieve: the ideas, the identities, the incentives that gave us the get-up and get-busy when what we’d far rather have done is hide under the duvet. Giving those things up, because they used to keep you moving forwards, a lifeline in the darkness, but are now an anchor once the storm is over, holding you in place when you need to soar free over the next horizon; giving those things up takes the sacrifice of stepping, blind, over the cliff-edge.
The Paleontologist is right. We talk and stress and panic about what may be around the corner, but we don’t actually do anything. Because doing something means letting go of what we still think is success, and joy, and the sign that life is actually going OK for once. We watch others going on exotic holidays. We save and hope and plan, and finally all our work pays off. Are we really going to turn round and decide not to go now, after so many years of empty longing? How is it fair to ask some to give up something they have never experienced, when others still take it for granted three times a year? And yet, if real change is going to happen, we are going to have to let go of those imaginings, the incentive of owning the best or the brightest or the newest, the idea dreamed up when the world felt younger and the future was not full of floods and wildfires.
Over the next few months, I am going to spend some time looking back over my self-set #Challenge2019 ambitions. This is partly because I was asked for an update, and mostly because I am both a perfectionist and a masochist, and do so love going over things I have done before, scrabbling around in the dusty neglected corners, reopening the cracks in the name of learning from my mistakes. I’m also going to look at them again because there were some pretty good actions in there, and I would like to continue them this year.
So, let’s begin. #ChallengeJanuary: to not buy anything that wasn’t essential, for the duration of the month. This was the challenge that most altered my behaviour during #Challenge2019: the act of consciously trying to reduce the amount I bought for a month had a lasting effect on the habits I took forward through the rest of the year. Probably the most significant change was my returning (in excited puppy who can’t wait to destroy a cherished item of clothing mode) to the guilt-free utopia that is the world of used items on eBay. Knee high boots, a Fitbit, new cards for Trivial Pursuit – it turns out you really can get just about anything that way, leading to less of an environmental impact, less internalised despair over going up another clothes size, and less screaming in frustration next Christmas when my mother-in-law is the only one who can remember any trivia from long enough ago to answer any of the damn questions.*
Setting goals means being Specific, Realistic, Achievable, Time-limited; much like my teaching nemisis, the omnipresent SMART target. (Always Achievable, interestingly, never Ambitious; an oversight and both a blessing and a curse.) This year, I will return to #ChallengeJanuary with this in mind. Being Specific means sharpening up the idea from just saying that I will avoid buying anything new – that isn’t sustainable in the long term, leading as it does to guilt trips over unplanned treats and agonising over new school tights. I have changed it to taking the goal of simplifying our household by the horns, wading unflinchingly in the midden that is the girls’ bedroom, and re-gifting or re-purposing all the things they no longer fit into or use. As a rough guide, I would like to remove two things for every one that gets added to their delightfully decorated black hole. Ultimately, they will have space to store things they still enjoy in the currently-overflowing cupboard-tops in their room. Is that Achievable? That remains to be seen. It is unquestionably Ambitious. And how to make it Time-limited? Saying I’ll have it done by the end of January is about as realistic as saying I’ll have climbed Mount Kilimanjaro by June (says me, the lady who generally finds perfectly reasonable excuses to avoid walking up 3 flights of stairs to the staffroom every morning). My honest goal is to achieve this by the beginning of the summer, learning as I go.
Changing everything that makes us who we are and tells us how to value one another is, as it turns out, something that is quite a big ask. It’s OK to be scared by that. We’re all scared by the unknown. We’re quite often scared by the known just as easily. But we don’t have the option of freezing, or hiding our faces in the cushions of the Wake-Up Chair until Mum or Dad comes in telling us how to fix the problems we have helped to create. We need to break it down and just take the next logical step. Get up and go through the airing cupboard to find clean school uniform; dig through the mess of Lego and ink stamps to find an unsnapped hairband; commit to borrowing all our books from the Library, or giving up meat for one meal a day, or to stop equating someone’s core nature and identity with their economic status, refusing the trap of judgements based entirely on what form of employment they perform. We need to take that step. And then the next one. And the next. And trust that Bilbo Baggins is as reliable a source of wisdom and insight as ever, and that it truly is a dangerous thing to take that step into the unknown: you never know where you may be able to end up.
*Am I the only one with a family tradition of playing Trivial Pursuit on Christmas Day? Please tell me someone else shares this pain. We start at 10 and it’s all going well, but before you know it, it’s 1 in the morning, no one has more than 3 cheeses, and if we get any more questions suggesting Tony Blair should be in the history category we will all go into collective meltdown.
Messy Simplicity 