February 2017 - 100 days of solitude

We are all of us magicians in our realms

My dad called me this morning, 9 am. This is unusual. I was on coffee number one and still a bit groggy.
    ‘Did I wake you up?’ he asked.
    ‘No. I’m having my coffee.’
    ‘Me too,’ he said – then: ‘I need your help. Will you help me?’
    ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘If I can.’
    ‘You can.’
    What my dad wanted – needed – help with was an essay entitled “On Translating Shakespeare” that he was about to send to King’s College, London, for publication. And he wanted me to edit it.
    I said: ‘Um,’ with all the eloquence this poet-father has passed on. I gathered my thoughts. ‘Sure,’ I added. ‘But do you really need me to edit your English?’ The emphasis of incredulity in this sentence being you need me?
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If you have time.’
    ‘I have time.’ I was about to sit down with my book-in-progress and agonise over unfinished chapters but, for this, I had time.
    ‘Send it,’ I said. ‘But I’m sure there’ll be nothing.’

My dad: the poet, the editor, the literature scholar, the man who translates Shakespeare into Greek and then casually whips up a 12 page essay on the topic, in perfect English; this man needs me? I was flattered, yes, and eager to be helpful, to prove that I was worthy of this compliment, this trust. But nervous as hell. Because, seriously: me? Who the fuck am I to mess with this man’s words, this man who gave me all the words I have, who, as far as I’m concerned, is the keeper of all the words? This magician with his pen, reaching into a hatful of words and pulling out entire worlds. How am I even qualified to comment, let alone edit what he writes?

I loaded the document onto my computer, determined to find nothing. Out of respect. Out of fear of disturbing the subtle balance of things, the hierarchy that keeps my understanding of this world and my place in it the right way up. Out of a reverse kind of pride: my humble skills and how proud I am of this poet-dad who far outskills me. It would be hubris to put red marks on his work. I’d do my duty, and find nothing. But we are all of us magicians in our realms.

When your web designer makes images appear at the top of your page like you asked him, that’s magic. When your massage therapist puts her hands on exactly the right spot along your back and eases the pain; when the plumber bends over your toilet and mutters and it no longer overflows when you flush it; when the gardener knows that your soil is too acidic and how deep to dig to sow tomato seeds: those are all magic tricks. When M, my boyfriend, the electrician, fearlessly reaches into a snake’s nest of live wires and makes the lights shine again, he is performing magic. When my sister stands up in a roomful of stressed out Londoners and gets them, with just her voice, to lie down on yoga mats and close their eyes and relax, she’s putting them under a spell. When my dad takes the poetry of Shakespeare – the metre, the meaning, the rhymes – and coaxes it into another language: how the fuck? And when I write, yes, that’s a kind of magic too.

The fact that something has been granted – a talent, an ability, knowledge, a healthy beating heart – doesn’t mean it should be taken that way. Our humble skills, the things we know, are someone else’s magic. Our nothing can be everything if it’s the thing that someone needs. Once we have learnt it, we forget, the time, to toil it took to get there; we forget that we’ve earned this qualification. Once we’ve mastered it, the glamour fades, and we just shrug it off as nothing, as unremarkable as having toes, or making a cup of tea. But we’re magicians in those things that we can do, the wands we wave so casually to make magic happen, like functioning toilets and thriving tomato plants and making words rhyme and finding small errors in a poet-father’s work.

It wasn’t nothing. It wasn’t a lot, but there were little things here and there, a word that jarred, a letter forgotten, an extra space between sentences, a z where an s should be. That’s all: ten marks, maybe, over twelve pages, ten tentative comments in red, the little things my dad had missed. And I had found them: me. The writer-daughter, hierarchically confused but qualified to comment after all. My dad was right. He may be the keeper of the words, but something of his magic has trickled down to me, and I – without noticing – have made it my own. And it’s another kind of magic now, a different trick altogether. I cannot translate Shakespeare but I can help to make an almost perfect essay a tiny bit better. Not casually: I agonised over those marks, just like I agonise over every single word I pull out of my hat to make a sentence, a paragraph, a story you might want to read. Just like my dad agonised over writing this essay that conveys the agony of translating Shakespeare. It may look casual, the way we perform the magic that we own, but it took time and toil to own it, and that’s what makes us qualified. That’s what makes us magicians, all of us, in the things that we know.
‘Thank you,’ my dad wrote when I sent him my suggestions.
‘It was nothing,’ I replied. But we both know it was a lot more than that. Nothing and everything; as remarkable as having toes.

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The conditions for unconditional love

I’ve been thinking about love a lot lately. My sister is getting married this weekend, and I am going to be her witness, and sign my name on a document officially declaring her and Arek husband and wife (or the other way round, as the case may be). And this makes me feel happy and grateful and proud and a little in awe. But, my own role in this event aside, my bearing witness, both officially and unofficially, to what is truly and unequivocally an excellent thing, I cannot help but question the purpose of such declarations. Weddings, marriages, and their necessity in connection to love.

My sister and I are not wedding people. In fact, the mere mention of the topic as it relates to our own lives is likely to cause, in both of us, an almost phobic reaction. In addition to this, we share a – partly justifiable – mistrust of marriage itself, as exemplified by our parents and society at large. The phonecall in which she announced to me the fact of her engagement could be described, without exaggeration, as one of the happiest and most awkward conversations two people have ever had. We have never talked about weddings; we have never fantasised, as other girls, of dresses and engagement rings. This was a foreign land, full of dragons and booby traps, and we circumnavigated these terrors as best we could, to arrive, clumsily, at a mutual conclusion of joy. We weren’t trying to be obscure, or unconventional; we just don’t have the vocabulary for this sort of thing. None of us really do.

And yet we try. We try, with words, to explain why people get married, to define a marriage, to express love. To capture its essence, to measure it, quantify it, evaluate it – demystify it, perhaps, to make it more manageable, more attainable. We are, as a society, entirely preoccupied with love, endlessly producing quotes, metaphors, clichés and contradictions. They’re in our art and our literature, our everyday conversations, our highbrow theories and our pop songs. And, regardless of whether we subscribe to fairytale endings or take the cynical view and reject love and marriage outright, in our moments of elation and of pain we all drunkenly sing along.

And if you turn to Eastern philosophies in search of a more sober perspective, as I have, it gets even more confusing. The teachings of Buddhism encourage loving kindness and compassion, yet discourage attachment, while Buddhist monks are happy to bless a union that is basically a marriage by another name. The Buddha is quoted as having said: “He who loves fifty people has fifty woes; he who loves no one has no woes.” And I don’t understand whether this is a warning or simply a statement of fact; whether those woes are to be avoided, or accepted – welcomed, even – as a part of love.

It is then suggested that we should love, but love all creatures equally. And I don’t think that’s possible, sustainable or even desirable. I can see the virtue in approaching each person and each situation with love; it takes practice, but it can be done, and I call that kindness. But to enact love, to love, as a verb, is a different thing entirely and I, for one, cannot produce that level of emotion for everyone I meet.

And further: love, in its truest, purest form, should be unconditional. And sometimes it is. But the reason it became love, the reason it grew into love is because certain conditions were in place when it began. Conditions as in circumstances rather than terms, but conditions, nonetheless. Does this negate its unconditional nature, retroactively, once it reaches that stage? Perhaps I’m taking things too literally, and this is just another case of our vocabulary letting us down, but it seems to me that for all their dogma, these philosophies are placing conditions on who and how I love.

But love is not possession: this one I can live with. Yet I have lain in a man’s arms and felt, with my whole, entire self: “I am yours. You are mine.” And it has nothing to do with ownership, but with the fact that something in the way this universe moves has brought us together and that’s exactly where we should be. A place where all the definitions of love cease to matter. But when I try to explain it, these are the words that come out. They’re the only words I have.

But what does all of this say about marriage? Does a wedding validate a love? Is placing a ring on someone’s finger a declaration of ownership? Is it, as Beyonce suggests in the eloquent lyric “If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it”, all about staking a claim? I think in many cases, in many marriages, it is. I may find the notion of ownership incompatible with my understanding of love, but to many people, the idea of belonging to someone, of someone belonging to them, is an arrival, a homecoming – it’s where they want to be. Just like I want to be in that place of stillness and certainty that I have found lying next to a man I love, and most marriages are lands I never want to visit.

But there are other marriages. Ones where love needs no validation. Where commitment transcends the signing of papers, if papers have been signed at all. It depends on where you place yourself in this equation. You can stand next to someone, or you can follow them, or you can lead the way. You can stand next to someone and place a ring on your own finger, not a promise to anyone else, but a symbol for yourself, for how you feel. You can get married, or you can marry; you can be a passive or an active part of the grammar that makes up your relationship. You can have a marriage where nobody belongs to anybody else but perhaps, if you’re lucky, you belong together. And you can hold their hand, but loosely; if they want to go away, they will, no matter how tightly you grip.

Words, grammar, syntax. Xs and Ys and the mathematical formulas that bring them together. The laws of physics, the laws of nature. Symbols and signatures, rings and vows and altars. Faith, fate, god and endless theories. We summon all these things to try and explain the inexplicable, to express something that defies expression, as elusive as it is ever-present, as abstract as it is tangible, as extraordinary as it is commonplace; something that slips through your fingers like your lover’s hand when you squeeze too tight, but will happily settle in your open palm if you know enough to hold it out, and wait. And it’s the human condition that we keep trying, that we will always keep trying, because if there ever comes a day when we stop trying, it will mean we have captured something that shouldn’t be caught, demystified the mystery that keeps our lives in motion. And that, I think, will be the day that everything stops. That will be the day when saying the words “I love you” will express exactly what we mean, and I cannot think of anything sadder than that.

There is no such thing as a universal marriage, just as there’s no universal definition of love. Those are choices we make, each of us, for ourselves, and saying you don’t believe in marriage is not an ideology, it’s a cop out. Love no one. Have no woes.

I still think my sister is very brave, and there’ll be dragons to slay (or approach with love, and convert to household pets), but I’m not worried. I have every reason to believe that she and Arek will have one of those other marriages, the ones that don’t make me want to run away screaming. I think they have it already. Because neither of them is getting married: both are marrying the person they love. Because, at times when I’ve lost my faith, I’ve looked to them and seen that they have built their life in that same place of stillness and certainty, and though they may wander off sometimes, they always know how to get back. Because they’ve shown me that big love doesn’t necessarily equal big drama, and when you’re faced with it, you might no longer need to put it into words.

But words are sometimes all we have, and mine are all I have to give. So this is dedicated to them: in hope, in admiration, and in love. Not equal, but as unconditional as it comes.

Taken from This Reluctant Yogi: everyday adventures in the yoga world. View it on Amazon, or join my readers’ list and get an e-book copy for free.

I am the storm.

Ever since I self-published my first book, 100 days of solitude, I’ve been standing at a precipice, high over the world, scuffing at the edge with the toes of my shoes, and watching dust rise up and stones tumble down the slope. One, maybe two at a time. I watch them roll down, gaining momentum sometimes, sometimes dislodging a small rock on the way and taking it down with them. I watch them hit the bottom, the impact they make: another cloud of dust rising and settling again. Again, I nudge, pulling another stone from the soil; I get down on my knees, freeing one more with my hands and setting it loose down the mountainside. I watch. I wait. I start again.

I want an avalanche. I want a landslide. I want that magical, inexplicable something that brings my book crashing into the world with a great, rumbling roar. I don’t want it to be a wave, gently lapping at the shore and pulling back again, to disappear into the ocean. I want it to be a tsunami, a great sweeping mass of words and thoughts and joy, rushing into the lives of thousands. Millions. I’m done being waves and pebbles. I’m done being quiet and small. I want the magic. I want that something, that moment when my book goes from selling a thousand copies to selling a million. Because that’s all it is: a moment. A click that sets it all in motion. That’s all it takes: some magic, and a click.

Perhaps literary agents and publishers have the big, industrial machines that tear chunks out of mountainsides and cause landslides that bury the villages below. Perhaps they have massive ships that cut through the ocean, dislodging the seas, turning waves into tsunamis and drowning coastal towns in their authors’ words. Perhaps they do, and it’s not sinister; it’s just the way it is. But I have no such equipment. I am just a girl chiselling away with my hands, but my words are just as big as theirs, and there’s another way.

The world is changing, and we can make our own magic. We can make our own destiny. We always could, but perhaps we have turned a corner and we can see it, now. Perhaps the dust from their big, industrial works is beginning to settle, and we can see it. Perhaps we’re done being told what we can’t do. Perhaps we’re done waiting. Perhaps we’re done being lodged in the ground, calling out for someone to come along and kick us free. Perhaps we’re done being rolling stones in other people’s landslides. There are mountains enough for all of us, infinite oceans of possibility. We can be our own landslides. We can make our own waves.

These thoughts had been building up for a while, but it was my friend Leo who gave me the word that brought them all together. We were having coffee, and I was trying to explain the magic moment, the click. “Avalanche,” he said, and I saw it. I’d known it from before when, in another magical moment, I suddenly understood, on a level entirely separate from intellect and real-world odds, that this book would go far. I’d known it, but I had no visual, and then Leo said that word, and it all came together and I saw it: the avalanche, the landslide, the tsunami. Sweeping into the world, graceful and magnificent; a natural phenomenon, but not a disaster, because it’s words I’m sending into people’s lives, stories to make them better. Because, as pretentious as it may sound, I really do believe that books can change our lives. And this is a book that’s all about changing, and finding your own path, and finding joy. This particular book has already changed my life. And it deserves its own landslide.

In real-world terms: the landslide, for a writer, translates into lots of sales. Money. But it’s not about that. It’s about having the means to carry on doing what you love, and, for me, this book is the way. Because another thing I believe – another one of my pretensions, if you like – is that we all have a purpose in this life, a gift, a thing we are uniquely qualified to do. And this is mine: writing. It’s what I do, and I do it well. And I deserve the chance to carry on doing it; to try. We all do – whatever our thing might be. And the real-world odds can go fuck themselves. There is another world, where anything is possible. And it is just as real as we make it.

There is nothing noble in stoically accepting the odds, nothing admirable in admitting defeat before you’ve even begun. This gift, this purpose: it shouldn’t be taken for granted. It needs to be defended. Suffering for the sake of suffering is such a wasteful way to live. But if the thing that you love doing can fund doing what you love, isn’t that the perfect way for the world to go around?

I am done with odds. I am done being pebbles and waves. I am done being the tortured artist selling drinks and dreaming of words. I have written a book, and I’m standing up for it. And for anyone who’s ever done a thing that meant something to them, for anyone who wants to, for all the pebbles and the waves, the quiet and the small, slowly gathering their strength against the odds to crash into the world. We can be the avalanche; we can be the tsunami. All it takes is some magic, and a click.

Fate whispers to the warrior
“you cannot withstand the storm”
and the warrior whispers back
“I AM THE STORM”.

You can click here to view 100 days of solitude on Amazon and perhaps add another rolling stone to my avalanche, if you like.

Not taking it personally

This is another philosophical post. And the question I’m pondering this morning is: what the fuck? In fact, for the sake of clarity, let me be more specific: what the actual fucking fuck, please?

I don’t believe in bad luck. I don’t believe in the world turning against you; the universe (or whatever you want to call it) is neither good nor bad, and it certainly isn’t out to get you. I have no tolerance for “poor me”, in myself or others. But I don’t believe in coincidence, either. I don’t deny there’s an element of random in the events of our lives, but still, somewhere, on some level, there’s a connection to be made, an understanding to be gained. The law of attraction is real, and what you perceive as your reality is constantly readjusting itself to match your thoughts and your beliefs. What you dwell on, you get more of; what you put in is what you get back. Your attitude shapes your experience.
Which brings me right back to the profound philosophical conundrum of what the fuck. Because not taking it personally is all good and wise but this, in list form, is my one-thing-after-the-other in the space of three short weeks:

    Multiple powercuts (island-wide)
    Telephone pole going down in my actual back yard (personal, plus collateral damage)
    Total failure of septic tank (personal)
    Sudden death of washing machine (personal)
    Unprecedented acute asthma attack (as personal as it gets)

That’s quite a lot of things, but wait. I’m not done. I thought I was done and yesterday I gave myself a stern talking to, performed a ritualistic sage-burning tour of the house, and declared whatever the fuck that was over. And then I changed into yoga gear, pulled my bedroom door shut so the cats wouldn’t climb onto my bed, and rolled my mat out in preparation for a long overdue, restorative yoga session. I remembered I’d left the light on in the bedroom; I tried to go back in, and slammed straight into the door. I tried again. I turned the handle and pushed. The handle turned, but nothing happened: the door remained totally unmoved. I threw myself against it half-heartedly a couple of times, but all I got out of it was a dull thud and a sore shoulder. I was locked out.
    And – praise my attitude – I laughed. I thought you are fucking kidding me, but I laughed, and then I went out in leggings, vest top and bare feet (all my things were in the inaccessible bedroom) and knocked on my neighbour’s door.
    ‘Please help me,’ I said. ‘I have no shoes.’
    ‘What happened?’ Manolis asked at the bedroom door.
    ‘Nothing. I just shut it.’
    He jiggled the handle; he twisted and turned it. He pushed and pulled and tapped and frowned a lot, while I stood beside him and laughed at every failed attempt.
    ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘From one moment to the next?’
    ‘From one moment to the next.’
    He went away and came back with tools. He picked and poked at the handle, took out a screw, twisted it back in, as tight as it would go. Nothing.
    ‘It’s having none of it,’ he said, scratching his head. ‘It makes no sense.’
    I laughed again, and brought out the electric drill. A hole in the door and a lot of fidgeting with three separate screwdrivers, and the catch finally released, throwing Manolis halfway across the room. I applauded as he straightened up, apologising for having entered my bedroom.
    ‘You are a hero,’ I told him. So many people have deserved that title lately; too many people have had to come to my rescue.
    Manolis smiled. ‘Just don’t tell your mother we put a hole in the door.’
    I wedged it open as Manolis gathered his tools. ‘It still makes no sense,’ he said in parting.
    I shrugged and laughed, and my open bedroom door was a happy ending.

But wait, not yet: it still isn’t over. As I smoked a cigarette and snorted intermittently at the ridiculous events of the last hour, I noticed that my dehumidifier, which had been humming away contentedly, keeping the house relatively warm, had stopped. This isn’t unusual: it’s on a setting where it turns itself off when it detects a certain level of humidity in the air that it deems acceptably low, and starts up again when it rises – same as a radiator with a thermostat. So I don’t know what made me pay attention this time; I don’t know what made me get up and go over there and check. The hum and pause of the dehumidifier is the background noise of my daily life. But I checked, and I saw that its power light had blinked off. Baffled, I pulled the plug out of the socket – and nearly dropped it in shock: it had actually melted. The air instantly filled with the unmistakable, acrid smell of burning plastic and imminent electrical fire. I stared at the mangled thing in my hand, blinked, and laughed. But there was a bitter edge to it this time, I admit; this time, for all of my unfaltering positivity, it started to feel like one-thing-too-many.

But was it? Was it the last thing? Is whatever the fuck that was over, or should I brace myself for more? And if I brace myself, if I anticipate it, will I be inviting it? Will I be shaping my reality to accommodate more of the same? I live my life expecting good things to happen, but it’s been one-thing-after-the-other, and I’m not sure what sense I’m supposed to make of this, what I’m supposed to understand. I can keep laughing my way through it, keep focusing on the positives – powercuts don’t last too long; telephone pole replaced and vertical; septic tank drained; brand new washing machine; asthma attack a one-off; hero-neighbour and a wide open door; plug pulled out just in time – but perhaps there’s a place where it all connects. Perhaps there’s something I’m missing. For every single thing there’s been redemption, a hero, a solution, a way out or back in. Yes. A happy ending, every time. But still, seriously, what the actual fucking fuck? I’m close to the end of my philosophical tether, and I wouldn’t mind some guidance, please.

So I’m making this post interactive, and opening the conundrum up to general debate: what the fuck? Go.

Fuck you, I’ll be happy anyway

Certain fundamental things that we’d come to rely on – the safety nets of our “civilised” societies – are coming apart, and it now seems that anything can happen, and it can happen to us. The paradigms are shifting and the safety nets are full of holes: anything can happen. And where does that leave us?

(Some thoughts on happiness)

These are strange days we’re living in, and the general consensus is that everything’s going to shit – to put it philosophically. And, if you’re anything like me, you’re looking around and seeing a world that you don’t quite recognise, a world that makes increasingly less sense. Most of our countries are in crisis. Certain fundamental things that we’d come to rely on – the safety nets of our “civilised” societies – are coming apart, and it now seems that anything can happen, and it can happen to us. “They won’t do it,” I said about Brexit, but they did. “They won’t do it,” I said about Trump, but they did. The paradigms are shifting and the safety nets are full of holes: anything can happen. And where does that leave us?

It leaves exactly where we’ve always been: responsible for our own sanity, our own attitudes, our own happiness. In charge of who we want to be in this world, and what we choose to put into it. There’s enough misery around; enough fear, despair and negativity. We are inundated with it, daily, on the news, on the social media, on the streets. And forgive me if I’m wrong, forgive me if I’m insensitive or naive, but I just cannot see how adding more negativity to the mix, how perpetuating it will make the situation any better. When we can choose, instead, to be as happy as possible despite it, when we can be aware of the shit that’s going down but still find happiness and positivity where they can be found. Because they can be found. It really is a choice that we make, for ourselves and those around us. Because happiness is cumulative and it spreads. And that’s a small way to make this crazy world a slightly better place. Where anything can happen.

So when everything around me is falling apart, when people are crying and dying and blaming each other and living in constant fear of darker tomorrows and I post photos of sunsets and horizons and mountaintops and talk about happiness, I’m not showing off; I’m not being insensitive or oblivious. I’m trying to remind myself and anyone who sees my posts that happiness still exists in these things. That peace can be found, even if momentarily. I’m scared too, but then I look at the place where the mountains meet the sky and for a moment everything is OK. And those moments add up, and they become an antidote to the fear and the despair – if we let them. So I’ll keep looking at mountains for as long as there are mountains to look at, and I’ll keep talking about happiness for as long as I still have a voice. Because yes, I know everything’s going to shit, but fuck you, I’ll be happy anyway. How about you?

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