The bananas have been sitting on the kitchen bench for over a week. She sees them when she rinses her coffee cup, and when she’s making the kids’ lunches on the days she’s working, and she sees them on the days she’s not working. They shrink just a little each day and she wonders if she should do something with them, but she’s not much into banana bread and her mind won’t stretch to more than that.
She gets furious with the toaster. It burnt her toast twice last week, partly because she was distracted and partly because it has a mind of its own that switches back to level 6 when she’s not looking.
And socks. How many feet are in this house? And the way they just expect to be paired up like nothing happened. Seriously!
Because, she’s discovered that after the big thing – the really big thing – come the little things, the mundane things. The MyGov password reset loop. Dealing with the bank. Not knowing how to deal with the bank. The text from a well-meaning friend saying “let me know if you need anything” when she’s already forgotten how to need things. The email reminder that the phone bill is overdue.
The mountain of tiny normal things that didn’t get the memo that her world had changed.
Maybe the little things are a kind of mercy. Something for her brain to busy itself with while the rest of her recalibrates. You can’t solve death, but you can wonder why the kids have suddenly stopped eating bananas. You can’t rewrite the awful bits, but you can yell at the toaster for making anything more than warm bread.
There’s no real point to this. I’m not even sure why I started writing, except that a few weeks ago she said ‘you haven’t written a blog post in ages’. It’s taken me a while to get my thinking straight and my head in the right place.
My thinking is this: if I ever was, I’m no longer convinced by people who respond to loss with wisdom or insight. I’m not convinced that grief makes you wise. It certainly makes you sad and angry and empty and …. The world, in its relentless striving for normalcy, doesn’t stop to accommodate the strange new reality, or the sadness or anger or emptiness or ….
It just keeps serving up the little things: the unmatched socks and toast that’s too brown and overdue phone bills and washing that won’t do itself. As if that’s all there is to be done.
Adding the date to the title might suggest that there’s significance to this date.
There isn’t. Not to me, anyway. There is to all the people who are having a birthday today – for them I imagine it’s quite a significant day. But there’s no significance for me.
And now I’m beginning to sound like I’m protesting too much, but I’m really just trying to work out why I added the date to the title. When I did it, mere moments ago, I had a reason, then I got distracted because I realised, when I typed the word ‘birthday’, that I’d missed my friend Airdre’s birthday two weeks ago and so had to write to her a very belated birthday wish, and now I’ve come back here and the reason for adding the date has slipped through the (increasingly) porous parts of my mind that holds reasons for doing things.
Very convoluted way of saying “I wrote the date and now can’t remember why”.
I could, of course, just delete the date and all of this nonsense and start again, but I’m not inclined to.
In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s Friday and that means it’s time for a Friday Feels post.
You know the drill. Three questions and an F-word.
What made me happy this week? Not only normal happy, but the kind of happy that makes you do the weird little happy gesture with your hands that you try to keep to yourself because when other people see it they stick a label on you. That kind of happy. Let me tell you the story.
We were one minute and 17 seconds into our journey to Tumut last Thursday when I asked Tim to turn around. I’d seen a man building something out the front of someone’s place, and I needed to speak to him. Tim duly turned around and I went and spoke to the man. I didn’t know the man, but soon discovered his name and number, and arranged for him to visit me on Wednesday, my working from home day.
Kyle, for that is the man’s name, arrived on Wednesday and is the cause of my happy gesture. He came to give me a quote on some work I want done on the house, and he brought his six-month old daughter with him. He handed the baby to me while he was measuring up and talking tradie talk, so I got to hold said baby and talk to her and bring up some wind I saw she had trapped, and let her play with my hair (well, she was going to play with it whether I said she could or not – it’s just one of those baby things).
It was lovely. It’s been way too long since I’ve held a baby and she was an absolute delight. I hope I get to do it again.
What else made me happy? I’m glad you asked. Yesterday was a hot day. Clear blue sky, broken air con at work, very noisy fan pushing hot air around. Hot. I got home, put our working air con on, found my bathers and headed to the pool. We’d had the cover on the pool for a few days (maybe a week) and of course, the heater’s been on (apparently, in this part of the world you only put your pool heater on in the summer – never in the winter), so I was expecting it to be warm. Or warm-ish at the very least.
It was only 35C warm-ish!
It was blissful. Maybe a tad too warm, if I’m being really honest, but I did not mind at all. I swam laps (five strokes up and five and a half strokes back), floated, swam lengths under water, and floated some more. It was a fabulous day for my first swim of the season. The sun was very low in the sky when I dragged myself out, and there was a distinct chill in the air (I think the outside temperature had gone down to 25C by that stage), but I didn’t mind at all. I was, in fact, very happy.
Anything else? Now that you mention it is, there is. Funerals are not generally things that make people happy – unless you see them as a celebration of someone’s life and can distance yourself from the fact that that person will no longer be in your life (except as memories). And even then, they don’t really bring a sense of happiness. But they do provide opportunities for families to come together. I have four cousins on my mother’s side, and while I see each of them individually from time to time, it isn’t often that we get together. Usually only at funerals as it turns out. Friday last week I got to spend some time with three of my cousins on my Mum’s side and it was lovely to share memories of our shared grandparents and trips we’d done and look back on photos when we were all a lot younger and decide not to re-create the ones where I, as a 12 year old, was holding my cousin Michael, who was then a baby and is now, quite obviously not.
So, not “happy” happy, but it’s always great to connect.
My F-word for the week is the same as my sister’s as it turns out: festive. I, however, did not dress as an elf and embody the notion of festive as she did. But we did put up the Christmas tree and that gives the house quite a festive feel.
Note the West Country-inspired bauble from Dottie Wombat
Only two more Fridays between now and Christmas, meaning only three between now and 2025.
For me, Fridays arrive like a reward at the end of a busy week. I work for a company that values its employees in more than just words. It instituted a 4-day work week some time ago and I’m here for it. My Fridays bring a sense of relief at the end of a week full of writing and editing and doing all the other things one does in a busy consulting firm. They act as a little pause between work and the official start of the weekend. I appreciate the slower pace of my Fridays, the opportunity to write a Friday Feels post, and the chance to then switch my brain off for a while.
Yet, each one brings with it a subtle reminder: time is moving quickly. Since I’ve been writing Friday Feels posts Fridays seem to arrive faster and faster, not because they actually do of course, but because I’m marking the time, taking notice of it.
This Friday, November 29, 2024, is a particularly poignant day to be marking time.
My parents were married on this day in 1958 – 66 years ago. Debbie and I were eating breakfast at Mum’s dining table this morning when Mum pointed to the crystal bowl in the centre of the table, “that’s been in the family 66 years today”. It was a wedding gift that she’s carried with her all these years, through all the different houses and states she’s lived in.
The crystal bowl hasn’t aged in the way the rest of us have, but it serves as a reminder of the passing of time. Dad’s passing in 2018 meant that they didn’t quite make their 60th wedding anniversary, but the date is firmly fixed in our minds anyway.
The date will also have other significance for us now. Today, November 29, 2024 we celebrate the life of my uncle, Mum’s younger (only) brother who passed away last week. We’ll gather today, family and friends, to share stories and memories of Uncle Roy. We’ll laugh and cry and comfort each other as we say farewell.
So that’s my Friday Feels for another week. Not the usual format, but it’s not a usual Friday.
Mum and Dad’s wedding day – November 29, 1958My baptism in June 1962. Uncle Roy, my godfather, is at the back Roy Frederick Humphries, 1941-2024
Oh hang on. I need to do my three questions and my F-word. We’ll get to my excitement in a sec.
The three regular questions I respond to each Friday are:
What am I proud of this week?
What am I excited about?
Where are the flowers?
My F-word is favourite.
What am I proud of this week? I went shopping. In a shop. Not only that, the shop was in a shopping centre. There were lots of shops and heaps more people. And I spent well over an hour there and bought things, of the clothes variety. Now, that might not seem like a big deal for many people and not a source of pride, but for me, it was. Some time ago, can’t say exactly when, but in the last few years, I’d developed a level of anxiety that meant being in shops caused unpleasant physical and emotional distress. I can’t say why it caused this distress – something about feeling trapped is as close as I can get to it – but it was real, if invisible to others. I can go to cafes, and I can work in an office, but there is something about a supermarket, a department store, IKEA, a clothes shop, that causes me to feel severely uncomfortable. That caused me to feel severely uncomfortable (although just writing about it now is doing terrible things to my insides).
Telling myself to put my big girl pants on hadn’t helped – there is no shaming yourself out of anxiety – instead, I had psyched myself up in the days preceding the shopping trip (I didn’t tell Tim in case I couldn’t go through with it), and told myself there was nothing to fear, that I wasn’t going to be trapped, and that no one was going to hurt me. I practised a week before by going to the supermarket and despite having some wobbles I managed to do my first proper grocery shop in a very long time.
So with my mantra ringing in my ears – no one is going to hurt you, there is nothing to fear, you won’t get trapped – I went shopping. Apparently, I still balled my hands into fists when I entered a shop, but enter it I did. I didn’t raise my balled fists in a defensive gesture when people came towards me as had become my unconscious habit, and so looked less like someone about to hurt others, and no one hurt me.
If you’ve ever had anxiety, you’ll know it really is something to be proud of.
What am I excited about? Chase is coming to visit this afternoon!! For those who aren’t in the know, Chase is my youngest son (second youngest child). He lives in Queensland and we don’t get to see him very often. Well, to be more correct, he lived in Queensland, until this week. He’s now moved to Victoria, and he’s coming to visit. What his move means is that once he’s found a house, the rest of his family will be moving down too, and that means, for the first time in 10 years I’ll have one of my children and two of my grandchildren living in the same state as me. It’s very exciting. I’d made up the guest room bed before breakfast, done a shopping list, and am psyching myself up so that later this morning I’ll be able to go to the supermarket to buy things to cook a meal for my boy. Awww!!
Where are the flowers? Last week I suggested that I might take some photos of flowers on the weekend and share them with you in this week’s post. I didn’t take any photos of flowers, but I did take another photo for my black glove series. Of a dragon fruit. It was gross. But photographically interesting.
Thanks as always to Tim for donning the black gloves
And my F-word? Favourite. Guess who’s my current favourite?
Hahahaha.
Trick question! Mothers don’t have favourites.
That’s it from me for another week. I’m off to the shops!
Fridays seem to come around much more quickly since I’ve started blogging regularly.
It’s time for another three questions and an F-word.
This week’s F-word is fragility, but before I get to that, I’ll respond to the three regular questions.
What made me happy this week?
What was I most proud of this week?
How did it feel to see a particular something in real life for the first time?
I’m going to answer all three questions at the same time, because they all have the same answer.
This. This is what made me happy this week. The publication of this book.
It won’t come as any surprise to those who read this blog on a regular or semi-regular basis to know that I’ve been excited for some time to see this book in real life.
Well, last night I got the opportunity to do just that. Last night, October 3, 2024, the book was launched by the Royal Historical Society of Victoria. It was a packed house – standing room only – with loads of people eager to view and buy the book.
In case you don’t know, the story of my (very minor) involvement goes like this:
I was retired briefly in 2022 and part of 2023 and decided to join U3A (University of the Third Age). I joined two groups – a photography group with U3A Hawthorn, and a book club with U3A Deepdene. Both were interesting and educational and great for meeting new people and hearing new ideas and perspectives.
The U3A Hawthorn group were invited by Richard Broome, president of the RHSV, to contribute images of Melbourne’s lanes to the society primarily for the purpose of creating a second edition of Weston Bates’s book published in 1994, titled Essential but unplanned: The story of Melbourne’s lanes. Sixteen members of the group eagerly scoured the city’s laneways looking for just the right angle and light and spark of interest. All up, we produced 3000 images.
Of those 3000 images, one of mine was chosen to be on the front cover of the book.
Seeing my photo on the cover made me very happy.
I am super proud that one of my images was chosen to be on the cover.
It feels great to be able to flick through the book, read about the fascinating history of Melbourne’s lanes, and see the fabulous images selected from the 3000 images that were contributed. The ones not used will be held by the RHSV in their collection to be used at any time someone is doing research on the city.
It was a great project to be involved with. It was also really great to catch up with others from U3A Hawthorn’s photography group.
And so to my F-word for the week: fragility
While I’ve been feeling happy and proud, there’s also been an undercurrent of deep sadness in our household this week. When a family member is desperately ill, you’re reminded of the fragility of life.
I’m not going to get deep and meaningful here or look for quotes on life’s fragility – but at the moment it’s looming large in my heart and that’s why it’s my F-word this week.
In April 2021, which seems like years ago, I went to Tumut in NSW. My youngest son and his two children were visiting my mother and as I hadn’t seen them for over a year, I thought I’d make the five hour drive north.
I thought I’d be back in Tumut within a month – Mum’s birthday is in June and I thought I’d at least go up to sing her a tuneless but enthusiastic happy birthday.
Alas, it was not to be. 2021, in case your memory doesn’t stretch back that far, was in a time we still considered to be ‘during the pandemic’. In 2022, with COVID deaths higher than they’ve been since the start of the pandemic – a seeming-decade ago in 2020 – we are considered to be living in ‘post-COVID’ times.
2021 was not a good year. We still had active COVID mitigation strategies in place – lockdown being one of them. I can’t remember all the lockdowns, but lockdown was one reason I couldn’t return to Tumut. There were, of course, others.
As we are now living in ‘post-pandemic’ times, travel is unrestricted. I had planned to head to Tasmania in late April, a place I hadn’t visited since early January 2021, but a car crash put paid to that plan. No one was hurt in said crash, apart from the car, but it meant no Tassie trip for me just yet 😦
While Tim has finished his treatment, been jabbed with the COVID vaccine for the 4th time, and had his flu shot, he is still not sufficiently recovered to travel long distances. I, however, felt it was safe for me to leave the state.
Yes, dear reader, I got out.
Mothers Day was as good a time as any for me to head five and a half hours north to see my mother. And my sister and brother, and uncle, and niece, and great neice and nephews.
I stayed in Tumba with my sister because Tumba is a town where things happen. The Snowy Valleys Sculpture Trail is one of those happening things.
Saturday morning was cold. Icily cold. The thermometer inched towards 8C during the day, and then, having hit it, rapidly fell to near zero. You can imagine how cold it was as we headed out the door around 10am, rugged up beautifully. Deb made sure her gloves matched her beanie, channelling the spirit of our grandmother, who used to do the same in the 1950s and 60s (but never with a beanie). Nan would have been very proud of her.
Our first stop was at Forage (rhymes with porridge) for a hot chocolate and a wander around the market.
Forage in Tumbarumba
Mum arrived, the hood of her coat giving the impression she was off to the Arctic, and we wandered down to the creek which was looking decidedly autumnal, to engage with the sculptures.
Mum ditched Deb and I to have lunch with some of Deb’s friends, so I attended a workshop facilitated by Japanese sculptor Keizo Ushio who uses the mobius strip extensively in his sculptures. We made mobius strips with paper and then attempted to carve a bagel – I’d love to see how he does it using stone. You can see Keizo’s sculpture at Tooma if you’re in the area (we didn’t get down there, but I’m very keen to see it).
Sculptor Phil Spelman then led a tour of the Tumba sculptures and we learnt a lot along the way.
Together we are strong – sculpture by Danish artist Keld Moseholm
Together we are strong is a work gifted by the Denmark-based Denmark, New Zealand and Australian Friendship Society.
Pipe and fittings … many cubes – by WA artist Jennifer Cochrane
Jennifer Cochrane works with cubes. They fascinate her. Picture a cube rolling and you’ll see the movement and energy in this work.
Habitat – a sculpture by Marcus Tatton
Marcus Tatton is a New Zealander living in Tasmania, where chimneys dot the landscape. When a house burns down, they are generally the only thing that remain standing. This has inspired Marcus’s work.
Arrowhead Dark Night Shine – Takahiro Hirata
I think this is one of my favourites. This is a piece of granite which is second only to diamonds in terms of its hardness. Takahiro Hirato, a Japanese sculptor, has hand carved and polished this arrowhead. It’s a truly gorgeous piece. The arrowhead sits on a basalt plinth.
Lumina Folds – by NSW artist Philip Spelman
This work by Phil Spelman certainly generated lots of discussion. It’s an abstract work with as many interpretations as people on the tour with us. Some see an ant, others see a bike, I see someone praying … that’s the beauty of abstract work. It doesn’t have to have just one meaning.
There are other sculptures in the area and I’m hoping to get to see them all eventually.
Off to Tumut on Sunday afternoon for a fabulous Mothers Day lunch with my brother and his family. There was so much food they came back for dinner. I must add they they provided all the food … Mum and I just had to turn up!
Later in the afternoon I caught the end of this beautiful sunset.
Tumut sunset
Monday morning and a quick visit from some kangaroos before I headed home.
It was great to catch up with family again after such a terrible year … let’s hope I can get back there within the next one.
I was scrolling through my Twitter feed this morning and came across a story on the ABC News site that caught my eye.
After the birth of her fifth child, Roseann Hall decided to do a photography project on the often ‘unseen’ side of parenting – the mess, the tantrums, the food smeared everywhere, the moments of stress and tension and of the ways new mothers coped with them.
After Roseann had her fifth child and again found herself scrolling through photos that didn’t reflect her experience, she decided to use her skills as a photographer to capture something more authentic.
Hall’s images instantly took me back to my early mothering days and I began to wonder if any of them would have been worth sharing on social media. I highly doubt it.
I have recollections of constant mess: of food-smeared surfaces, of unmade beds and unwashed washing, of piles of unironed clothes and of floors strewn with toys and clothes and the debris of life.
None of it was social media worthy. None of it was worth sharing to a wider audience. But for many of us with young children it was normal. It wasn’t pretty that’s for sure, and mothers and mothers-in-law and aunts and grandmothers would sometimes step in, a working bee would be organised and the house would shine.
For a day.
And then the inevitable inertia and overwhelm of being a mother would take over – the monotony, the everyday struggle, the sameness, the mundane decision-making (should I do the ironing first or the vacuuming?), the inevitability of mundanity. Nothing to look forward to but more mess, more washing, more cleaning, more ironing, more vacuuming, more dusting … the finger run along the mantlepiece when he came home for lunch to see if it was dust free.
It never was.
Mothering has been happening for thousands (and thousands) of years, and while, I imagine, no two mothers’ experiences have been the same across those years, how did we come to decide that ‘normal’ is a tiny box that only some people fit in? And who decides what’s in that box?
How have we come to the point of looking at others’ lives and deciding that their life is “normal” while ours isn’t? Or that their life is different and somehow that means better?
In the ABC article, Divna Haslam, a clinical psychologist and family researcher at the University of Queensland claimed that “we should all normalise all the aspects of parenting, not just the pretty ones.”
When did we stop normalising the unpretty aspects of parenting? Does any mother of young children imagine, when she sees images of others’ lives, that they don’t have unpretty moments as well? That their two-year old doesn’t have temper tantrums that can last for hours? That their toddler, being introduced to a new food, doesn’t spit it out or wipe it over every surface they can find? That their three year old hasn’t ever picked up a crayon and drawn all over the walls with it?
Have we really become that naive?
Maybe it isn’t about that. Maybe it’s not naivety at all. Maybe it’s the visuals and the access to other people’s lives we’ve only experienced in the last 10 years or so.
Social media, the thing that’s allowed us to connect in ways we’d never been able to before its invention, has maybe also caused us to unconnect from reality. We see others’ unreal images and imagine they determine the reality of someone’s life. The totality of their life.
But do we really think we’re the only ones with children who make unreasonable demands in the supermarket at the tops of their voices? That we’re the only ones with children who refuse to get into their car seat? That our newborn is the only one who doesn’t sleep through the night? That our two-year old is the only one to have a temper tantrum in the main street, requiring us to carry them – kicking and screaming up – under one arm while trying to wrangle their trike with the other? That our four-year old is the only one who swears like a trooper when Grandma walks through the door, that our eleven-year old is the only one who verbally baits his sister till she’s in a paroxym of frustration?
It’s sad if we have. But we don’t have to, and I know that may be easier said than done, particularly from my vantage point. We know – in the very core of our being – that the vast majority of little children will be unreasonable at least some time before they’re five. And while we might not want to post images of those moments on social media, let’s not forget what sits behind the cheery images of happy-looking kids and the ‘perfect’ settings in which they live.
If you’re looking at others’ lives on social media, imagine the corner of the room you can’t see, full of life’s debris – the clothes that moments earlier where all over the couch, the bowl from breakfast the child threw on the floor, the toys they’ve been told to put away a million times but never do.
Think of the “perfect” images that appear on social media as museum or gallery pieces. They might be tightly curated images of a life, but they don’t represent reality.
Well, not entirely. The day still happened, and I did stuff … but I didn’t write a blog post.
It was one of those beautiful autumn days we sometimes get in Melbourne: icy start but eventually warm enough to get the washing dry, a tiny waft of breeze to help the leaves spiral from the trees, and a no-cloud day which made it perfect for a late afternoon walk around the neighbourhood.
Walking late in the day
And no writing.
The week for me has felt a bit like those old cartoon backgrounds that keep repeating as the character runs across the screen. A window pops up every now and then, and then you notice the same door re-appearing and the pot plant on a stand.
The illusion of movement without any real progress.
Numbers of people out for picnics or gathering inside others’ homes.
Numbers of people wondering what life will be like when the lockdown is over … when we’re able to visit family interstate, to head out to a favourite cafe or pub, or return to our workplaces.
Some workplaces have indicated that working from home will be an option after this – possibly forever. I sincerely hope mine will be one of them. It’ll feel strange to go back to a windowless cold office now and chat face-to-face with colleagues. I can’t think why I’d want to do that or why it’s a better way of working than how I’m working at the moment.
Working from home suits me. I don’t have little children or pets to distract me, although I get my share of phone calls from my daughters asking about high and low modality words and about phonemes and graphemes. It’s not the same though as a two-year old seeking my attention as soon as I start a meeting, or a dog running around and around the couch while I’m working.
Jimmy, formally of Giggle and Hoot fame, has been keeping me entertained this week with his spot-on observations of life with little children, particularly in this era of working from home. This video applies just as much to parents working from home when their Zoom meetings start.
Sarah Cooper has also been keeping many of us entertained with her lip syncing of US President, Donald Trump’s press conferences. She doesn’t edit the audio – just does a great job of lip syncing to it. The little flourishes she adds make her videos even more entertaining.
What’s been keeping you entertained this week?
One thing that’s kept me busy – not sure how entertained I’ve been, but I’ve certainly been busy with it – is creating the magazine for our numbers project. Ten of us are engaged in a photography project – to take 12 photos of 1-12 without including the actual numbers.
The favourite image I’ve taken is my number 4:
Four(k)
I’d had a different idea in mind initially, so we shot that and then we started playing around with the idea. The afternoon light was beautiful and when Tim held the strawberry out in front of him, it hit the strawberry and the ends of the fork’s tines nicely. I like that – when you play with ideas and one of them works. It worked that Tim was wearing a dark hoodie too – made for a great backdrop.
Through doing this project and the alphabet one, we’ve come to an even stronger realisation of how different we are as photographers. Tim has a wonderful eye for detail. He can wander around and see things that I’d never notice in a lifetime.
I, on the other hand, plan all my shots, storyboard them and then play around with the original idea as I shoot. He’s more of an observer and documenter and I’m more conceptual in my approach. Neither is better or worse – except when I try to document what I see. That always turns out worse!
Although, having said that, two magazines I created a few weeks ago turned up this week. One is Country Shops of Victoria and Tasmania and the other is of bus stops. I am so thrilled with them. They don’t sound terribly interesting I know, but I get a little frizz of pleasure everytime I look at them. It was my attempt at documenting and I think it turned out okay.
I’m now keen to do more.
Again, a week in which connections and creativity featured heavily … and the other stuff just kept repeating in the background.
As I write, it’s May 9 2020. Many parts of the world are slowly emerging from restrictions due to the spread of coronavirus. Restrictions are beginning to ease in parts of Australia too.
Some people are concerned about this, others are cautiously optimistic that life will return to ‘normal’ soon, and others are pressuring governments to ease restrictions more quickly.
We might all ‘be in this together’ but we’re certainly not in the same boat. The same storm perhaps, but not the same boat. Everyone’s experience of lockdown/self-isolation – call it what you will – is different.
It’s alarming and distressing to read that instances of domestic violence have increased, as have calls to helplines such as LifeLine.
Through the week, I read a tragic story of a 12 year old boy in the US who hung himself in his wardrobe in mid-April. His father blames coronavirus. His view was that as his son wasn’t able to go to school or meet up with his friends, he had nowhere to put his energy (particularly his negative energy) and so took this very drastic step, perhaps, his father said, not fully realising the finality of his action.
There are other situations, just as tragic.
For some, then, this period is particularly difficult. They’re in the storm but in small boats, or boats with one oar, or boats that don’t have a lot of supplies. They’re tossed around by the waves and the wind and can find no safe anchor.
We can’t imagine that our own experience of this time is the same as others.
I’ll own that statement. I don’t imagine that my experience of this time is the same as others.
It’s why connections are so important to me. It’s important to me to stay connected – to others, to ideas, to creative pursuits, to routine, to family, to physical and mental health.
For some, unexpected connections have made this period of time less unsettling than it might otherwise have been.
ABC News Breakfast shared a story on their Facebook page of a man in Wagga, NSW who is drawing a crowd during his trombone practice. What a delight – a time for people to come together – to sit and listen, to tap their feet, to wander into the sunshine, to reminisce. Connecting the past with now, connecting memories to others, connecting sound and emotion.
There are examples of this sort of connection between people happening all around the world. If we can, we should seek them out as they can bring pockets of light into what otherwise might be a dark time.
I’ve also been struck by the connections some people are making as they seek to make some sense of this time. Poet Lorin Clarke writes from the perspective of dust motes as they watch humans spending more time at home. It’s clever, this way of seeing things from another perspective and making connections across people’s experiences. And then putting images and music and a very particular kind of voice to this, adds to that sense of connection across more than ideas – across aesthetics and art forms too.
And then there are those who can sum up experiences many of us will recognise, in seemingly simple ways. My friend Taimi, shared this on her Facebook page earlier and I laughed out loud (I won’t tell you which particular image made me laugh the most).
If our things could talk
Graphics like this can connect us to others – even unknown others – as they allow us to know we’re not the only ones putting the dishwasher on more often or rarely using the car.
We spent a few hours one night through the week listening to Wes Tank rapping Dr Seuss books over Dr Dre beats. Connections again – between words and sounds and beats and voice and cleverness and creativity and silliness and more. See if you can do it!
And then there’s connections to things I didn’t know I was missing. An email arrived just the other day, and I glanced through it disinterestedly until I saw the words ‘Slow TV’. My attention was immediately caught.
A car company filmed a driver driving through the NSW countryside for four hours. It almost made me cry!
There’s a world out there that I haven’t connected with for weeks … months. There are hills and trees and bumpy roads and grassy verges and sky … all that sky. There are horizons that go beyond the back fence, two metres from my back door. There are sheep and road signs and beautiful music to accompany me on this journey of what might be described as nothingness, but which I describe as bliss. Absolute bliss.
Connection to country. Who knew it was something I missed?
And, of course, as always, there’s connection to family. To Mum, and my sister Deb, and my daughters Rochelle (and on weekends her husband Michael) and Emma, and their kids, and Alison, and to my daughter-in-law Kaz (and even more grandkids), and my cousins Cassandra and Jenny (and often their kids), and sometimes to my nieces Sarah and Eliza and sometimes their kids too. We exercise together every day (those of us who can make it), then chat – or listen to all the kids saying hello to each other.
It’s a fabulous connection – four generations and multiple arms of family coming together as often as we can to keep physically and mentally healthy. As has been emphasised as we’ve exercised more and more, exercise is not about how you look, it’s about how you feel, and exercising with family feels good!
And on the back of that connection, we also connect creatively. We’ve completed our Images of Isolation project and are into our Images by the Dozen project. We’re all to take 12 images – representing the numbers 1 to 12 without actually having numbers as a feature of the image. It helps keep our brains busy, our eyes seeing differently and our connections strong.
These are just some of the connections I’ve made this week. What connections have you made?
Time is strange, isn’t it? When we watch the second hand on an analog clock, we think time is regimented, neatly segmented, that one second is the same length as another second. The first minute of each hour lasts as long as the last minute of the hour.
We talk about time as if it’s a commodity – we can use it, waste it, spend it. It’s something that can speed by, or drag, or simply pass. For some, time is money. For others, it’s life. Was there ever a beginning to time, will there ever be an end? We think we know what it is – that it is something we can comprehend. But is it?
And we each have our own perceptions of time. Days either drag or speed by depending on how you spend your time.
And so we’ve made it to May.
March dragged by … each day feeling like a week. What day is it, was a familiar refrain, so much so that a weatherman in the US started telling his viewers what day it was each day – in much the same way they do on Playschool. [Please note: I do not endorse Fox anything, unless they’re on my sister’s PJs and slippers]
Then April came and went, seemingly, for me at least, in the blink of an eye.
Where did that go? Ben’s birthday on the 10th, Easter, extra leave afterwards, four days at work, then annual leave, Byron’s 1st birthday and Tim’s on the same day. A photography challenge and creating a magazine from it, plus creating magazine of my Bus Stops of Victoria and Tasmania and Country Shops of the same (I promise you, they’re more interesting than the titles make them out to be), exercise, exercise and more exercise.
Connections and creativity.
Mental and physical health.
What a month.
And now, May. Ronan, my third grandchild, announced this morning that it’s only 27 more days until he’s a teenager. He sounds like one already – the deep voice grunting monosyllables as he lies on the couch (after doing a tough workout, I might add). He’s almost as tall as me now, probably will be by the time I get to see him again.
And BOOM!
Time distorts. Slows down, almost to a crawl. It’s possible I wouldn’t have seen my grandchildren during this time in a world without ‘rona (although Easter, so you never know) but knowing I can’t see them yet and not knowing when I’ll see them again, seems to elongate time.
It’s the same when you’re waiting for your examiners’ reports after submitting your PhD. The clock ticks off each second in its usual way, but each second seems that little bit longer than the one before, especially when you know the reports are back and your supervisors have seen them but aren’t allowed to tell you the outcome. Each second grinds by, especially when you focus on that one thing you want more than anything.
The email from the Graduate Research Office with the outcome.
This is the situation for one of my PhD candidates this week. The weekend will be unbearable for her and each day next week that she has to wait will feel like a month.
And then it’ll be over. The email will arrive, the restrictions on our movement will end, and time will resume its regularity.
It feels long in the ‘during’ … in the living of it. Time is drawn out during the waiting, during the uncertainty, when we aren’t sure of the outcome, when we aren’t sure what the world will look like on the other side.
But then things will resume, perhaps differently resume, but the seconds will continue to tick by as they always have. Will we go back to our old regular routines or have we learnt something from this time of enforced isolation? Will we continue any of the new routines we’ve established?
All the new routines I’ve established are about creativity and connection. Why would I drop them once this is over?
It’s a question worth musing on.
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I wonder if Louis Theroux will continue doing duck walks when this is over? (We did them this morning and while the kids didn’t seem to mind them, the older adults in the group were mostly non-plussed).
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Our alphabet of isolation wrapped up to wild enthusiasm on Sunday night. I’m adding one image per day to my Instragram account – I’m wondering what will end first … my alphabet images or the restrictions we’re currently living with.
I’m hoping my images will be a good reminder of this time, as, over time, I’m sure I’ll forget some of the details. Like toilet paper shortages. The supermarkets have now lifted restrictions on how much you can buy, but remember at the beginning of this outbreak how people were fighting over it?
What was that about?
And this will be a reminder too.
Stay safe and have a great week. I’ll leave you with this image of a flower I took a number of years ago. It’s colourful and unlike the flower itself, this image hasn’t seen the ravages of time.
Musings from the cold 