Author Archives: avocadoandlemon

Family holiday, part four

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‘You know we have to run up the stairs too,’ I say.

‘Aww.’

The younger of my two brothers and I have been running barefoot across the grass and the car park near the beach. It has started raining, and the weather patterns from the last few days suggest this light rain, after a stinging hot morning, will soon get much heavier. The rule about also running up the stairs is not related to the likely weather outcome though; I’ve just made it up arbitrarily, the way children often make up rules for games they’re playing.

We’ve just come from the playground at the other of the beach. We had to wade through ankle-deep water to access much of the equipment (hence the bare feet). We stood together on the platform atop four large springs, our weight on either side of the bar spinning it around. We squealed. We were disappointed to discover on the monkey bars that our adult-sized bodies were harder to lift than either of us ever remembered our child-sized bodies being, our upper body strength, perhaps, not having kept up with the increase in size and weight. We climbed over the top of them instead. The slippery slide seemed shorter than when we were children, and the woodchips covering the ground sharper.

Ostensibly, we left the playground to beat the weather home, but it’s probably no coincidence that we made our decision shortly after a small child and his parents arrived.

At the bottom of the stairs we pause briefly. Look at each other. I can hardly believe this man is my little brother; that when he looks at his sister he sees a woman. We run up the stairs together, and across the road, the cement and asphalt roughing up the soles of our feet.

Family holiday, part three

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Dad and I take the short drive from where we’re staying to Wauchope to pick my youngest brother up from the train station. The train has been delayed from the outset of its journey in Sydney, and won’t pull into the platform for at least an hour after its scheduled time.

When we arrive at the station there are a number of people sitting inside. We ask them if there’s been an update on when the train will arrive. ‘Twenty minutes or forty minutes from now, depending on which announcement you believe,’ comes the answer. I wonder how long these people have been sitting here with their bags.

We decide to sit outside on the platform. Dad loves trains. I love train platforms. I think of them as little islands of in-between, almost the same everywhere. The white edge and the yellow line painted on the asphalt, the hard benches — usually blue in New South Wales — and the people waiting. Today, a couple and their toddler and a woman leaving behind a man sit with us on the platform.

The announcement over the loudspeaker tells us we’ve got at least half an hour’s wait. We talk about train travel, about finding a journey as interesting as its destination.

‘Who lives in Wauchope,’ I wonder aloud. Dad types the question into his smart phone. Real estate agents, tourist information sites. But then profiles of people. A man in his eighties, several people in their fifties and sixties, just a handful of people in their thirties. It dawns on us that we’re looking at an online dating site. At first it’s amusing, but the more profiles we view, the more uncomfortable we become with our voyeurism. Soon, Dad puts his phone away, and not long after the train comes and deposits my brother on the platform. He has been travelling for thirteen hours, and all day has eaten just a piece of toast, a muffin and a coke.

It is not the names, nor the faces, nor the likes and dislikes of the people of Wauchope looking for love online that stays with me; it is their ages. Numbers. I wonder who is maintaining their profiles, whether they’re looking for a new start or whether they just haven’t found the right person yet. And I wonder at our discomfort, re-evaluate our sadness. Numbers. Still so full of hope.

~

Read parts one and two here.

Writing and Life and Doris Lessing

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There’s a beautiful piece by Melanie Joosten up on the Meanjin blog today about writing and how it fits (or doesn’t) into life. Joosten leans on the writing of Doris Lessing, looking for answers. Lessing, she says, “tackles that familiar feeling of inadequacy — that the artist writes out of an ‘incapacity to live’. She reminds me that writing is a way to make sense of the world and to order my thoughts.”

To my discredit, I’ve not yet read any of Lessing’s novels, but I do re-read her 1965 collection of short stories, A Man and Two Women from time to time. I’ve always been struck by the clarity of Lessing’s observations. I agree with Joosten when she writes: “I cannot think of a more electric writer, one whose words speak of things always precisely of the moment.”

But, before now, Lessing is not an author I’d have thought to look to for advice about how to fit writing into my life. Perhaps I should look to her now. Joosten’s thoughts are very familiar: “When I ask myself what kind of person I am going to be, I realise that ‘a writer’ is only part of it. If one of the ways we live our lives is to seek happiness, we have to understand what happiness means. To me, the happy life is an amalgamation of the creative life and the moral life.”

Retraining as a social worker, Joosten seems to be asking herself many of the same questions I am at the moment. Questions about how I want my life to fit together, how I want to fill my days. I realised some time ago that none of the things I currently do, I’d want to do full time. Both writing and teaching are fulfilling, but somehow more so when I’m trying to do them both, turning my life into a fairly complex puzzle. I feel like I’m just starting to get somewhere with it though, like I’ve perhaps got together all of the edge bits and a small section in the bottom right hand corner. And I’m beginning to understand now why my mum, and her mum too, love to do puzzles. Working so slowly to fill this puzzle out requires patience, and rewards that patience with a steady stream of small satisfactions.

~

If you’re interested in reading the full post by Melanie Joosten, you can find it here.

Joan Didion and weddings

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I’ve recently found my way to Joan Didion. For all the usual reasons (too many words to read, too little time) her name has been sitting on that list in my mind, and her books on that pile beside my bed for longer than I would’ve liked. I’m so glad I finally did get to her though.

Completely by coincidence, her book The Year of Magical Thinking has been set as one of the texts in the course I’m doing at uni this semester. I haven’t yet started it, but am looking forward to it because of the essays of hers I’ve read. Below are some bits that stood out when I was reading her essays back in February, lying on the beach while I was away on holidays.

It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value of having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. (Joan Didion, ‘On Keeping a Notebook’, Live and Learn, page 113)

However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves. (Joan Didion, ‘On Self Respect’, Live and Learn, page 116)

I’ve always found the concept of self an interesting one. The idea that we carry around the echoes of the people we used to be (and possibly also of the people we might become) is one that appeals to me — and I’ve written about it here before. And I love this description of self-respect: the ability to rest with the uncomfortable aspects of ourselves.

This weekend just gone, I went to Queensland for the wedding of a very dear friend of mine. She and I lived together for a couple of years while we were at uni, and being at her wedding got me thinking about the people we used to be. We each are quite different now to those people, and yet still the same. We danced like we used to. I cried at her, because I was so happy for her; she laughed affectionately at me. Everything was the same, but different, and it was absolutely lovely in ways that I am not eloquent enough to express.

Expansion

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Happily, I’m having one of those weeks where my reading keeps building and my thoughts keep expanding out, turning into this incredibly complex web of interests. I’m not quite sure where to look at any given moment. I’ve made some decisions to change things — in big ways and in small ways — over the last few months, and it’s like I’m looking at a map, looking at all the different routes I might take to get to where I’m going. Except that where I’m going is a very vague concept — like I’m headed to a suburb, rather than a particular address. It’s exciting*.

Yesterday I had a conversation with a friend about how I’m a bit of an airhead, a bit of a dreamer. I need things and people to pull me back down to earth from time to time, and I need to do my best to be really organised so I don’t forget to do things I’ve said I will, or be places I’ve said I’ll be. I’ve also been teaching an awful lot of yoga classes these last few weeks. Having my head in so many different places in such a short space of time makes me even more prone to forgetting things. So it probably shouldn’t surprise me that I’ve found my way back to sitting curled up with a book for hours on end. It seems to satisfy both the dreaminess and the need for some kind of grounding.

Among other things (I seem to have ploughed through books much faster than usual lately), I’ve been reading Anne Enright’s Booker Prize winning novel The Gathering, partly for sheer enjoyment, and partly for research. Today I came across this passage, where the character is thinking about St Veronica, who gave Jesus her veil so he could wipe his face as he carried his cross:

“I became quite fond of her; a figure leaning out of the crowd, both supplicatory and tender. I still think of her wherever wet towels are offered in Chinese restaurants and on old-fashioned airlines. We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing; we have forgotten how abjectly the body welcomes a formal touch.”

It made me think about how we touch. How a small gesture of touch from another human being can bring so much comfort, can calm you down. Of how the gentlest touch when I’m teaching yoga can change a pose entirely for the student. And of how that calming, that grounding, on a yoga mat or in life, helps set the base from which expansion can occur.

~

* And, if I’m honest, at times also confusing and daunting. But then aren’t all the best things in life a mixture of exciting and daunting?

Family holiday, part two

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We stand side by side in front of the mirror. Our arms and legs are slick with sunscreen. Mum recalls a day earlier, when Dad stood just here and half-heartedly applied sunscreen to his face so that almost none of it was rubbed in, then asked her if his face was done.

‘We should both do the same to him,’ she says, and we apply the sunscreen, leaving large white streaks and blobs all over our faces.

‘How’s this?’ she says. She begins to giggle. So do I. We can’t stop.

We are doubled-over, still laughing, when Dad comes in to use the sunscreen. Mum attempts to straighten up and ask about her face. Two words, a glance at me, and she dissolves into laughter again.

Dad shakes his head at us, not sure why this recycled joke is so hilarious. Tears rolling down our cheeks now, neither are we.

Yoga: Changing The Brain’s Stressful Habits | Psychology Today

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This is perhaps the most accurate description of why, once I started, I continued to practice yoga. Physical exercise, sure, but mainly because it’s helped me manage better my stress reaction. Think calm blue ocean, calm blue ocean, calm blue ocean.

As a neuroscientist, despite my initial incredulity, I came to realize that yoga works not because the poses are relaxing, but because they are stressful. It is your attempts to remain calm during this stress that create yoga’s greatest neurobiological benefit.

via Yoga: Changing The Brain's Stressful Habits | Psychology Today.

Family holiday, part one

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This is the most extended period of time I’ve spent with just my parents since I was three-years-old, since the first of my two younger brothers was born. Just over a week. We are staying in a sixth-floor apartment that overlooks the main beach in the town my Dad’s brother’s wife grew up in. It is larger and fancier than most of the places we stayed in when I was a child — there are two double rooms, two bathrooms and a walk-in pantry that I’d love to have in my own kitchen. There is a roof-top patio.

For the first few days, they apologise for their oddness, perhaps not realising that my silence is a quiet appreciation, rather than embarrassment. I love that they are mad. Perhaps because it explains my own quirks.

We go to the supermarket to buy things to put in the walk-in-pantry. Somewhere in the middle aisles, it becomes a rule that we are only allowed to look at one side of the aisle as we wander down it, necessitating a doubling-back so we can view the other. ‘Like Job,’ one of us says. ‘If you look at the other side, you’ll turn into a pillar of salt.’ To move from one side of the aisle to the other, we have to touch the end, like touching the end of the pool before swimming another lap. We traverse the rest of the supermarket in this fashion.

In the last aisle, Dad walks ahead, doubles-back before Mum and I.

‘You should see all the amazing things on this side,’ he says.

‘I can’t look,’ Mum returns. ‘I can’t! It’s against the rules!’

I run, exaggeratedly, to the end of the aisle, touch the wall, and double-back so I too can see the varieties of toilet paper and tissues. There is a woman, a stranger, walking towards me. I don’t look at her face, but I imagine she is either baffled or smirking at the adult woman running like a child through the supermarket, her parents laughing at her, and I couldn’t care less.

A city’s intricacy

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It’s the city’s crush and heave that move you; its intricacy; its endless life.

    ~ The Hours, Michael Cunningham
    I’ve been trying for months now to articulate exactly this sentiment. I miss the open space of my country upbringing, I miss the clean air, I miss seeing the stars in the sky at night. But this, this layer upon later of human intricacy, is what I’d miss about the city were I to move to the country.

    An example: in a house around the corner from mine lives a man who practises his operatic singing in the middle of the day. Sometimes I happen to be walking past, and it never fails to make me smile—there he is, just the thickness of a wall away from me, singing beautifully.