Well Becoming

I’m reading Julian Barnes’ beautiful book Levels of Life, about hot air ballooning and the death of his wife. His link between the two is to do with height. He used the word both physically and metaphorically – rising effortlessly up in the air in a balloon, or crashing down into the depths when grief strikes.

I've been thinking about how we often use physical words to describe our emotions.

We do talk a lot about height when describing our moods, mainly whether we’re feeling up or feeling down. Sometimes we think visually, and talk about feeling bright or gloomy.

Another way of looking at our emotional lives is in terms of their weight. If life is treating us well and there is lots of fun and enjoyment around, we often describe ourselves as ‘light-hearted’. If things are not going so well, we’ve had bad news or are expecting something difficult to happen, then we may talk about doing something or approaching a situation ‘with a heavy heart’. We can be weighed down by the cares of the world. Hopefully, we can sometimes throw off our burdens or share them with other people.

The word depression contains elements of both height and weight. In physical terms it refers to a hollow, an area that is sunk below its surroundings. It also refers to a sense of pressure, of being compressed, constrained, pushed down.

For me, there is a very strong link between my emotional state and my sense of weight. This is nothing to do with my actual weight in kilograms, which could usually do with being a bit lower!

If life is difficult I feel heavy, tired, sluggish. I find it’s a big, big effort to drag myself around. I’m trudging through treacle.

But when everything is going well I really do feel lighter, not just in my heart but in my whole being. Sometimes I feel weightless, it’s as if I could take off and fly.

I love this sense of lightness. It is effortless, floating, breezy - like being in one of Julian Barnes’ hot air balloons, or floating on my back in the Mediterranean with the evening sun (another form of lightness) warming me. I experienced it yesterday evening in my tai chiclass, when my arms floated up and down without any effort at all from me.

Lightness of being.

Yes please. Unlike Milan Kundera, I don’t find it unbearable.

I can see there might be down-sides to lightness. It can suggest not being serious, superficial, unimportant, lacking gravity (another physical term!), as in “he’s a light-weight.”

Where do you go when life gets too much for you?

When everything’s getting on top of us, when we just can’t take it all any more, we need to escape to somewhere safe. A refuge, a bolt-hole, an asylum, a shelter - a sanctuary.

In the Middle Ages a sanctuary was a place – often a church or monastery - where safety was guaranteed for people fleeing from arrest or prosecution. By the law of the medieval church, a fugitive from justice or a debtor was immune from arrest. If you’ve ever watched Derek Jacobi in Cadfael (or read Ellis Peters’ stories) you’ll know how that worked.

We don’t always have to go to such extremes. It is good to have our own personal sanctuaries, for those times when we just need to get away from it all. You might find yours in the shed at the bottom of the garden, or on your allotment. Or jogging round the park, with your favourite tunes on your iPod. Or soaking in a hot bath with music and candles, and the bathroom door firmly locked.

When I was growing up in Dublin, family life was often stressful. To escape from all the hassle, I created a little library for myself in the outside toilet. I loved sitting there and reading. My brother Nick found a different refuge (usually from us older brothers wanting to beat him up!) in the branches of an old apple tree. Going through major life changes in my late 20s, the main place I felt safe was in my car, driving up and down the M6 between Manchester and Worcester.

Sadly, sanctuaries can become prisons. Lots of people use booze or drugs as a means of escape. They work for a while, giving that warm glow of comfort and forgetting. But too much for too long and they cause more problems than they solve.

If things are really, really bad – if you’re experiencing abuse or violence at home and don’t know how to get away from it - you may seek sanctuary inside your own head. You find ways to watch what’s happening to you as if you’re outside the situation. It’s safer and easier than experiencing the pain or terror directly. But you risk losing touch with the rest of the world. As a GP, a lot of people with problems like this find ten minutes of sanctuary in my consulting room.

How do you find sanctuary, when life gets too much for you?

Here is a message from my friend Mary. She has given me permission to post it. It speaks powerfully to my recent posts. The wonderful image of the feather on your heart will live with me for ever.

Hi Chris,

I hope you and all your family are really well and warm as the winter bites...

I finally got to reading your ‘Day of the Dead’ blog – not a big mystery why it took me a while to ‘go there’, given the loss of my mother in August and the energy one needs to cope and grieve.

Reading about the different celebrations and festivals surrounding the dead, I was very suddenly taken back to the room in my mother’s house where we brought her, after the hospital, after the undertakers, after choosing a coffin and jewellery and her favourite dark pink jacket to wear in farewell. And the astonishment I felt that she looked so like herself, lying there, with that fine delicate skin and those hands that so often held us safe, shaped our worlds, hands that told stories with abandon and sketched love, dismay, anger and longing on the air around us. Astonishment that, in that room in her house, it seemed there was no veil between the living and dead, and yet there was. Astonishment that someone so utterly vibrant could actually die. It’s changed me.

I feel I want to fight harder for a life lived well and vibrantly, because it doesn’t just land on you, you have to choose it and leave other things or people or stuff aside. And perhaps sometimes it does just land, like a feather on your heart. My mother Carmel had an extraordinary ability to take joy in the smallest thing and then she’d tell you all about it, so you got to share in her sense of joy in a world that can surprise, that can waft a feather straight to your heart. Her life was not easy but her spirit was indomitable. She taught me so much, far more than I ever understood or recognised.

On the Day of the Dead here in Ireland, I watched five of Tomas’ great nieces (all of one family) dress up respectively as Snow White, a leopard, a ghost, a ‘scary guy’ and a little red devil. They brimmed with the excitement of becoming something completely different, an unknown quantity, a mystery. The cold air clung to them as they pranced out into the dark and along the very quiet street of their small village, crossing over into a different realm. Maybe then I saw my mother, transformed into something entirely different, a mystery. Finally, they turned for home, rosy with excitement, coming in from the dark. When they hugged us (and can they hug!) they became known again, solid little bodies in our arms, familiar, warm, ours. So my mother. A mystery, but familiar, ours.

Thank you for the blog, and the stories that connect completely unknown people...

Here’s the bit that I love the most:

To never never never wonder why at all
To never never never wonder why it's gotta be
It has to be
And I'm beside you
Beside you

It’s the refrain, it weaves amongst the rest of the lyrics, simply supported by flute and acoustic guitar.

The meaning behind Morrison’s songs isn’t always easy to work out, and he is notoriously reluctant to explain himself. So we are left to make our own best interpretations of what he is singing about. 

I think Beside You is a celebration of the direct experience of unconditional love. It’s about loving being with someone just because you can. Because you’re there and they’re there, you’re together and it’s fine. No need for conversation or discussion, no questions asked, no demands made.  No trouble, no fret or worry. Being in this particular moment, with someone you care about, and knowing that this is entirely, totally sufficient.

Being together, in ‘the silence easy’.  

Which sets me thinking about my own Beside You moments.

I am fortunate to have so many people that I can be with, enjoyably, comfortably and without worry, that I am wonderfully spoilt for choice here.  

Here are three recent moments that spring to my mind:

Go well on your merry way. I hope you have a rich store of Beside You moments, and I wish you many more of them.

Forget Halloween, it’s just a commercial nonsense. What’s much more interesting is the day after, 1 November. We call it All Saints Day. In Mexico it’s known as the Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. 

If you think that sounds grim, macabre or spooky, you couldn’t be more wrong.  The Day of the Dead is a massive communal celebration. Thousands of families visit their local cemeteries and have parties at the gravesides of their dead relatives and ancestors. They build little altars at home, and decorate them with photographs and loved ones’ favourite foods.  It’s an event that goes back many hundreds of years, at least to the Aztec era.  

The biggest and best Mexican celebrations are in Oaxaca.  A couple of years ago Sue, Mike and I were there for the festivities.  We had a ball! The city cathedral was surrounded by hundreds of huge sand sculptures. The main cemetery was transformed into a place of light, with music and dancing, eating and drinking - bubbling with energy and excitement. It was full of joy.   

The nearest we get to this in our buttoned-up western culture is the Irish wake, when family and friends come together to celebrate the life of whoever has just died, often with their body present in the room.  There’s plenty to eat and drink, and laughter, with some good stories told.  But it’s different, it’s about just one person, and it only happens the one time.

Wouldn’t it be great to remember and celebrate our dead on a regular basis, and do it together? It would reaffirm our sense of who we are and where we belong, and remind us that we’re part of a big supportive community.  

Of course we might want to pick and choose a bit about who we’re remembering - there may be some people we are glad to have got away from. 

And since many of us move around a lot, we might have to work out the best place to do our celebrating. 

For me it would probably be the churchyard in Corbridge, Northumberland, where my father’s buried, near where he and his parents lived for many years. We’d need some big braziers to provide us with heat and light, as it can get pretty cold up there.  As well as the food and wine and singing (‘Blaydon Races’ would have to figure), we’d take a football and play a bit of 3-and-in.

Where would you hold your Day of the Dead? 

And what would you do to celebrate?

Our son Mike married Paula a couple of weeks ago. It was a wonderful day. The ceremony was on the bank of a river in remotest Northumberland. The sun shone (amazingly!), Paula was radiant, Tom remembered the rings, and we all knew we were part of something special.

There were three great speeches during the wedding feast. Lots of fun stuff,  and a dollop of wisdom too. 

Mike told us how he and Paula first met, in a pub in Newcastle. They talked about all sorts of things that day, he said, “but most importantly, about the thing that would come to define us ever since then. I can't remember why we were talking about it, but we both agreed that in life, it was OK just to be happy. You didn’t need to worry about lots of stuff, or feel guilty about being happy. Being happy was just OK."

This is such a great message, I’ve been thinking a lot about it ever since.

Life isn’t always fun, not by any means.  It can be tough, unbearably so at times. It would be foolish to think that we can smile our way through everything that happens.  Of course we can’t.

Fortunately for most of us, most of the time, things aren’t that bad. But we are very good at finding reasons not to enjoy life when we can.

 Here are four bad reasons not to be happy, and some answers to them.

Desiderata, that famous poem that was on walls of many student homes back in the day, ends with the command: ‘Strive to be happy’.   Sorry, but that sounds too much like hard work to me. 

We don’t need to strive.  We can simply allow ourselves to feel good. We can give ourselves permission to be happy.

Really, it is OK.  

Life is precarious. It doesn’t matter how hard we work, or how carefully we plan, things will go wrong. A lot of the time we find ourselves surrounded by hassles and worries, or filled with boredom and tedium.  Sometimes it’s much worse – a severe accident, a life-threatening illness, or the untimely death of someone we love. So when we have glimpses of happiness, it is good to cherish and celebrate them.

Robert Herrick, 17^th century poet, urges us to make the most of the good times while we can:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying;

And this same flower that smiles today,

Tomorrow will be dying.

I’ve gathered a few fine rosebuds, this last week or so.

Last weekend was the big cycle ride from Carlisle to Liverpool (the reason for my two previous posts about cycling uphill).  Getting over Shap summit despite driving rain and a strong head wind was wonderful. Cruising the nine miles downhill to Kendal was even better. Exhilaration, feeling alive –all that and more.  Two rosebuds at least.

A bonus of distance cycling is that you can eat as much as you want, in fact you have to, to keep your energy up.  So slap-up breakfasts, mid-morning stops for double ice-creams and hot chocolate.  More rosebuds. Calories, who’s counting?

At the half way point, the entire family turned out to greet us. An evening with all my children and grandchildren, together in the same place.  A whole heap of rosebuds there.

This week Sue and I’ve been in Ireland, taking part in a GP conference in Kilkenny. Before that we had a couple of days over in the west, including a drive to Spanish Point, on County Clare’s Atlantic coastline.  Hard to believe it was midsummer’s day: wet, windy and cold. But it was beautiful, in a wild sort of way. We sat there for an hour or so, well wrapped up, eating apples and soda bread, watching four girls learning to surf, and listening to the waves breaking on the shore.

On the drive back the sun broke through the clouds, and I remembered Van Morrison’s wonderful song Coney Island. So, with apologies to Van, here’s my final rosebud:

I look at the side of your face as the sunlight comes streaming through the window in the summer sunshine. And all the time coming from Spanish Point, I’m thinking, “Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time.”

Gathered any rosebuds yourself recently?