Tag: Norway

Waterfalls

Elizabet BarefootLeave a comment

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.

Dissolution and recreation

Elizabet BarefootLeave a comment

The other day, I sent a message to Sam, writing that I felt as if I’d never had an authentic thought. The articulation was perhaps a bit dramatic but I thought that it communicated clearly that as I continue to shed old patterns of behaviour and thought or, in other words, as I Marie Kondo (used as a verb) the hell out of my soul, I cannot see what, if anything, will remain. Do I possess a core that has been eclipsed but not destroyed by 3 decades of unconscious absorption of my environment? Who am I?

My curriculum vitae from a few years ago reads like one Microsoft Word would use for one of its templates. Legal degrees and an exiting career start. An equal number of languages and hobbies that make me sound both peculiar and reliable. A mugshot and compulsive formatting in shades of black, grey and blue.

In my old life, I worked as a research fellow in international development. A few years and a minor breakdown into it, I quit the job, keeping, as a sort of severance, only my recent PhD enrollment confirmation, a handy tool, I thought, that would eventually allow a smooth transition into my next adventure. A friend recently pointed out how ludicrous that was to struggle to regain sanity while at the same time worrying about how the cv, that terrorist instrument in which the only permitted direction is up, would portray the sudden hitch.

In my new life, the doctoral project feels like a remnant from an old life, as if I had time-travelled. All else is new to me. I no longer live in a city but a small town in the Norwegian countryside. While my job is technically in Oslo, the public administration position is far from the prestige of purportedly saving an entire government from itself. Norway is the first country I’ve moved to for love and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Sam is… well, Sam is home. Also, Sam is wild. His second name is Outdoors and ever since we’ve begun to hang out I’ve experienced more awe than in all of my previous life combined.

So, here I am. Nowhere close to where I’d thought I’d be at 33 but exactly where I want to be nevertheless. For one, there is Sam. I’m starting to take seriously my impulses to write and I’ve learned how to make blueberry jam out of blueberries I have picked in the surrounding forest. Sometimes I just breathe. At the same time, I am beginning to question all I thought I knew. I am not doing this in a structured manner but keep being overcome by pressing questions and insights that spring seemingly out of nothing. I am questioning what’s important to me, what I care about. I’m trying to figure out where ideas about me and criteria for success that I no longer recognise as my own initially came from. Some days, as if to follow up on a wholesale destruction of 20 years worth of diaries that I completed two summers ago, I want to dissolve into thin air, so suffocating the past feels. Other days, I don’t even know what foods I like and wonder whether I bought that book because I thought I’d enjoy reading it or because it fit with an idea of myself I wanted to portray after I’ve mindlessly picked up said idea that such a portrait was desirable.

Although I sometimes find the process upsetting, even scary, I don’t actually mind the dissolution of the mirage of me as otherwise there’d be no space left for me, that core, whatever she may look like. I want to be patient, and bask in the liberating and invigorating periods, but I am also curious to meet her. Clueless as to where to start, I sometimes make lists of things I still, again know for sure. The lists are short. I love Sam. I like walking barefoot. And as I draft this essay and listen to summer rain, thunder and the neighbour’s kid’s laughter, I know that I like the sounds of those, too. It’s a start.