My husband’s cousin is here from Mauritius. We have had long chats about where all our lives and childhoods have overlapped, taking us back to family quirks and idiosyncrasies. We were musing about how we all end up becoming our mothers. I was teasing my daughter and telling her that she would become me, when I realised my argument was backfiring on me, because if she was to become me, I was going to become my mum! I quickly backtracked on my argument, but she had caught on and was already throwing it back at me in gales of laughter.
It did get us focused on quirks. One I know I have already picked up from my grandmother, which is having my keys ready well in advance of seeing my front door or my car. We used to hoot with laughter if we went on holiday with my gran, she would start digging in her handbag about 300kms from home to check if her keys were there. At about 150kms from home, the keys would be on her lap and about 50kms away, they would be in her hand with her fingers poised around the first key to be used. It was the source of silent rib poking, eyebrow raising and grins between the family members as we watched the keys’ journey to lock opening. I seemed to have picked up this “be prepared key attitude.” These days on the train, I adjust my bag on my lap at the Hartwell station on my journey home. I get my keys out at Burwood and by Ashburton my fingers are firmly gripping ny car key!
I smile and bless my gran on every train ride when I catch myself doing this, which is now daily…yes, so I have her quirk…I could have done far worse 🙂
Last night my good buddy and I went to watch a performance called “First and Last” by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. We are blessed in Melbourne with entertainment that is filled with sound, from the roaring of Grand Prix to the beauty of the Symphony. My preference the Symphony, but I love this city that gives so much. But I digress…
The Symphony last night was beautiful. The concert pianist, was Ronald Farren-Price, he is 88. It was his last performance. He played amazingly, with dexterity, fluidity and passion. After a standing ovation, he came back and said, “I have been told to play something else.” With no sheet music, he decided to play a beautiful piece by Mendelssohn. I sat in awe, watching the music flow through his hands and come out of the grand piano. What struck me, is he must have in his lifetime, practiced and played over and over and over again. The music was in his cells, his neurons unthinkingly just going down a path familiar to him, because it had become part of who he is. I do believe we are the sum total of our repeated thoughts, attitudes, deeds, which over time get so entrenched in our bodies and thinking that we become them. This 88 year old was music. He had soaked it up, absorbed it, lived it for so long that you could see the notes that defined him.
What I was left with besides the music, was a reminder, to be vigilant with what I think, do, say and repeat over and over again, because when I am 88, and I am in auto-pilot, I want my cells to remember love, compassion, wisdom, freedom, ingenuity and loads of other things, not TV programs, gossip, pettiness or fears. Thanks Ronald, for the reminder that we are our inputs and we need to stay disciplined and focussed on a daily basis, to make beautiful music, no matter what that music is.
PS…In all of that I also have discovered a new composer…enter Sibelius 🙂
One of the biggest challenges for all of us modern human beings is getting to the optimal levels with everything we love and want to do. I had over the last few years looked at my life and felt that disproportionate amounts of time and energy were being put into areas that no longer sparked my passions or interests. They used to, but I had grown and changed and doing the same stuff just no longer fitted. Just like a favourite piece of clothing that was worn and that no longer fitted – I needed to discard, recycle and reinvent.
Some of it was forced on me, the universe saying “Enough, we have nudged and pushed you, but you have ignored us.” So it pulled the rug out from underneath me and I landed squarely on my bottom. Falling as an adult either physically or metaphorically, is unpleasant and unnerving. We are used to being in control. While I was sitting squarely on my derriere I had to formulate a plan. So I dusted myself off and put my life back together in a similar vein. The universe scratched its head and said “How much more, before this girl gets the message?” So it rubbed its hands together and turned up the heat. It got really hot. Forcing me to really make my own climate changes. I spent many days and nights going to bed blessing my life and visualising what my life would look and feel like it. I accepted that it would come to me. I started lifting my rocks and looking underneath them, uncovering my long lost dreams, hopes and aspirations. Then when I felt I had the solution, I took a risk and tossed my safe, secure career to the wind and stepped off the cliff.
I planned what my life would look like outside of work from a health, fitness, friends and family perspective. I also decided I would find a “cause” that resonates with me and sparks my passions and matches my skills and that as I became successful in my own enterprise I would give back my time, intellect and passion to “something.”
To date I have found the job, the health, the peace, the friends, the family. Yesterday I found the cause. It is called Simunye. A South African school principal founded an initiative four years ago that takes Australian teenagers to South Africa and exposes them to Orphanages, very poor parts of the country and they have to help build facilities for a school or a community. They leave as typical teenagers, it would seem they come back as human beings. As a South African / Australian, this really resonates. I have found my company, I have found my health, I have found my zest and now I have found my cause.
Watch this space peeps, the caterpillar is emerging out of her cocoon 🙂
I find people fascinating, on public transport you get your fair share of diversity and it is never boring. Sometimes it is not for the faint-hearted, but boring? Never. Like a few weeks ago when I shared on Facebook, my story of the woman who got on the train with her pram and the rain cover over it and when I looked down, no baby, just a cat…the cat looked quite pleased to be on the Alamein Line at 5:30pm on a Friday night.
It is often on these journeys that thoughts and insights hit me between the eyes and make me ponder. Like today, I came home earlier to do some conference calls and then head out to a charity I am thinking of getting involved in. It was that time of day when there is a mish mash of people on the train, most people probably not working, retired, students whose lectures have finished for the day and mums with young kiddies who aren’t at school yet. I was sitting opposite an old guy who looked like my dad, but had obviously eaten less pasta as he was less “jolly.” It struck me that as my father ages, the essence of him becomes more and more obvious and pronounced. He has always been family oriented and fanatical about learning and eating. It seems the older he gets and the more he strips off other layers of himself like work, friends, social activity, the more concentrated who he is becomes. It got me wondering if that is what aging is? Is it, the stripping away of the layers of responsibility, losing the roles we have had to play that were necessary for our and our families’ survival, the loss of identity in a working sense, the loss of friends who leave the planet before us and just ditching the social airs and graces that older people eventually poo-poo. When all of that is stripped away, we are really just the person who was covered in the veneer of all of that.
If that is what it is, my goal will be to laugh hard and long everyday, do “stand up” in the old age home (even if it is holding onto my Zimmer Frame), see the funny side of everything, especially my own foibles, have long, deep conversations with the people I love in my scratchy granny voice and refuse to do anything that is remotely against what I feel like doing on the day. It will be to see beauty in whatever is around me, hold others without judgement and still learn, learn, learn and learn some more. I am grateful for who I am and if it does mean that getting wrinkles means confidence and juiciness and wisdom. Bring it on! But first I am off to enjoy today, so that when I distill the essence of me, I like what I get 🙂
The days follow each other but are never the same. They are called by the same names and follow each other in regimented naming order, never getting out of sync. Sunday nevers decides to take a few days off and follow Wednesday. They may follow the same order, but their content differs enormously. Sometimes they have a similar feel or overall texture, but the days follow each other and are never the same.
This Tuesday is the last Tuesday my daughter will have before finishing exams and school. To other people it is a normal Tuesday, but to her it is a bookend that holds the end of all the chapters of her school life. The other bookend, a Tuesday where it all began 13 years ago. The door to her new life starting on Wednesday, has already started to open, the cracks of light coming through the opening are highly attractive to her, with the heady scent of freedom mixed with the intoxicating light. There will be days when she has crossed the threshold, when she will look back through the door wistfully at herself, her friends and the experiences that made her childhood. It may take some time before she wants to do this, but maybe on some random Wednesday, she will be drawn back to opening the door and remember the joys and sorrows of this time, but from here it is onwards and upwards.
Today one of my best Facebook buds, who is funny and positive and has the most “can-do” attitudes I have come across, posted her status update as two tiny words “I apologise…” She is normally so funny and juicy that even the “I apologise…” has a lilt and a spring in its step. A conversation underneath it ensued, which started as “and so you should. who gave you permission to walk around being happy and bouncy and saying lovely things to awesome people?? and supportive, and encouraging, and just plain darned nice?? LOL…..♥” Then came her response “I hurt somebody today… And I’m truly sorry. It’s not in me to do things like this :-(”
It got all of us chatting and ended up reflecting what I really believe. We are souls who perhaps have been together many times, we adore each other, yet we come to this crazy planet, that is filled with ambiguity, to learn and grow and hopefully leave it as better souls who worked through issues. I have come to think that perhaps the people that hurt us the most are the ones who love us the most, because against their wishes we have asked them to help us learn a lesson on this planet. It is not a role they may want to play a part in, but one where they have “agreed to play bad cop” when they really would have liked a better starring role in the movie of our life. But they got the bit part, the part they did not want to play, because that was the part we needed the most.
So when I have been hurt, I try to look at it through the lens of what I needed to learn. In the last few years on a number of fronts, I and others “broke my heart.” I had a heart that was very together. In this time I have learnt that a broken heart is an open heart and amazing things happen when your heart is open. I have learnt that I am not perfect and therefore not to rail against the hurts inflicted on me, but rather see them as the most amazing gifts, because in them I have learnt more of who I truly am, than in many of my most joyous experiences.
The piece I still have not quite reconciled is where I am the one who did the hurting. As much as I can rationalise and accept when I am on the “receiving” end, I still struggle if I am the “inflictor.” I think it is because when you are the one doing the hurting, you know it is “not like yourself” and you wrestle with why it happened in the first place. I think the uncomfortableness that you are left with when you have done the hurting, is a reflection of how much you loved the person and how much you never wanted to hurt them or how much it grates against your own values when it occurs. To my earlier post “Does love mean never having to say you are sorry?” I am now firmly of the view that the absence of an apology means that hurter has not contemplated the lesson from their perspective either.
So, to my Facebook Bud, you have the best intentions, we know it, we love your spirit, you might have done the best thing for that person, it might not feel good, but it may be just the thing they needed to learn. My worst experiences have been my best experiences because they taught me who I am. Perhaps you helped someone find themselves…or you just learnt who you really are in your own moment of naked vulnerability.
She is long gone, but there are bits of her in the weaving of my DNA, particular bits that I love as part of me, that she passed onto me seemingly deliberately through my mother. But more importantly she is part of my value system and some of my favourite memories have her in them. How do you piece someone you love together into a paragraph, so that someone who has never met her, feels the warmth of her handshake, the zest of her spirit, the backbone of her resolve and the compassion that surrounded her steeliness?
She was born in Holland in 1908, number nine in a long line of siblings that arrived before her. I never met her family, as she had left them far behind, when she emigrated from Holland to South Africa, and many were dead by that time, but I felt like I knew them. My great-grandfather owned a department store, in Rotterdam, my grandmother would tell wistful stories of her nine siblings working in the store, doing mental arithmetic in their heads to add up what customers had bought, then late at night in the warmth of their home, singing songs around the grand piano. The rational and the emotional, integrated side-by-side in their lives. My grandmother taught me a love of language, she spoke to me in Dutch, taught me how humour differs in different languages and we would roar with laughter when we translated Dutch idioms into English and realise they were totally meaningless and nonsensical. She also gave me a deep love of French. The sound and music of the language. She had been sent to a French Boarding school, much to her despair, being away from everyone she loved. Her mischief causing her desk to be placed outside the school gate, to wait for the wrath of her father, who was coming to pick her up at the end of term. I loved the image of my grandmother, being a young girl and being naughty, sitting outside the imposing French boarding school waiting with trepidation for her father to arrive. I asked her to retell that story and the one where she fed a goat a toffee, over and over again. They appealed to me that this woman, so principled and correct and loving, had once been a girl just like me. We would sit and play cards, domino’s or “Halma” for hours and she would speak her secrets to me in Dutch and French and my world would feel safe and complete. We would make dinner together and wait for my grandfather, the love of her life, to come home. At dinner we would say grace in French, I always felt that God appreciated that grace far more than the boring English one we said at home.
My grandmother was from a generation of composure. She never had a hair out of place and if she did, no problem, she put on her wig to disguise a “bad hair day.” She taught me to share my joy, but hold my grief privately. I remember being so upset when my grandfather died, knowing that she would be alone in the house, that I left home, to go and live with her. I was 17 in my final year of school. I packed my bag, got on my scooter and moved in with her. I knew half of herself had been ripped away. She remained composed and together. I asked her how she did it. She said “Tears are for your pillow.” Many years later, after she had gone to join her beloved. I found a telegram she had got from the Red Cross to tell her that her parents had been killed in the bombing of Rotterdam. I held the telegram in my hands, knowing she had held it too. Knowing that that single sheet of paper had brought her world collapsing around her and I felt the strength that she had held that paper with transfer into my own fingers.
I have a friend, who is much older than me and who every time I bemoan the fact that I am getting older, says “You are scared.” I am not scared of getting older if it means that I will carry the wisdom of my life in my heart like my grandmother did. I am not scared of getting older if means that in the powdery softness of my wrinkles, I will hold my grandchildren and whisper the secrets of the women who have come before them. I am not scared of getting older, if it means that I will gather my clan, share music and food and the memories of generations. I am not scared of getting older, if it means I can shape the hearts of those younger than me with the values and stories my grandmother passed on to me. I will be proud to have the unbotoxed wrinkles my grandmother had, as long as my heart is full as hers was, with passion, principles, light and love.
For my grandmother, long gone, you are still here and the song below, slips me back to lying next to your record player, making you repeat this “7 single” over and over again, while we played “Old Maid.” I loved you then, I love you still.
In reading “Saved by a Poem” by Kim Rosen, I am rediscovering poetry and the beauty of the cadence of language. I spent some time googling some poets. Billy Collins was America’s Poet Laureate for a long time. I love his wry, dry sense of humour. Here is “The Lanyard” – if you have been a child, or a mother, this is delightful and beautiful. Enjoy.
I have often spoken about how I love that technology brings us together. But I also love how it educates. Yesterday, my South African friends on Facebook started posting pictures of the sun with a “halo” around it. I had never seen this before. When we were in Fiji in July, we had seen a full moon with a rainbow around it and that was awesome, with the sea and the palm trees in the background. But I have never seen the sun like that.
The phenomenon is when cold crystals from cirrus clouds form in the air and the light refracts through them basically creating a rainbow, in the same way that light goes through raindrops to form a rainbow. It is commonly known as a “sundog.” If we were ancient people we might wonder what something like that means. It would surely be a sign from the gods? Yet these days we notch everything up to a scientific explanation and move on. Being rational is wonderful, but do we miss out on the magic of the universe around us, by glibly writing it off to it’s scientific explanation? So I began to ponder on what the halo around the sun is metaphorically. I pondered through my spinning class this morning (a girl needs to do something while pedalling) and I pondered while I was making my lasagne this afternoon. My interpretation is this…
The sun is warmth and happiness, it definitely impacts how we feel and think and grow. Ice crystals are like our fears or resistance, the cold parts of ourselves or the parts where we are “frosty” with each other. When you turn your positivity to your iciness, you get beauty. When we shine our light on fears, the refraction causes rainbows. Holding our fears, resistance or coldness in warmth, can result in beauty. I dare you, look through a different lens, the sun did yesterday 🙂
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