Meeting Myself

I bumped into myself today

I am looking well

A little bit of extra weight perhaps

I noticed I’d had a recent haircut

It is very neat

Was I not going to go for something

More uncontrolled?

I am a creature of habit.

Wasn’t it my birthday last week?

I don’t ask myself for numbers

I told myself about the coffee meetup with friends

I surprise myself sometimes at

How sociable I can be.

Carrot cake? It’s always carrot cake

And a pot of tea

I asked myself how my university course was going

Creative Writing, yes?

I confessed to myself that it was getting tough

Have I read the Illad, I asked myself

No, I replied.

We did not talk about school and what

I learned and didn’t learn

Because of the class I was in.

It is on Spotify, if I want to listen to it.

And the knitting? I asked

I told myself about the Tunisian crocheting hooks

I am keen to start playing with them

But there are other project to finish first

Ah, I said

I never was one for completing things, was I?

I laughed with myself about the half-knitted baby cardigan.

I glanced at my watch

The number 5 bus was due

I hugged myself and said I must dash

Don’t be a stranger, I said

As I turned away

I met myself a few weeks back. Up until then I had been busy. There was no conversation at mealtimes. Breakfast was spooned into the mouth by one hand while the other was thumb-scrolling down Facebook posts. The iron was spitting steam and hissing heat as I watched the another puzzle piece fall into place in a who-done-it. My husband’s theory on these things is it always turns out to be the famous actor in an understated role. Not this time though.

I met myself somewhere between 11 o’clock and midday on a Tuesday. You could call it new age if you like. An elemental relaxation class on zoom with an intriguing envelope of art materials. There was a compass in the pack and north for me points to the corner of the kitchen where the pantry meets the fridge. South is a bookcase. West is the cooker and east is a vegetable rack in the corner hijacked by bird seed and suet balls.

I met myself playing with a blue plastic prickly massage ball. My left foot has always been a wee bit bigger than my right. It turned out to be much more sensitive too. I missed much of what was said and done after because I was tying the laces on my shoes. The ball did a once over most body parts and woke up the sluggish stuff on the outside.

Yes, I met myself. I blew a feather. I breathed in slowly.

And somewhere in it all, I met myself and said, ‘Hello.’

It is all to easy in the flurry and the hurry, the scurry and the worry of the day-in day-out routine to lose touch with ourselves. We become strangers to ourselves and we suddenly we spot ourselves in a mirror and come face to face with someone who looks a little bit like us, but probably isn’t us.

A feather and a blue plastic massage ball might help in the meeting of yourself. A stroll along a path. Watching birds chitter and chatter as they bathe one another in a puddle. It is when you slow down you meet yourself.

Find yourself your way and say, ‘Hello.’

Bull's Balls and Man's Relectance to Change

I should say that any step toward turning into my mother should be a good one, but I seem to have caught her unwillingness to travel by bus. For her it was all about the size of the windows and whether, should the bus turn upside down in an accident, she is of a size that does not pass through small windows. For me, it’s all about toilets and the not-really-need-to-go-but-what-if? My husband has instructions to keep talking to distract me. It is not so much about what he says but the fact that he is saying it.

Yesterday’s topic was falsely labelled food. Bombay duck for example isn’t duck at all but a fish. Apologies for the spoiler if you did not know that. Rocky Mountain oysters, the husband said, are not oysters. I had to google them when I got home. Without my hearing aids there’s much about a conversation that I don’t pick up.

‘Buffalo, boar or bulls' testicles known as criadillas are breaded and fried.’ The article went on to explain that they are hard to come by in supermarkets, as hotels and various eateries tend to hog them. They might have been popular food way back in the dark ages, being cheap and widely available, but not so much these days, not in my neck of the woods. If I had lived back then with my list of won’t eats, I would have starved.

I was reading an article about experiments to change people’s attitudes to certain things. It was to do with , not  eating bull’s balls but, a test of true and false. The ones that scored highly on the test were praised to the hilt. The ones that did not do so well got a sad pat on the back and a pitying look. Then the people running the test confessed that they had made up their high score/low score lists. Not everyone given a high score had achieved one. Not all low scorers got a low score. The participants knew the lists were fabricated. Yet, over a cup of coffee, when asked how they had done, the high score list said they had done well and the low scorers? Yes, you’ve guessed it. They said they had done badly. Nothing owned up to had changed their view about their scores.

I think I could look at the whole list of nutritional elements attached to bull’s balls, but still not want to eat one. I could have them costed out and proven as a cheap meal in these days of cost of living price rises, but I still would not eat one. I could be faced with a plate where it all looks delicious and smells delicious, but still would not want to eat one. My mind is already made up and I am unwilling to change.

It makes me wonder where I have drawn my lines concerning what I will eat, or won’t, or the other lines that come to mind – what I will wear and what I won’t, where I will go and where I won’t (this comes with an interesting tale of a search for a toilet in Luxor, but I’ll save it for another time).Or who I will like and who I won’t.

I have been reading a book on my phone, ‘The Path of Change’ by Pope Francis. He talks of visiting somewhere, South Africa perhaps, where he met young people with T-shirts with the logo printed on front, ‘I am not the danger. I am in danger.’ We presume things, or have been fed things through various channels that refugees are dangerous, or Muslims are dangerous, or Jehovah Witnesses are dangerous. The truth is very different but the mind is made up and we are reluctant to change.

A local hotel where my sister lives has been hijacked by the government to house refugees. It is on the edge of the village, close to a motorway. Language, even when you speak the same one, is not understood. There is nothing there to relieve the boredom, and no opportunities to work without a permit. It might be a good idea t hand out the t-shirt, ‘I am not a danger. I am in danger.’ There have been meetings between the village people (not the pop group) and the refugees. There have been culture exchanges with different food and different music between the two groups. Maybe there are English lessons happening now. But ask a villager if they have changed their mind about the refugees? I think not. They are like the high scorer, that might actually be a low scorer but because they were on the high scorer list insist they scored highly.

Would it help if someone sat on me, forced my mouth open and pushed a Rocky Mountain oysters down my throat? Would I smile, eyes wide open, and declare it to be the best food ever? Possibly not.

Education has always been thought to be the way to change people and their opinions. But the scientific evidence is not there.

I think it must start with me, where I am, giving the right balance to the information I have, choosing to steer clear of long held prejudices, to make a change. And, when I’m proved wrong, accepting the wrongness and making the next change.

 

Earthquake at the Back Door

 

It happened on a Friday. Not last Friday but a few Fridays ago. Around about tea-time. Four o’clock in the afternoon. I was standing beside the back door at the time. Could I have been about to check the washing on the line? It had been out there for a while, waiting for a warmer day, a drier day, a day when there was a snapping breeze.

I had a panic attack.

Now, you might have had too many to count. Goodness knows there are plenty of things out lurking behind corners waiting to ambush you. Or maybe not out there at all. Maybe they drop on the hall carpet wrapped in brown paper, stamped and falling just below the letterbox.

I have had ripples of panic before. The low impact ones that can be waved away by drinking tea and reading a book. Or, in my case, picking up my knitting and completing a row of yarn over, sl1, knit1 and pass slipped stitch over.

This was not a ripple. It was earthquake size and although nothing on the outside was falling over, inside worries and anxieties were slamming down everywhere like mental boulders. Yes, the unfixed toilet seat was there, and the ironing pile which inhales and exhales on the chair in the front room. The felting on the shed roof was slapping in the hurricane wind and that Zoom meeting I was leading later, the one I wasn’t looking forward to, you know, the one where I might have to challenge unkind behaviour from a previous week, was drawing near. Switching off lights to save electricity meant I was living in the dark. And I was perpetually cold from fear of wasting heat.

It was just too much.

I stood beside the backdoor, a rabbit caught in the headlamps of life. Rooted, not running, feeling some kind of end hurtling towards me.

‘Go and do the washing up.’ Some might think it was a random thought. As a person of faith, I don’t think that way. It might me my voice, in my head, but the uniqueness of the thought makes me think it is possibly not my thoughts.

There are so many times where we are not in control. Re-reading my list, I admit that most, if not all, of those things are actually within my control. I have an iron and an ironing board so that pile that inhales and exhales on the chair in the front room doesn’t have to be there. Maybe it is the accumulation of things that I could have dealt with, but didn’t, that caused the overload. It felt like things were spiralling out of control.

I went and did the washing up. It was one thing, one small thing, that I could control. I could fill up the bowl, add a dash washing up liquid, and restore order somewhere.

The earthquake subsided.

Sometimes what is needed in those moments when the earthquake within begins is to find the one small thing that can be done. One little corner of control. And just focus on that.