Category: life

Where were you … ?

I’ve just read a post asking “Seven/Seven: Where were you?” and also today was talking with mother of the girl I tutor about remembering where we were when … and listed various events that we remembered and talked of what we remember about where we were.

I commented on the “Seven/Seven: Where are you?” post and said:

I will always remember where I was on 7/7/2015. I was at home in Frome, home educating my daughter. My son had gone to college that day in Radstock. We were really engrossed in something when suddenly we both said “let’s put the radio on”. Neither of us will ever know why but we listened with shock as the reports unfolded. We are Christians and we just prayed and cried.

But also I remember clearly where I was when the Twin Towers were hit –

We were in our first week of our Family DTS in Paisley Scotland. I think it was the first time I’d left my kids for with someone to teach them since I’d taken Ben out of school. Us adults were in a church hall about 2 miles from the main house. Our base leader came in (the days before everyone had mobile phones) and said there was dreadful news. It unfurled slowly. We were on our faces in prayer. It was not just an awful time nationally but for me it was an awesome time realising the things I could pray and the strength I could pray with.

The death of Princess Diana is neither so deep or so inspiring.

We were living in Belfast. We had been there for about 10 months. I was helping out in the Sunday school at the church we had been attending for maybe 8 months. Someone came in and said “Diana’s been killed in a car accident.” Everyone looked sad. I didn’t say anything. I presumed this was someone they knew, someone who attended the church. I remember racking my brains to think of any Diana’s I’d known. Thankfully I kept quiet and didn’t embarrass myself.

But it also brings back memories of where I was when I hear of things closer to home –

when I heard my Dad’s voice on my answer phone and I knew something serious had happened – my sister had drowned.
when my husband phoned from our friend’s house to say that friend had succeeded in hanging himself.
my Dad bursting into tears in the first ever house I owned to say my Mum had left him for the second time.
the colour of the train we were on when we picked up the message from my husband to say his dad was dead

These are a list of events where I can see and smell how things were, that have stayed seared in my brain, where everything is still so vibrant, where something has been capture. A moment in time. And yet there was a prompt on a

Did my childhood kitchen look like this?

Linkedin group I’m part of which this morning said “write imagine your 5-6 year old self and write about the kitchen in your family home.” I couldn’t remember. I know I’ve moved a lot as an adult but as a child we only lived in four different homes and I can only really recall the third house, where I lived from 10-16. I only remember the fourth house because I visited it twenty years after I’d moved out because new friends were living in it. How can I see snapshots for vividly and yet not remember even something vague from a place I must have gone in to over a thousand times?

It is said that memory is an odd thing and that we shouldn’t trust it that much. What is truth may not be fact. Yet those things etched in my brain that I have mentioned above I am sure that they are really true, that they really were like that. In fact there are certain

Maybe this just says it all from http://www.theyoungadultcaregiver.com

words or phrases that can send me right back there. Though I wonder if I spoke to others who were there whether their truth is the same as mine?

Tags friends, memory, prayer, questioning, relationship

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More than just OK

All day every day we run around exhausted trying to work out what’s good, what’s bad, what we like, what we don’t like, instead of just experiencing this world. I’ve been doing a Mindfulness course and I must admit till then I thought that Mindfulness was just about stopping to look at things, even then to put them in the good/bad, like/don’t like category, but I don’t think that’s the case. It is about judging. I talked about this in my post on Keeping Sunday Special in regard to how we judge people’s faithfulness but I think I’m taking it further.

Over the past few days I’ve been walking the dog and trying to look and listen to nature without judging, without deciding whether I like it or not, and then have been trying to take that on into my life. At the moment my daughter is home from university, which means for a lot of the time she’s in the living room – in my space – which actually I then find it hard to write, to even think creatively. So I can decide if I want to decide if I like her being there or not or just accept that’s where she is. To a point I do like the fact that, when she isn’t working or out with friends, that she likes to be in with me. Though in honesty it is because the internet connection is better on the couch. I also don’t like her being there because I find the continuous computer gaming annoying to listen to. Now I can either get upset and put it in

make sure you put things in the “right” box

“don’t like” box or even try to work myself up to liking it and so putting it in the “like” box, which it can fall out of, or I can decide that this is the way life is and if I’m not able to be creative for 3 months then that’s what it is. See actually I almost wrote “it won’t be the end of the world” as though that made things ok, and it needed to be in the “ok” box”. That’s the other place we use if we actually don’t like something but aren’t sure what to do with it we say its “ok” which like “nice” or “interesting” has a myriad of meanings. Often “OK” can mean that actually we don’t like it but we want others to think we are good people so we tell everyone that it’s ok. So with my daughter I have to say “that’s how it is” and then work my life around it. I can also tell her how I would like to have some space. Or as happened yesterday I said, calmly, that I would like her to help more in the kitchen and we made supper together. It was helpful. Yes it did go in the “like” box but actually things to. We will always have things we like and don’t like, and that’s ok but we still need to accept that those are our tastes and not right or wrong.

So I like some help in the kitchen and I do have my own way of doing things. This isn’t right or wrong but how I like things. I like the house to myself and everything quiet, but that’s me. it isn’t right or wrong, good or bad, but just me. And when it comes to being out in nature there isn’t a right and wrong, good or bad. There are just flowers, grasses, birds, trees, cars, people, colours and sounds. All just being there.

Now that I am accepting not just what I see in the countryside as “more than just ok” then I am bringing it into my home life, my friendship life, my working life, my creative life, my Christian life. In fact I would say this article says how we should live life more than anything I could write. Integration of the Negative. Jesus didn’t put things in good or bad, right or wrong, but he did suggest ways that made life work more fully for all. And this is where I like this practise, if I’ve got the Mindfulness thing right, is that even though it benefits us we are doing it for others. If I am accepting of everything then I am a calmer, less critical person to live with, probably less anxious too. Though even if I’m anxious or depressed I can just accept that that’s the way I am and it’s ok. Not to judge me either!

Oh I seem to be back to the “love your neighbour as yourself” 🙂 which was a reoccuring theme in my other Diane’s Daily Thoughts.

Tags friends, God, relationship

alone grief life Love relationships

Who Do You Tell?

Yesterday I was tutoring. My pupil lives on a large country estate. I had just stopped my car to sort out my dog’s harness

when a lady came out of the gatehouse and asked if I could run her to the big house as she’d locked herself out of both her house and car. She worked at the big house. She then said to me “I know you.” We did the ‘how old are you?’ question and realised that she went to school with my sister, me with her sister. She told me I looked just like my sister. For the five minute car ride back to the big house she was so preoccupied about being locked out she didn’t ask me about my sister. I asked her about herself hoping she’d ask how Carole was then I could have told her that Carole had drowned just over three years ago. I’m not sure how much more information I would have told her, but probably because I didn’t tell her anything was why I told a friend I met for coffee in the afternoon, that I hadn’t seen in nearly three years, the details and my suspicions. I needed to tell someone.

And I didn’t just need to tell someone about my sister’s death but I was stuck with who would care about me seeing this person? None of my family knew her. She was someone that actually I remember bumping into her years ago with my sister and her with her sister and we talked about how we’d been to school with each other. It could have been me she recognised. But there was no where I could go with this information. Who could I say that I’d seen this woman? I couldn’t phone or text my sister to say ‘guess who I saw today?’ There are so many things when you live a travelling life, a disjointed life, that there is no one to pass things on to. I think of my husband’s uncle’s funeral and there were many of the same people who were at his dad’s funeral, but also people were asking about people they all knew. No one other then my sister would have known or cared about the connection. It is one of the things about grief that no one tells you – the who do you say things to that are only relevant to you and the deceased.

So who do you tell when no one else is interested?

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What is Rest?

What does rest look like? God talks of rest and in Isaiah 30:15 says “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it,” which makes one wonder why church is so busy all the time.

I’ve just been away for 4 days with Interweave, UK Reconciliation group, and there the theme God wanted to pull out was rest and hoI w it was only in rest that we could be able to know what God had planned for us. Rest is counter-cultural. Life is about being busy and doing things and getting on in life. Work is seen as something that you work more hours than contracted for and then have busy recreational life. We’re now at a time when more books than ever are published and there are more TV programmes to watch than ever but we are expected to be doing all the time.

I have been brought to an enforced time of rest but it is hard to stay here, and hard to tell people what I do, or don’t do. I talk of looking for work, when in fact I think God has been saying very clearly not to look for work. Resting is scary because it gives time for me to think, think about the last few years and how I feel about what has gone on. The first month of my resting time has been filled with grief, of what should have been. Interestingly that was something that kept coming out as people told their stories over the last few days. God seemed to have decided that instead of us doing something reconciliation stuff in UK He wanted us just to build relationship and become vulnerable with each other. So we told our stories. So much came out that things had not “turned out as they should have” and a lot of talk of “what should have been.” It was all done in a positive stance of it not being fair and not how it should be. It was like everyone was affirming each other that at times its ok to stamp one’s feet and say “its not fair” and you know what – God can cope with that. So much of what we are led to believe in church and in our culture is that one should just pick oneself up and keep going. Though we also pay more than ever for counsellors, therapists, therapeutic treatments, as well as recreational drugs. Maybe if we slowed things down and rested then we could save some money? Maybe if we were allowed to say “its not fair” “it shouldn’t have turned out that way” and then really grieve then maybe we could save some money. So these past few days myself and others were able to say that things didn’t work out as they should have and that we were grieving that and that was ok. From that place of honesty we could rest.

But it is also from that place of rest and honesty that one can re-evaluate one’s life. Things haven’t worked out as they should have so what was planned will not now happen and that’s ok. Interestingly whilst I was away my son, who’d just joined the army, found out that a couple of old rugby injuries meant that he is going to be medically discharged. This was not his plan. I haven’t spoken to him but I am sure he is saying “its not as it should have been.” He’s made some big life changes before he went in in preparation. He will be grieving. He will also have to be rethinking what he does. He needs to rest and re-evaluate where he is going and what he is going to do. And that’s ok. And it’s also ok for him to be angry that it didn’t work out. Same as its ok for me to be angry that people I loved committed suicide, died too soon, things I’d hoped for didn’t happen, for my friends to be angry at deaths that shouldn’t have happened, partners that shouldn’t have left, jobs that should have happened. I think rest is to acknowledge that, to be honest about life and relax into it.

There were some in our group who know how to find that rest even when their diaries are full. They have learned to dip into that rest and listen to what they should be doing, know where to put the “its not fair” stuff. But that didn’t mean they told others of us to just get over it. They affirmed in us that we needed to say and feel the way we did.

So what is rest? For me at the moment it is time walking my dog, hearing a friend’s life story and writing that and other things on the couch with dog and cat wrapped around me, studying for my Masters and catching up with friends. I am also starting 4 hours tutoring a week and we are renting our spare room out on Airbnb. This will bring in enough money to keep us going so we don’t have to worry about that. For my husband it is working 4 days a week, attending church meetings and going walking and climbing at times, but also finding time to drink wine or coffee, depending on time of day, with me and friends. We’re learning that it’s ok not to do. But I think one of the key things REST means is being open and honest about how one is feeling, being connected to one’s feelings and also connected to God.

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How do we “do life”?

I’m a practical person and I get fed up when I hear a sermon or talk and there is no practical application, but then I realised I’d sent out a piece that talked of “doing life” and having the right attitude but didn’t really say how to. And ok one can say that actually we all need to work out our own path to finding a right attitude, but all these self-help books wouldn’t sell so well if it was just about us working it out in our own heads. So here’s my attempt at “how to do life?”

As a Christian I do go back to the Bible and to what Jesus says about things. I believe as well as being the Son of God – wholly God and wholly human – Jesus was also a great teacher so I think it’s good to hear what he has to say on things. Jesus said “with me you can have life and life to its fullness.” This was doing life and life in all its completeness. I don’t think Jesus was saying there wouldn’t be any hassles, any deaths, cancers, loses to grieve over, hard times to walk thougth but I do think he that what he is saying is that we can have life in its fullness even in those hard time. But how do we tap into this?

Well Brian McLaren in “We make the path by walking” says we need to look at the story behind the miracles Jesus did. In the story of where Jesus turns water

Paolo Veronese’s interpretation of The Wedding at Cana – hung in the Louvre, Paris

into wine (John 2) we get so caught up in the details of this story that we can miss what could be the underlying message. Jesus uses the jars that were for ceremonial washing and messes things up. McLaren says that Jesus is showing that it doesn’t matter if this are clean or unclean but that it is all about super-abundance and super-celebration. Here was too much wine for one small Galilean village to drink in a week let alone in a day! And also they could no longer ceremonially wash their crockery or hands. The need to be religious had gone and it was time to enjoy life. This didn’t mean they stopped farming, doing business deals (and a wedding was a place where many business deals were carried out), caring for children, elderly parents, those who were sick. The things of life would go on but the religiosity was gone. Again McLaren talks of a healing Jesus did on the Sabbath. And the sermon is always based on the fact that Jesus did his healing on the Sabbath. My daughter has always struggled with this saying that Jesus was being deliberately obtuse and surely that’s wrong. But actually what Jesus again was doing was saying let go of your anxiety and fear of getting it right, stop being paranoid and look at me.

Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones with the real Jane and Stephen Hawking

We watched “The Theory of Everything” and in that saw a man who could have so easily been pitied and achieved nothing, and I am sure people with lesser disabilities do give up but not just Stephen Hawking, but his wife Jane and many of their friends “did life”. In fact there are so many quotes for Hawking that I don’t know where to being. The film finishes with him saying “where there is life there is hope” and there is:

Look up at the stars and down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder what makes the universe exist. Be curious.

However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.

Hawking doesn’t have much choice where he looks because of not being able to control his muscles but he does have a choice of how he views life. Often we can choose where we look but choose to look at our feet. As Oscar Wilde said:

We’re all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars

To “do life” means we choose where we look and how we view the world. We can choose to look at the stars and be curious or we can choose to look at our feet and our circumstances. We can choose whether we accept what we are told or be curious at what is going on. Hawking and especially his wife Jane, refused to accept what they were told and look at the difference he made to the world. My friend who started me on this quest regarding “doing life” refused to let cancer beat him. I have other friends who refuse to accept what the world says about how their story should be played out and are “doing life” in the craziest of ways.

I’m not sure how practical this has been but to be it is about having faith, being curious, getting rid of fear and paranoia and looking at the stars, at the what could be if only … And then, I believe, not just going for it but helping, supporting, encouraging and loving each other to get there too.

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Do Life

I have a lovely friend who, until recently, wound me up with his expression “I’m off to do life with … ” or “let’s do life together.” I use to think it was obvious that we all do life and that’s what goes on. But I’m now not so sure everyone “does life”, I think there are people who just get on with things and put their heads down and don’t enjoy life.

This weekend my husband’s Uncle Ron died. Here was a man who “did life” even if some of the family didn’t get it and thought he was being irresponsible. Nine and a half years ago he had a horrific car accident which cost him his legs. He was a big man and was wheelchair bound with no legs so never a possibility of walking again. I only really met him once not long after the accident and he was in hospital, but even there he was busy. He had decided to grow tomatoes on the roof of the hospital, where patients were allowed to go. Even though he didn’t know what life would bring he was planting something for the future. From what I heard from my mother-in-law Uncle Ron was always having barbecues, growing various flowers and vegetables and keeping his carers busy. He had to have full time carers because he couldn’t even get in or out of bed without help. Last summer him and his carers went on holiday to France. He wasn’t going to lie down and die. Because of his over-eating and lack of physical movement he had problems with diabetes and in the end that was what killed him. Uncle Ron could’ve decided to eat properly and give himself an extra five or ten years but he would still have been in a wheelchair, and in fact from the accident he did get another extra nine and a half. He could have died in that accident but didn’t and decided to “live life.”

My friend who has the expression “do life” is also someone who has see death and come through it. Life is a big thing for him. As we get older we do see more and more people die, some in old age, some too soon, but eventually we will all die. The big thing actually to always ask ourselves is “have we lived life.” What does that mean?

To Uncle Ron it appeared to mean enjoying life, inviting people round to eat, and planting flowers and veg. For the friend I’ve just mentioned it means going on mission and giving to others. To some it means going to war torn countries and nursing or reporting to let those people know they are not alone. For each of us to “do life” means something else. As I mentioned in an earlier post about being able to “act on what transpires” which actually is living life. I don’t know what will happen next at all. Take this morning – my neighbour and I set out with our dogs and were in the middle of a long deep conversation when we aspired a fellow dog walker and his Labrador puppy so we walked with him a bit, then he went off and we got back to our deep conversation, then bumped into some other walkers and walked and laughed with them for another hour. That wasn’t planned. In fact the plan for me was to have a quick walk then get to see a friend for coffee, who had cancelled that morning because her son wasn’t well. I was going to “do life” with her but in the end got on and “did life” with what transpired. Maybe this was the same for Uncle Ron. He never planned to be without his legs for the last nine years of his life but he made the most of the life he had without those legs.

We do all need to plan and to put things in place to look to the future but we need to be flexible so that things can change. And when we do put things in place we need to hold them lightly but hold them with joy and then hold the changes with joy and not with fear. Life is too changeable even in nice middle class England (a place I know and love).

So thank you John and now I get it completely. I have been lucky and not personally come close to dying but I’ve enough to know life isn’t static, isn’t predictable. There is a choice to live in fear and just get on with it, or to “Do life”. What do you choose? What do I choose?