As I set out to write this blog, I planned to post a new train of thought every 3rd Saturday. But 4 September passed by and so did 25 September. How hard can it possibly be to write a short essay every 3 weeks? Maybe if I cared more or was better organised…
With at least two deadlines in the rearview mirror, I considered to delete the blog. I often do this. I’d start a new calendar on 1 January, develop a colour-code, etc. I would fail to do whatever I planned to do with it at the latest by February and end up tossing the booklet. There could never be a recovery from a failed intention.
In a passing manner, I mentioned this to a friend who was dealing with her own self-imposed deadlines as she is planning to launch an inspiring kickstarter. She took a sip of her cappuccino and said: ‘no-one cares when you publish’. She meant it in an encouraging manner and emphasised the ‘when’.
And, just like this, before I had finished my own coffee, her words changed how I saw things. My little place of the internet is mine to curate at my convenience. Yes, it would have been so elegant if I published a post every 3rd Saturday, eventually added an interview every 2nd Tuesday of every second month, then a book review every 1st of the month. I’d be so proud of the regularity, I’d bask in it. Alas, I’m not there yet. But I want to write. So I’ll do.
As part of my attempt to finish my PhD this year, I decided, sometime in July, that I’d spend 2 hours on it every day. I’m currently 75 hours or so behind. But as I began looking at the thesis as something I wanted to write, rather than something I had to write, I would no longer get freaked out by the buildup. I don’t have to give it 75 hours, I get to. And I realise that Floodplain is such a privilege, too. I don’t have to write my 4 September post. I get to. So, here it is, a few weeks late, the 4 September musings. To quote one of my favourite authors, Elizabeth Gilbert, ‘Onward!’
The other day, I had one of those small but significant aha moments. I realised that if I stopped to continuously look for tiny gestures of approval from my surroundings but rather paused, took a couple of deep breaths, turned my attention inward, asked myself what I needed and did that instead, be it brewing a coffee, a time-out on the porch or a walk in the woods, I could embrace a lighter existence and forge happier relationships with those around me. I scribbled down my thoughts lest they slipped my conscience. ‘Permit space. Beware of distance.’ As I remained conscious of this new mantra in the days that followed, I experienced a powerful change in both body and mind. I was suddenly breathing more easily and smiling more often. I heard the distinct melody of a mountain stream and wondered at the first ripe blueberries’ intense blue colour. I enjoyed solitude and marvelled at the beauty of people. Invincibly self-sufficient, I had never been calmer, kinder, more present.
Over the last couple of years, I have observed that I have trouble taking such instantaneous revelations as the one described above seriously. I would articulate my thoughts and share them with Sam who would nod and add a smart or funny sentence or two yet immediately I would begin to wonder if I was, in fact, a fraud. Shouldn’t wisdom be gained from rigorous and systematic study, not the way one stumbles over a branch in the woods?
As I contemplated my latest insight and its unannounced arrival, I remembered an article I had read not long ago. Or perhaps it was two articles? Either way, the message that resurfaced had something to do with climate change, how we talk about it from the perspective of human years and how nature doesn’t keep time the way we do. A millennium or a year matters little to the Mother. She is, after all, timeless. Whether we melt all the Arctic ice in a year or a decade, she will respond when she must and will care little for our challenges to prepare for this or that disaster in just a day. She will respond when the time is right.
I also thought of the Floodplain and the river as a metaphor. In particular, I contemplated waterfalls and how we don’t discard them for being too reckless to be taken seriously. We marvel at the force of the free fall of the water liberated from the confines of the riverbed. And as we walk further downstream, we cannot ignore the waterfall that was either. Without it, the river wouldn’t have reached where it did, wouldn’t have been quite the same. The waterfall is an integral part of the river’s unique identity.
In the same way, insights, unpredictable, serendipitous and forceful as they are, are no less credible for that. When overheard conversations and observations of human interaction, words and sentences, bits and pieces of songs, atoms and sparks accumulate in a particular manner, when they reach a tipping point at which making a mental leap is unavoidable, wisdom happens. It is frustrating, perhaps, that we cannot grow 1 unit of it per day. That we cannot schedule neither the progress nor the completion of the process. But perhaps learning does not lie in hustling towards some unknown final result, whether we call it divine wisdom or nirvana, but rather in accepting that if we keep our minds open and don’t rush what cannot be rushed, those sometimes little, sometimes life-altering realisations will eventually crystallise into words. And we only need to trust ourselves enough to accept them for what they are. Our invigorated Self.
When the thought first emerged this spring, I mistook it for a dark one. After Sam and I had spent 10 months apart in different countries, he, surrounded by people, me, struggling with loneliness in increasingly strong and diverse ways, I was hurting, and I wanted him to grasp, to really grasp how I was hurting and how much. Yet, one evening, sitting on the couch and staring out into the garden, I concluded, with immediacy and finality that he couldn’t.
Following that initial realisation that he, even he, could not without turning dishonest say more than that he understood that I was hurting, I have spent hours juggling that insight in my mind. I have since realised that not only could he not understand me, I also could not understand him. Every time he said that he wished for some silence, my instinctive reaction was that he was mocking me, his words felt like punches to the stomach. In my false belief that I knew how it was for him to be with people, I negated his feelings and, on top, turned them against him.
A question then forced itself upon me. If we who love each other cannot grasp more than that the other is feeling discomfort, can any person ever really understand another? As I articulated the question, I felt as if a dense, dark cloud expanded in my mind. If no-one can understand one another, aren’t we doomed to remain what we were not built to be, islands, in vicinity of, yet isolated from one another?
I decided to play with the thought. Could I reframe what not understanding meant? What if the insight was not dark and heavy but light? What if the realisation that our capacity to understand was limited was not suffocating but liberating? A ray of sun then pierced through the grey mass. If we cannot understand, we only have to acknowledge and care. That is much simpler and well within our capacity. “I recognise that this is your reality. Is there something I can do to help?”
But not: “I understand.” Although we might want it to be true, it will seldomly be. How could I have communicated my loneliness to Sam? How can a person who only ever traveled to go on holiday understand the physical desire of a migrant to hear her mother tongue spoken on the street, not just the radio? How can a white European understand the experiences of a black European and how can a white collar understand a blue one? Brexit and Trump and still we think we understand and allow ourselves to judge and the rifts between us deepen.
I think we don’t have a clue. About the small, why a remark sets someone off, the big, a soldier’s experience of PTSD, or the political. However, we don’t need a clue. We need to listen and acknowledge, care if we can and, even when difficult, or particularly when difficult, reserve judgment. We need to accept that everyone’s reality, which might not be our reality, is real for her or him.
This might sound defeatist but at least for me, the clouds have cleared. We are islands but we can throw each other horseshoe buoys when the other is drowning as we are standing on firm land, knit him a blanket when he is freezing even as we are sweating and say “I am here!” when being there is all that is possible. Not expecting from Sam that he reads my mind and soul means not setting him up for failure where I accuse him, righteously, but not right, of diminishing or outright denying my reality, achieving nothing. It also means not setting myself up for disappointment and keeping my bandwidth free for what Sam does give me plenty of, namely love, care and coffee. It means accepting the validity of my own emotion without subjecting it to external confirmation and therefore lending legitimacy to anything I might want or need to do to deal with it. It means appreciating that my experience is different, in its way unique, and that I am richer for it.
There is one exception to what I am writing. Every now and then we come across a sentence in a book, or a verse in a poem, that feels as if the author has looked right into our soul. Like the emergence and dance of the auroraborealis or the sudden sighting of a wild moose, it captivates the entire being. It is a sensation so rare but at the same time universal that it would deserve its own word. Knowing that understanding is so evanescent we could, liberated from the duty to portray and the expectation to receive it, truly bask in the unbearable magic when we are, in fact, privy to it.
Floodplain 