At leisure...

Well hello there, old blog of mine. It's been a long time. A very long time. Why the hiatus? What's happened you ask?

Well, first there was a career change (the bad one), then another career change (the good one - becoming a teacher). Then came love, then came marriage, then came the most beautiful baby (but not a whiff of a baby carriage). 

I cannot and will not complain. I've been - and am - bloody lucky. I truly do reflect every day how blessed I am to have so much good stuff in my life. Frankly I don't know what I did to deserve it. So, given that this blog has historically been an outlet at less "I'm bloody lucky" moments in my life, why write now?

Because I've rediscovered another old friend - leisure time. 

Yup, baby is at nursery and I'm unemployed so find myself in that weird, desirable and magical state - at leisure. I have a coffee. I have a book. Dammit, I even have a muffin. So why aren't I feeling leisurely? Why am I, in fact, feeling stressed? 

In the absence of answers I did what I always do. I googled. 

"Stuff about leisure time please Google". 

According to Ovid, "In our leisure time we reveal what kind of people we are." A bit of a nail biter then. Thanks for that insight. 

I found this more helpful...

"A man can never be idle with safety and advantage until he has been so trained by work that he makes his freedom from trials and tasks more fruitful then his toil has been." (Hamilton Wright Mabie)

Nail with sore head. 

Aha!, I realise. I can't enjoy this rare moment of leisure; I don't know how to make it fruitful. And I can't seem to clear my head enough to figure out how. 

It's a weird thing but over the last year or two I have longed - as most of us do - for moments like this: alone, with free time and caffeine. But - like most of us find - there has always been something in the way: 70 hour teaching weeks, marking loads, home improvements, home tidying, defrosting the fridge... More recently it's been baby juggling, with all the joys and stresses one can imagine that brings. But now, with time on my hands, I just feel a heavy mix of paralysis and nausea. 

What should I go with these hours ahead of me? Should I do more job hunting (or just cut out the middle men of the job market and just go and thrash my head against the wall?) Tidy the house? A cup of tea perhaps? Or maybe I should do some of that sewing / knitting / drawing / exercise I'm always saying I want to do? Alternatively I could just sit, paralysed and overwhelmed, checking Facebook and my emails for the god-knows-how-many-th time today, hoping for some divine inspiration or contact from the outside world.

And whilst this frozen in time inability to make any kind of meaningful choice feels uncomfortable enough there's also the wave of sickness, the stomach churning post rollercoaster feeling of not being able to stand still for a second to process the barrage of thoughts...

Is the baby ok? Is it normal she cried when I left her at nursery? Am I bad mum for leaving her? Maybe I should go pick her up?

Will I ever, ever, ever find a job? Why is this so bloody hard to find one? But should I work at all? Maybe I should be at home with the baby. Am I selfish or ungrateful for wanting more? Should I go get the baby? 

And why can't I read books anymore? What if I can never concentrate for long enough again? Should I have more coffee and try a bit more? Or go home and vacuum? Oh and when will the bloody damp patch on the wall ever dry out? 

I shouldn't have eaten that cake. Will my marshmallow post baby tummy ever go? Will I end up diabetic if I keep drinking chai lattes?! Maybe I should just go get the baby...

I cannot, it seems, feel idle with safety and advantage. And without you, old blog, I don't know how to make the time fruitful. I don't know how. 

Believe me, I know such time is a gift. I can sense - and trust me am berating myself for - the undertones of ingratitude which might seem to reverberate through this post. But I don't mean to be ungrateful. I really don't. I am lucky. I AM blessed. In so many ways.

I just wish leisure time felt a bit more, you know, leisurely. 

No Inconsistencies Aloud?

Sometimes we think we know stuff. Sometimes we think we know it better than anyone else. Particularly when that stuff is something we know about ourselves, about how we feel about things. But it’s often when we come to talk about what we know that we realise all the stuff we don’t – or else don’t know well enough. Safe inside our heads our thoughts about things seem solid, sturdy, watertight. But get them out in the open by speaking about them and all of a sudden gaps can become apparent.

I have a pair of boots I like to wear. They have a habit of letting the water in when it rains and I end up with cold, wet and dank smelling socks. It’s not terribly attractive (nor fragrant) when it comes to taking my boots off at the end of the day, and it’s not terribly comfortable either. So why do I wear them? Because they fit. Because I like how they look. Because they go well other things I’m wearing. But are they the best thing for my feet? Maybe not. Maybe I need to get myself some wellies.

I think thought can be a bit like my leaky boots. We all have ideas, opinions, views on things. We feel comfortable with them. We know we can pull them out the back of the wardrobe when we need them and slip into them with great ease. But thoughts are not always built for an all-weather terrain; sometimes they can stand up to the scrutiny of questioning no more than my boots can a heavy downpour.

I wonder then, do all our thoughts need to have the robustness of a pair of wellington boots? Or is it ok to let the water run in a bit?

I experienced a leaky-boot moment in my thinking not so long ago when I agreed to take part in some research for a BBC radio show. I was to be interviewed on my thoughts on the concept of an interventionist God – undoubtedly a biggie when it comes to ‘Stuff to Think About’. I have views about God though, and I’m very happy to talk about them - so what could be easier? Or so I thought. For it wasn’t until I started to try and verbalise my thoughts on things into a microphone that I suddenly realised how hard it was. All my certainty about what I know, what I feel, suddenly began to slip away into the gaps of what I don’t know. What’s more, I heard myself talking and was struck by how many inconsistencies there were in what I was saying.

I stuttered.

I stammered.

I felt my skin prick with tiny beads of waffling perspiration.

I said “Err” quite a lot.

Realisation: What I think just isn’t watertight.

Now, being charitable towards myself, I could say, well wasn’t this just the subject matter, or the circumstances of being interviewed? It’s none to easy talking into a Dictaphone at the best of times, let alone on such a grand subject. And maybe I’m just not that great at talking about how I feel about things in front of strangers?

Or, I wondered, is it something about the nature of thinking aloud? Does the act of speaking thoughts highlight all the murky spots in our thinking in the same way an apple oxidises when you open it up to reveal its insides? And, more to the point, how much do the murky spots matter? Being an ex-Philosophy student I love listening to people talk and watching out for inconsistencies in what they’re saying. Whether I’m listening to a politician espousing policy on TV, a work colleague making recommendations on ‘how we should be doing things’, or a friend talking about their views on such-and-such and whatever, I’m always on the lookout for those points in someone’s expression of their thinking when I can say inwardly to myself “Well, that doesn’t really make sense does it? You’ve just contradicted yourself”. I like to think that this isn’t arrogance or geekiness on my part, but rather by-product of my study that I search out inconsistencies in the same way a train spotter is always searching for that elusive model number missing from their pocketbook. In any case, I consider myself as someone who appreciates a well constructed and well grounded argument.

A certain degree of robustness of thought is important I think. It really does matter that we submit our thoughts and views to a certain amount of internal scrutiny before we put them out there, speaking them aloud for others to hear – and obviously more so in some contexts than others. But is it not also the case that it’s part of being human that sometimes we just don’t make sense?

As much as we might like to pride ourselves on our ‘superior intelligence’ in the animal kingdom and kid ourselves that we, as humans, have a level of mastery of logic, the fact remains that we are not perfectly rational beings and we don’t always spot the inconsistencies in our own thinking; sometimes it’s full of holes and thoroughly leaky boot.

I’m not sure though, that it always really matters. This isn’t to advocate that we should all go around thinking what we like and spouting out our views to others with any consideration or scrutiny over the logic of our thinking – most definitely not. But just that maybe perfect waterproofness is an unreasonable goal when the best we can really aspire to is water resistant – with the holes filled in as best as we can. It’s ok to embrace the inconsistencies, and it’s ok to speak them aloud, so as long as we recognise them for what they are – opportunities to reflect and review our own thought processes. After all, to err in our thinking is human, to be gifted with the power of thought at all is nothing short of divine.

The Guest House

There are times when I want nothing more than to be able to write. There are times too when every condition conducive to writing seems met. The circumstances all allow it, all distractions are absent, and my mind seems ready, willing and able for the thoughts to come. But even so, despite this, somehow the words don’t always come so easily.

Like a child refusing to eat their greens, the words need tempting, teasing out with the promise of “there’ll be custard for dessert if you do!”. Stubborn, frightened, like a cat stuck up a tree refusing to risk one of its nine lives in making the leap of faith down, I have to grab my ladder and make the climb upwards to fetch the words and carry them gently down to terra firma. Or sometimes hidden, somewhere deep under the surface, they need a sharp hook to pull them, gasping, struggling, fighting, like fresh fish caught unsuspecting in murky waters. What bait can I cast off with, a fisherman of words, to tempt my thoughts to take bite and allow them to be raised to the surface, glistening magnificently like the prize catch of the day?

In the absence of a truly tasty morsel I sometimes feel I have only the most meagre of things to throw into the still waters of my mind – a miserable maggot of an idea – and that is, the fact that I am finding it hard to write. For in doing so it often happens that something takes bite that I would never suspect would catch on – I fish for a Trout and catch a Koi Carp.

Other days however, like today, there is nothing I want to do less than write. The conditions just aren’t right at all. I’m tired. I’m miserable. My head hurts. That third vodka and tonic drunk to chase down half a bottle of wine last night really wasn’t a good idea and my jittery, shaking hands are firm proof that I really can’t ‘hold my drink’. And as for the two year old loudly throwing a tantrum next door because he “only wants yellow food to eat”, well, don’t get me started. But yet, despite all this, somehow I find making myself a cup of tea, reaching for a packet of Garibaldi, and nestling down on a bed strewn with an excessive amount of scatter cushions to do just that – to write.

Why, I wonder, is it so much easier to write when I have no intention of doing so? Why can I find the words when I’m not even vaguely looking for them? Do the same principles apply as when looking for your missing car keys – when you’re looking you can’t see them, but when you stop they’re right there under your nose? Possibly. Maybe.

In any case today it was the words that found me. I was the fish that took the bait, not the one casting off from the shoreline. And that bait came to me in the form of a poem sent to me by someone important to me. I wonder if you will take bite too on reading....

The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Jelaluddin Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks

When I wrote my last blog post, two months ago today, I was in the processing of finding a new home. And if my memory serves me correctly I was, in fact, that weekend staying at a friend’s house as a guest. I needed somewhere to stay and they welcomed me in – a house guest shown nothing but the most generous hospitality, met at the door with a smile like Rumi’s unexpected visitor. Now, two months on, and I am sitting writing this post in a brand new home and have turned to a whole new page in my own guestbook – a new chapter giving rise to new sets of visitors and new unfamiliar feelings.

Rumi’s poem illustrates beautifully, I think, that we never know in life what feelings may check-in with us on a day to day basis, leaving a mark in our guestbook. Feelings drift in and out, changing weekly, daily, hourly even. Some bring heavy luggage, some nothing more than the clothes they arrive in. Some keep themselves locked up quietly in their rooms, hardly letting us know they are there, whilst others may make continual demands for attention and service. And whilst some may be only fleeting guests, with us for a weekend break or an overnight stop, others settle in for a long term visit. Rumi encourages us to accept them all – good and bad – and to treat them equally as welcome guests. They are all a blessing in their own unique way.

Equally, I think, we should accept the very different kinds of callers who pay us a visit in our lives. As in Rumi’s guest-house, you never know who, when and how people will arrive in your life. You may not always know where they came from, how they got here and why it’s you they have decided to pay a visit. Sometimes the visit is welcome, filled with gifts and thankyou’s, warming our homes and lightening our hearts. Other times we wish they had chosen another doorbell to ring, leaving nothing behind them but muddy footprints in the hallway. Some guests outstay their welcome with no sense of propriety or respect. Others leave far too soon with a farewell which feels insufficient, leaving our home feeling all too empty.

It is easier perhaps to control who which visitors we invite into the guest-house of our lives than to control the feelings which flit in and out unannounced. It’s simpler to create a boundary with a lockable door and spy-hole than with freely swinging saloon doors after-all. And it is, arguably, easier to ask a person to leave when they have outstayed their welcome, than a feeling which lives by an entirely different set of rules and etiquette, often with no regard for our convenience or comfort . But in either case, whether it be feelings or guests to our lives, Rumi’s stance of granting hospitality to all kinds of visitors would seem to me to be a good one.

Yes, of course there is an argument to be made for establishing a firm set of ‘house rules’ that we will not let ourselves or our house guests contravene. We ought to, to be sensible, make provisions for some kind of security, a lock on the door to be used in times of danger. And, of course, we must exercise some degree of control to maintain our homes in good condition, not allowing them to be trampled by ourselves, others nor to fall into disrepair. But is it not, I think, still good to remain open and welcoming, to invite in all kinds of guests without fear, and to have faith that all are to be considered a blessing?

A new home, with a new guestbook, and a new space for writing in the messages of unexpected guests. I know I plan to set up my home with a “Welcome” mat outside my front door and a set of fresh towels ready and waiting in the guest room. I wonder though, will I find the same should I call upon you?

Deliberations for the Displaced

I’ve had a certain blog post on my mind for quite some time. It’s one that I’ve been carrying around for several months, dragging it awkwardly behind me on all my travels like a roller suitcase with dodgy wheels. Perhaps it’s the rather cumbersome nature of the thought which has meant it’s taken me so long to actually sit down and write it out. Or perhaps it’s just a question of location – of not having had somewhere to sit down for long enough, and quietly enough, to let the process of contemplation work its way through to some kind of conclusion.

For it is, in some ways, a question of location – or at least, being located – that I want to write about. It’s the question of where we are located, of how we are located, and what it is that keeps us there – for me, it’s all question of Home.

As someone who’s done a fair bit of moving house of late, “home” (and what that means as a concept) is something which features as a rather prevailing thought in my little brain. I’ve been wondering about it a lot. Wondering what or where “home” really is. Wondering how you decide that you are at home – or, indeed, know that you are not. And wondering, why is home so very important, why does it matter, and why do I even need to ask the question?

There are lots of poems about home, songs about home, and a great deal of sayings, all of which might help us in answering some of these questions. The most obvious of course is the classic, the one we find embroidered on scatter cushions and emblazoned on doormats - “Home”, we are told, “ is where the heart is”.

This, I think, is perhaps more of a platitude than a saying, for is it not something of an obvious truth that “home is where the heart is”? Our homes are indeed our lifeblood, as essential to our being as the heart which beats steadily inside us. They are the place in which we spend our formative years as children growing up, the place we return to after a hard day’s work or a trip away, and the place we long for when we are exhausted by life and want somewhere to lay our heavy heads. Home is the place we can go when we want nothing more than to hide from the world. It’s a place of privacy, of safety, of security. It’s the place we feel we can be ourselves. And hopefully, if we’re really lucky, it’s a place which is full of love.

So what happens when, for whatever reason, we leave our homes and make the decision (or have the decision made for us) to move? If home is where the heart is, does a move away constitute leaving behind a little –or a lot – of our hearts in the physical location of the building we call ‘Home’? Is it the place which makes the home, the physicality of the building, the geographical location, the people in it? Or is home the heart that we bring to a place in virtue of carrying it always inside us? Is home a place we need to go out into the world to find (or to make), or is it a place we carry inside us so intrinsically that no matter where we are it will always find us?

And furthermore, by way of a culmination of all these questions, the most burning of all is this – If, as the saying goes, home is where the heart is and heart and home really are so essentially related, I can’t help but wonder - in the words of Jimmy Ruffin - what becomes of the broken hearted? Do they end up homeless? Or just living in a broken home?

Even as I write this post now, I struggle to find answers to these questions. Perhaps because there are none. But one thought which occurs to me is that whatever the relation between heart and home, when either are lost, broken or moved away from, there is one thing left behind which is common to them both, and that’s memory.

It’s memories we are left with when a relationship ends and we find ourselves trying to mend our broken heart. It’s memories we are left with when we leave the physical precinct of that place we call ‘Home’ and try to make another home elsewhere. And – in both cases - it is our memories which are the source and means of the process of reconstruction; they are the foundation upon which we can begin to rebuild, and they are the tools we use to guide us in the design of our new beginnings.

In relationships we often find ourselves drawn to partners who ‘remind us’ of someone else – a past partner, a much loved family member, or someone else we hold in high regard. Conversely it sometimes happens that a memory of something unsettling, painful or sad might make us deliberately seek out someone who seems entirely different to what we are used to.

So too the same applies in the context of home. We often remark that a place “feels like home” or indeed that we feel “a long way away from home”. Anyone who has ever flat hunted or viewed houses with a view to buy will identify with that instinctive feeling you get when you first walk through the door of a property. And I’m sure that many of us have felt similarly when visiting another part of the country or a different part of the world – some places just to seem to fit, others make us reach for our passport and the next flight home.

It’s the sense of the familiar, a point of correlation with a memory held deep within, which makes us feel at home or not – be it in the literal sense or in terms of a relationship. And it’s often the satisfaction of completing the journey we make to get there that reinforces for us whether we really have arrived in the right place. Like a perfect cadence in a chord progression, the journey home and the arrival at that place of familiarity, is a logical progression towards a natural conclusion – we know when we have arrived, we know we are meant to stop and rest, and we can finally enjoy the satisfaction of a long, silent sigh of relief.

But it’s memory I think which gets us there. It’s memory which provides the roadmap, the directions, and the means of travel. To steal a quote from writer Terry Tempest Williams, “memory is the only way home”. Ignore those memories, discount their validity, and it’s likely that in either context – finding a home or building a relationship - we are likely to find ourselves wandering, lost, floating without an anchor somewhere all at sea.

I’ve been trying to find somewhere to settle and feel at home for a while over the best part of the last year, and so I know only too well why it is so important. I can well sympathise with the journey Dorothy makes in The Wizard of Oz to find her way back home, and the sense of yearning she has to get back there. But yellow brick roads are sadly not always easy to find, and in the absence of an actual physical place to call home – a place to finally unpack that suitcase with the dodgy wheels – it would seem all the more important that we feel at home in an entirely different sense, and that’s the feeling of being at home with oneself.

Ok, so we may not all be seafaring folk but I am sure we can all identify on differing levels with what it feels like to be “all at sea”. Perhaps you know what it feels like to feel buffeted by the waves, subject to the providence of a calm or stormy sea, to be caught unawares and unprepared in the midst of harsh weather . You know what it feels like to sense the cold jolt of spray upon your skin and the sting of salt in your eyes and to be swept away by an overwhelming current. You know what it feels like to have lost your compass and experience the desperate yearning for some sign of light on the horizon, a beacon to guide you ashore.

Sometimes for whatever reason, you can’t get to where “home” is. Maybe you’ve lost your way, a road is blocked, or it’s just not there anymore for you to visit. Maybe that storm you’ve been caught in is too thick and too impenetrable to find that glimmering lighthouse on the horizon and sail on back in land. So what can you do? You can drop anchor where you are. Sometimes it’s just a question of isolating where that anchor is and what that means for you. I guess that’s why we all need a reliable crew of family and friends to make the journey with us – for often they can point out where that anchor is an a way that we had not seen ourselves.

Failing that, I guess the other option is to call up the Good Witch of the North and find out just where we can get ourselves a pair of those Ruby Red slippers Dorothy wore. Now there’s a good excuse to go out and buy impractical sparkly shoes if ever I heard one – a direct route back to our own personal Kansas!

After all, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like Home...

Nakedness & Nudity - Indecent Exposure or a Bare Faced Lie?

Have you ever met someone new, a new friend or acquaintance, a work colleague or even a potential partner perhaps, and they’ve revealed something about themselves you would never have guessed?

That cute looking guy in your office who you always seem to bump into at the water machine and have an awkward sweaty-palmed conversation with about “staying hydrated”? Well guess what - it turns out he’s a Frisbee champion . Or has a PhD in Dendrology. Or is an amateur taxidermist. (Incidentally there aren’t any cute guys in my office that linger around the water machine.... sadly....although I think there might be a man who’s a taxidermist, and come to think of it I’ve definitely seen a Frisbee tucked under his desk).

It doesn’t matter what 'it' is really, it’s just that that is the fantastic thing about people – they have an endless capacity to surprise.

I think it’s because we live with ourselves everyday - and are so used to the workings of our brain, the things we have achieved, and the ways in which we like to amuse ourselves - that we often forget about ourselves that we also have an endless capacity to surprise – perhaps even to shock. We’re so close to our own selves, so familiar with our own sense of who we are as a person, that it’s often incredibly hard to step back for a moment and consider how a 'revelation' about ourselves might suddenly change the way that someone sees us.

Not so long ago I was talking to someone new and I revealed a little 'something' about me. I happened to mention that I work very occasionally as a life model . It’s something I did on a whim - a very well thought out and emotionally motivated ‘whim’ of course - when I was at University. I met a fabulous artist and modelled for him and, since then, for a few different colleges and art schools.

Now, I know this about me and I also know what it’s all about so I often forget that sometimes people just don’t get it, and that in revealing it to someone I can lay myself bare to criticism, misunderstanding or – at best – a slightly bemused expression. What, you take your clothes off? All of them? In front of ..... people???

The ‘surprise’ of being reacquainted with my own capacity to surprise another in revealing this aspect of my personal life prompted me to think. And what it got me thinking about was this;

What is the big deal about nudity? Is it the inevitable connection that people make in their heads between nudity and sex? If so, what is the relation between nudity and sex? And really, when all is said and done, do we reveal more about ourselves by stripping off and baring our bodies, jumping into bed with someone and having sex OR by opening our mouths to reveal something of who we are?

Now, to my mind, nudity is nudity. It doesn’t equal sex. It’s always been my experience that sex is so much more to do with what happens between two people when they have their clothes on than when they have their clothes off. The nudity part is just a functional requirement of having sex; it’s almost incidental, and in any case, it’s not the meaning. Sex, to my mind, is like the full stop at the end of a sentence; there has to be words and meaning beforehand for the full stop to have any purpose. Similarly nudity, taken alone without the context of a fully clothed relationship, is just a full stop; punctuation without any grammatical significance.

Sex, I think, is the punctuation in a fully clothed, content laden, purposeful conversation; sometimes (if you’re lucky) that punctuation is a “!”, sometimes (interestingly) a “?” and sometimes (sadly) just

.

But however our sexual lives are punctuated, and however many “!” we may or may not be blessed with, without the prerequisite of clothing, sex becomes empty grammar.

So if nudity really is something altogether different from sex, what is it about it that causes us to raise our eyebrows?

It is, of course, the feeling that in being nude we open ourselves up to the most terrible of things – to exposure. And not just to exposure per se, but exposure to being human.

It’s very hard to lie about being human when you are in a state of complete nakedness. Particularly when you are life modelling, it’s also very hard to lie about what particular ‘form’ of you human you are; everything is suddenly on show, in all its toned, wobbly or just-plain-saggy glory and you are suddenly no longer “you” but just a nude, a figure, a source of artistic inspiration. It’s scary stuff, admittedly, but there’s also something very liberating about the experience, something very ‘levelling’, and ultimately (as there would be for me) an opportunity for some kind of philosophical reflection.

Nakedness is, in this sense, incredibly exposing. But in a funny kind of way, it’s also perhaps the most potent and effective form of disguise.

When I stand in front of a class full of art students – people who are complete strangers to me – it isn’t me they get to see, but just a body. Don’t get me wrong, art students and teachers are almost always incredibly friendly and appreciative of their models, but at the end of the day nobody is really interested in who I am and what I do, what I think or what I feel, what I had for my breakfast or what I’m going to have for my tea. Having been left very peacefully to sleep through a forty minute pose only to be woken temporarily with a polite request to “change position now” I know very well that it’s not me that’s of interest during a life modelling session, but rather my functional significance as an object with which to practice their drawing.

Likewise, when it comes to sex, there isn’t necessarily anything particularly exposing about it. At least, not if you’re having the kind of sex which I would, according to my ‘definition’ above, consider to be “empty grammar”. If it’s meaningful and truly intimate and preceded by the appropriate amount of clothed conversation then yes, it can be exposing in the most wonderful and beautiful of ways. But this isn’t, I don’t think, always the case.

No, it is not in nudity nor in sex that we expose the most about ourselves, but rather in the words we speak and those small moments of ‘revelation’ when we share something about ourselves with someone for the first time. Peeling off our clothes to bare our bodies as a life model - or to engage in some entirely different kind of naked ‘activity’ – isn’t necessarily a moment of exposure at all but, as I’ve suggested above, actually a moment when we can ‘cover up’ who we really are in the most powerful way.

It’s the incredibly revealing power of words that I personally love and it’s probably for this reason that I take great pleasure in writing. It’s probably also the reason why I try to live my life with an ideal of honesty, of speaking the truth. I mean, if you’re going to ‘reveal’ anything about yourself to anyone, is it not always best to reveal something real, something true? But therein lies a question for another post perhaps.....

For now I want to end this piece back where we began - back at the water machine in the office, having our awkward chat with the cute Frisbee playing taxidermist with a doctorate in the study of woody plants. Now we might not all have such a weird and wonderful list of things to reveal about ourselves but I can guarantee there’s something about all of us which has that same capacity to surprise, to shock, to shift someone’s perspective on who we are. Maybe we’re just too close to see if, but I really do believe that it’s often the things we consider most mundane or boring about ourselves that others consider to be the most interesting or relevant.

For me, such a ‘revelation’ might be found in sharing an anecdote about my life modelling experiences. But even if being an artist’s model isn’t your ‘thing’, I think it’s worth asking yourself what it is about you that has that capacity to surprise and to shock? And it is also, to my mind, definitely worth taking a risk in allowing yourself to become a little ‘exposed’. There’s something very liberating and exciting about inspiring either response in the face of another person, and something even more liberating about revealing something of yourself to the world and saying “this is me”.

But perhaps I’m wrong about all this and you think I’ve missed the point somewhere? I’m never worried about admitting I’m wrong if I really am, and I’ll be the first to acknowledge another point of view if I believe it to be honestly held and well thought out. So now, I’ve revealed a little bit about me in writing this post, why not reveal a little back and tell me what you think.......I’ve showed you mine, isn’t it about time you show me yours?

* The image used is The Model by Tamara de Lempicka, 1925

Portraits and Pictures – A question of Image

I’ve been looking at some old photos recently. Sorting them through. Deciding which ones I want to keep or throw away. Some hold memories of times with friends or family, or of someone significant who is, for whatever reason, no longer around. Some only bring a tinge of sadness and that small dull ache felt when something touches upon a sore memory, a war-wound endured at some point along my life so far. Photos often function as a means by which a moment in our lives can be lived again, and as I was sorting through photos today I felt both the pleasure of reliving a smile and the pain of recalling injuries sustained. (Incidentally, I wouldn’t want to deny myself of either).

As well as recalling memories, photos are also incredibly good at reminding us of who we were at a certain time in our life. But, on the other hand, have you ever had that feeling of disorientation when you stumble across a photo of you where you don’t recognise yourself? But that’s not me! I don’t remember my hair being that long/short. Nooo, I never wore that did I? God, don’t I look slim/fat/like Gwyneth Paltrow. Ok, so I’ve never looked at a photo of myself and thought “Oo, don’t I look like Gwyneth” (although it’d be a rather grand day if I did) but the point is that photos can sometimes confront us with an image of ourselves that we don’t recognise – and sometimes don’t like.

The great thing is, of course, that if they’re our photos we can simply throw them away or stick them under the duvet, behind the radiator, in the microwave maybe. If they’re on Facebook we can ‘un-tag’ them (a very rare feature of Facebook I actually like, and have found useful on more than one occasion). But when they belong to someone else, well, that’s a bit trickier. Short of breaking and entering I can’t really sneak round to my best mate’s house and steal back those embarrassing photos of me when I was thirteen and had bad hair, bad glasses and even worse dress sense.

So it’s an inevitable fact then that somewhere out there, under someone’s bed, on someone’s bookcase of photo albums or (horror of horrors) on someone’s mantelpiece, someone is holding onto one of those “but that’s not me!” photos, and there’s not really a lot you can do about it. Those pictures, sadly, are you, they’re part of your life story, and they reveal a truth about you that’s undeniable.

After all, the camera never lies, does it?

Maybe not. But what about a portrait? I recently spent an afternoon visiting the National Gallery. I went to see the Christen Købke exhibition, Danish Master of Light, and it got me thinking about portraits and pictures. As I sat and looked around the room at Købke’s portraits I wondered what it was - if anything – I could learn from these paintings and, on a broader scale, what it is I could learn – if anything – from any portrait. Does a portrait portray a truth about the character of the subject, their story, their virtues and vices? Or does it present us with a lie, an illusory image designed to seduce the viewer into a particular way of seeing the sitter?

One obvious difference between a photo and a portrait of course is the role of the artist. Now, I’m not for a second suggesting that photography isn’t also legitimately ‘portraiture’ in the fullest sense of being an art-form, but the photography I’m referring to here isn’t art photography, but ‘snapshot’ photography – the type of photos taken on a night out with the girls or by your dad when you’re least expecting it at some family ‘do’. No, in portraiture there must, by necessity, be an artist who creates, whereas in snapshot photography there need only be someone who points and shoots. So, given the essential role of the artist, what is their job as the portrait artist – to recreate a ‘true’ image of the sitter or to interpret and inspire a specific perspective?

In either case, whether a portrait portrays or betrays a truth or lie about its sitter, what is it about that afternoon spent at the National Gallery that stuck with me and got me thinking? And why would this, and the process of sorting through photos, prompt me to emerge from my blog-writing slumber and write another post? Well, it all comes down to this – whether it be the art of portraiture or the artlessness of snapshot photography, it’s all a question of image.

I worry about image a lot. And no, not because I’m horribly vain, but because I’m horribly human. Its part of being human, I think, that we reflect upon who we are and how we present ourselves to the world. Most of us check ourselves, even if only cursorily, in the mirror before we leave the house. If going for an interview we don our best suit or slip on our smartest heels. We buy a new dress or shirt for a first date and spend hours preening ourselves in our bedrooms, checking our hair, putting on make up. Why? Because we care how we look. We care how we come across to other people. And because we want to be in control of how other people see us. And of course it isn’t just a question of our physical selves. Do we not all strive to present outwardly that image of ourselves that we most want the world to see? An image of strength, of confidence, of intellectual or physical achievement. We don’t tend to want the world to see those bits of ourselves we’re not so keen on – our insecurities, our vulnerabilities, our weaknesses. Isn’t it fair to say that pretty much all of us attempt to keep these bits hidden away from people, at least from those we don’t know, have only just met or perhaps just don’t trust?

In this sense then it seems to me that we are all our own portrait artists, each of us standing with brush and palette in hand and a canvas before us on which to create an ‘image’ of ourselves. We all have a certain degree of control over the “snapshot” we provide of ourselves to the world and a certain degree of control over which snapshots get stuck in the photo album and which end up in the bin. But that control is inevitably limited, for at the end of the day there will always be someone who sees us differently to how we see ourselves, and more often than not this is in fact the case.

I know there have been times when I have felt my brush and palette being taken away from me and an image painted of me which I neither recognise nor like. This can be as uncomfortable, if not more, as seeing one of those “but that’s not me” photographs. When this happens its good perhaps to remember that we can reinvent and recreate ourselves as many times as we want on our canvas – there’s no limits to this and no limits to the images of ourselves that we can present to the world. If we feel ourselves trapped inside a picture frame of a portrait of ourselves that we don't like then there’s nothing else to do but to force yourself out and slip into your artist’s smock. Hold the brush rather than be the canvas, choose your own palette rather than be coloured by another’s image of you - the chances are you’ll end up with a far more beautiful and brilliant artwork than you could ever imagine.

It’s a bit of an epic this post, admittedly, and so I wanted to sign off this piece with some wise words. As is my way I went on a search for a good quote. Now, I have to admit I’m not really a Star Trek fan, but after stumbling across some quotations from Deep Space Nine on Wikiquote (as one does) I must say I’m seriously considering becoming one. I was amazed by the sheer philosophical brilliance of quotes such as

“There comes a time in every man’s life when he must stop thinking and start doing.”

“It takes courage to look inside yourself and even more courage to write it for other people to see.”

And finally,
“Females and finances don't mix” (my personal favourite!)

Geeenius!

So, it is with the wise words of Jadzia Dax that I’ll sign off for now;

“If you want to know who you are, it's important to know who you've been”.

What better reason then to dig out those old photo albums...... Those old pictures of you never lie you know.

* The image used is by Jeremy Lawrence, www.futtfuttfuttphotography.com

Much Ado about Doing

If, like me, you’re a fan of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, you’ll be familiar with the following exchange between the two principle characters, Holly Golightly and Paul Varjak;

Holly: You know those days when you get the mean reds?
Paul: The mean reds, you mean like the blues?
Holly: No. The blues are because you're getting fat and maybe it's been raining too long, you're just sad that's all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you're afraid and you don't know what you're afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?
Paul: Sure.
Holly: Well, when I get it the only thing that does any good is to jump in a cab and go to Tiffany's. Calms me down right away. The quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there. If I could find a real-life place that'd make me feel like Tiffany's, then - then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name!

Tiffany’s is Holly’s antidote to the “mean reds”. Fortunately for me (and for my bank balance!) I have found my own antidote which is much closer to hand and, in my opinion, holds far more sparkle than a whole room full of platinum and diamonds. For when I get the “mean reds”, or even “the blues”, I always have the urge to rush out and head for the greens, the browns, the ochre. When that feeling of claustrophobic fear strikes, my instinct is to run to space – to the ‘great outdoors’. A wood, a park, the sea. Somewhere I can feel the edges of myself, the limits of me, paling in my insignificance into the limitless world of nature.

But what is it I find there? Quiet? Serenity? A sense that “nothing very bad could happen to you there”? Yes. Perhaps. Maybe all these things. But more than this, what I encounter in the quiet space of nature is Being.

We all spend so much time 'doing' in our lives that the question of 'Being' and what this means often drops out the bottom of our existence.

Have you ever walked around a supermarket, piling it high with your weekly shop, only to get to the checkout to find that the small item you placed in the trolley at the beginning of the shop has fallen out the bottom? More often than not it is an item you purposely went shopping for, with everything else just impulse buys and unnecessary luxuries. This is what happens with Being I think – it falls out the bottom of our trolley of existence.

Sometimes I think it happens just like this – a single occurrence resulting from our being distracted by other things or piling our trolley too high. Other times it’s a more gradual, insidious draining away – like sugar draining from a hole in the bottom of a packet; you don’t notice until suddenly the hole becomes so large and fragile that everything comes gushing out.

“What is it you do?” - Isn’t this a question we’re all familiar with at parties, gatherings and social functions where we are meeting strangers for the first time?

“What did you do today?” – A question asked by mothers to children, wives to husbands, friends to one another.

When do we ever ask, “How did you ‘be’ today?”. And no, it isn’t just a question of grammar that prevents us from asking this question.

I often don’t know how to answer that question of “What do you do?”. I often don’t really know what it was I ‘did’ on any given day either. It’s all too easy to lose our sense of what it is we’ve ‘done’, should be ‘doing’ or what it is we’re even good at ‘doing’. And there are times in our lives where that painful presence of an absence of ‘doing’ feels suffocatingly close. Like tinnitus in your ear, its shrill noise rings in its persistence and deafens us to the sound of our Being.

So on days where I’m struck by the “mean reds” I run to the greens of nature. For in nature you find no ‘doing’ but only ‘Being’. The concept of ‘doing’ makes no sense out in nature, for ‘doing’ implies purpose and what purpose does nature have other than to be?

Does a tree ever ask itself what it should be doing today? Do birds ever remark upon one another’s birdsong and reflect upon whether they could be doing a better job? Does a gentle breeze ever agonise over what direction it ought to blow in today? No. Being need not make any reference to purpose, to any concept of what needs to be done. Being just is. Its this sense of ‘is-ness’ that I feel most clearly when I take myself out into nature.

The other day, feeling just a little ‘blue’, I decided to take myself off for a walk. I headed to Nymans Garden, a National Trust property in West Sussex, and found myself following the Bluebell trail. It was a cold but sunny March day. I sat upon a pile of trees - cut down for making a pathway it seemed. I felt my skin prickle with cold and a warm red glow of winter sun on my cheeks. I heard a woodpecker busy at work and watched a tiny rabbit scampering through a blanket of crisp golden leaves. I felt a shivery breeze through my hair and heard the gentle bubbling of water over rock in a nearby stream.

Had you asked me on that afternoon, “What did you do today?”, I probably would have said “Not a lot” and at once have felt a definite absence of purpose, a lack of any sense of achievement. But had you asked me, “How were you today? What did you feel?”, then my answer would have been altogether different:

I felt something of the world today.
I felt my heart beating.
I felt alive and real, and it felt good.

When our time is up and we exist to be, I wonder what will matter more – what we did, what we achieved or whether we lived as ourselves, in the fullness of our Being. Will it matter most whether we taught ourselves how to 'do' or whether we really learnt how 'to be'?

To be or to do – now that is the question. I know my answer, the question is, do you?