Category: Life

Posted in Life, Photography, Writing

The art of looking away

Posted on by Sharon

There’s a cat on her windowsill. The black one from next door, red bandana tied rakishly around its neck, a burst of insouciance.

He watches her, looking like he knows things she doesn’t.

She watches him back then lifts the camera and looks away.

In photography, negative space is the area around the subject, the quiet, unclaimed part of the frame. She looks there instead of at the cat. At the branches giving him an absurd hat. At the fence palings rearing from his head. At the shadows, menacing, behind him. She makes a choice about where to put her attention.

Then is drawn back to her phone by the vibration, and spins through war, famine, scandal, disaster. She scrolls, for far too long, then finally looks away.

She looks away and in doing so notices the tiny bits of life that belong only here, at this moment in time. The sunlight sliding through the shutters like it has somewhere else to be, the Vegemite-coated knife balancing on the sink as if auditioning for the circus, the leaf skittering erractically down the path to come to rest on the mat at the back door, the cat still watching from the windowsill.

She lifts her camera again, capturing it mid-stretch, and realises – again – that the art of looking away is also the art of looking at.

Posted in Life, Writing

What she doesn’t photograph

Posted on by Sharon

She photographs because she wants to hold still what is fleeting – an angle, a pose, an age, a smile, a moment in time – before it dissolves, fades, evaporates into reality.

But what she doesn’t photograph matters too.

She didn’t photograph the sky turning red from a hundred bushfires, or the water lapping at the laundry door. She didn’t photograph the washing line, snaking down the backyard, heavy under the weight of the weekly wash, or the heat from the wood stove in the kitchen. She didn’t photograph the hospital bracelet crumpled in the bottom of the bag, or the small fist clutching a handful of her mother’s hair.

She didn’t photograph the look exchanged before the first word of bad news, or the sigh that followed.

She didn’t photograph the relief in the hospital corridor after the surgeon said it went well, the ordinary dinners that kept them alive through ‘that’ time, the thousand mornings where nothing “happened” except that she woke up, or her fumbling attempts at dancing that looked more like jelly caught on a string.

Sometimes she wants proof that it really happened the way she thinks it did. That the sky really was pea soup green, that the drummer really did smile at her.

Maybe it’s better this way. No evidence, no proof. A series of memories, more absurd and exaggerated each time she recalls them – never sure which details are real and which are imagined.

Or which she simply longs for.

Posted in Life, Mid-life blogger, retirement

Euphemisms: Word cushions that soften reality

Posted on by Sharon

I’ve always been fascinated by the use of ‘shop lifting’ for ‘stealing’. I wonder how that came about – and why? Who decided that we’d cushion the harshness, the directness, the in-your-faceness of ‘thief’ with the much gentler ‘shop lifter’?

I guess I could look it up if I was so inclined.

Also, who decided they’d term the injuring and killing of civilians ‘collateral damage’ as if people were bits of furniture that got in the way of bombs and bullets.

Or ‘friendly fire’ rather than saying you killed people on your own side?

And do women still ‘powder their noses’ when they need to pee? And do parents still talk about number ones and twos with their kids?

Don’t get me wrong, euphemisms serve a purpose. Sometimes saying the thing itself is too blunt, too harsh, too direct. We’re much more inclined to say that someone has ‘passed away’ than they’ve ‘died’. Or as one grieving wife told her daughter the other day “Daddy has gone on a work trip with Jesus”. There’s a finality to the blunter word that is softened by other ways of phrasing it.

When we rename harsh realities euphemistically, they may not hurt so much, they may make the reality more palatable. They may make it easier to convey things that we’re otherwise embarrassed or uncomfortable to convey.

For instance, I was sacked this week. Not for any wrongdoing or poor performance – purely as an economic decision.

Since learning of said sacking, I’ve been struggling with how to soften the message when I tell other people, of how to not sound bitter (I’m honestly not at all bitter), of how to communicate that it wasn’t because I was bad at my job.

And so I’ve been turning to euphemisms – softer words that cushion the harsh reality of having been ‘given my notice’, ‘let go’, ‘restructured out’, ‘transitioned’, ‘invited to pursue other opportunities’.

So here I am, ‘hanging up my hat’, ‘calling it a day’, ‘moving into a new season’, ‘starting a new chapter’, or if you prefer, ‘entering into a period of rewirement’ (a fantastically euphemistic word if ever I heard one).

Or another way to look at it is, that at this very early stage of transition from work to whatever comes after it, I’m simply ‘between adventures’.

That’s a euphemism I can live with!

Posted in Life

The streak

Posted on by Sharon

I’m not talking about the Ray Stevens song here – I thought I’d better preface that in case you think I’ve taken up running through the grocery store with no clothes on.

This is a different kind of streak, a streak that requires memory, persistence and consistency. You have to remember to do the thing that develops into a streak every day. You have to build it into your – in my case morning – routine, so that you don’t lose your streak through forgetting.

At first it’s easy – the stakes are low; it doesn’t matter if you don’t do it when you have a streak of just one or two, or even ten or twelve. But when it starts getting over 50, there’s a tingle of motivation to keep going. You play around with it, testing yourself out to see how much you really do care, to see how serious you are about it.

You start to brag to other people you know who have their own streaks – or who at least challenge themselves on a daily basis. I’m on 150 now. I’m now on 200. I’m closing in on 280! You feel a weird sense of pride, tinged with a fear that it might end. You ask your husband for hints, you read the blog to pick up what others have said about it, you try a different starting point each day.

You also need to get it right – your streak is over if you make too many errors – and so you proceed cautiously, being more careful, taking more time. My morning routine was such that I was having to get up half an hour earlier, just to get it done. Or getting to work later!

I make it to 300! I don’t post about it on social media of course, that would be weird, but I do feel pretty good. Close to a year’s worth of luck and determination, and new approaches, and risk, and remembering.

But then, Thursday, August 15 dawns. I’m not well, I rush, I get to the last attempt, feeling oddly confident. I couldn’t possibly be wrong.

I sit there open mouthed when it turns out I am.

My streak ends at 303.

303 days of getting Wordle right – and then, in an instant, my streak is gone!

I had wanted to get to a year … and I came so close!

And the thing that hurt just as much as losing my streak?

There was no acknowledgement of my 303 days of success. Just a ‘thanks for playing! You’re out of guesses.’

Brutal.

Posted in Family, Life

After the big thing, the little things

Posted on by Sharon

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.

And maybe for now it is.

Posted in Family, Life, Mid-life blogger

Friday, December 6 2024

Posted on by Sharon

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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

Golly.

See you next week.

Posted in Family, Life, Mid-life blogger

Friday Feels

Posted on by Sharon

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, 1958
My baptism in June 1962. Uncle Roy, my godfather, is at the back
Roy Frederick Humphries, 1941-2024
Posted in Life, Mid-life blogger, Writing

Friday Feels Returns

Posted on by Sharon

I missed last week’s Friday Feels post. The reason is one of the things that made me happy – read on to find out more.

Friday Feels is a (seemingly) regular blog post I started writing about three months ago. Debbie, my sister, writes the occasional Fridays Feels post and I thought I’d copy her lead.

There are three questions each week, mostly the same, and then an F-word. I think I’m supposed to write only brief responses to each question, but struggle to do that. Someone famous once apologised for writing a long letter “because they didn’t have time to write a short one”. Even though I could take the whole day to write a blog post, I try not to. Especially on days like today where it’s warm – 27C – and the pool is calling!

The three questions I answer each week are:


1. What made me happy this week?

2. What’s been challenging about the week?

3. What’s caught my attention on social media this week?

Rather than a F-word this week, I’ve decided to write about a C-word instead.

First, the questions.

  1. Cancer – that’s a C-word. And it’s related to what made me happy this week. On Friday last week, rather than writing a blog post, I met with my medical oncologist for my FINAL oncology appointment. I’ve had annual check ups with my breast surgeon, my radio oncologist and my medical oncologist since 2019 and last Friday was the last appointment. Five years of low-down terror in the back of my mind … and now it’s all done. I have to admit to being much more emotional than I imagined, and spent some time in a quiet corner of a hospital corridor pulling myself together. But I’m happy that my appointments are done and that the five years is now officially over and closed off in my mind.
  2. COVID – that’s a C-word and it’s related to what’s been challenging about this week. Tim didn’t feel too well last Friday and did a COVID test. Negative. Big relief. Saturday he felt even worse. Mid-afternoon I found him in bed shivering even though it was a really hot day. I took his temperature – 41.5C. That’s a bit warm. I had thought he didn’t want to do gardening with Chase and I, but apparently he was ill. Sunday he did a test. Positive. He tested positive as recently as yesterday. He’s slowly getting better. I’ve been working from home all week and because of the design of our house we’ve been able to keep away from each other and so he hasn’t passed it to me. But it’s been a big week.

    Another reason it’s been a challenging week is because my uncle – Mum’s brother – passed away on Wednesday evening. He was a great storyteller and had a wealth of them to share – from years in the Navy to his more recent travels. He was also a great reader and that made discussions always interesting. He’d share books and recommend others and wasn’t shy about telling you why a book was unreadable! Wifedom, for instance, was not one of his favourites! Mum has lived around the corner from him for the last four years and minutes after she’d ring him to invite him round for morning tea, he’d be at the front door, zooming up the steep hill fearlessly on his mobility scooter. One thing we always chuckled about, was that even though they were both in their 80s, she’s still such a big sister! He was a well-read, well-travelled man, but oh golly … when his big sister said to do something, he’d do it! It seems that’s one thing that never changes in family relationships. You’ll be missed, Uncle Roy.
  3. Characters – that’s a C-word. Have you heard of Paloma Diamond? I hadn’t either till just last week – possibly because I don’t have TikTok. But she popped up on my Instagram feed last week and she’s become a bit of regular for me now. The actor behind the character, Julian Sewell, has amassed a huge following – and I’m just jumping on board. Also, if you’re into period drama, check out his ‘Aunt Ingrid and Evelyn’ characters.
Screenshot from Julian Sewell’s Instagram account

Link to Julian Sewell’s Instagram, just in case you’re interested.

Well, that’s it from me for another week. I’m pretty pleased with myself for not mentioning the other C-word.

Christmas!

Apparently it’s only 30-something days away. Who’s getting excited?

Posted in Life, Mid-life blogger, Writing

Friday Feels

Posted on by Sharon

As it’s Friday, it’s time for another Friday Feels post. When I started writing these posts I wasn’t planning on doing more than one, and now I find I’ve written a post every Friday for the past nine weeks.

I answer roughly the same questions each week and it’s always interesting to read back over my responses (mostly so that I don’t repeat myself) but also to refresh myself on what’s been happening in the/my world.

The three questions each week are:

  1. What’s made me happy this week?
  2. What’s caused me some discomfort?
  3. What have I re-started doing that I haven’t done in ages?

My F-word for this week is fazed, which I’ve sneakily used somewhere in this post.

  1. What made me happy this week was my friend Airdre coming to visit. The last time we tried to organise a catch-up her grandson thoughtfully gave her his cold and so she wasn’t able to make it, but today, despite a lingering cough, she arrived for a chat and a laugh and a delicious lunch at a local cafe (3 Little Pigs – we can both highly recommend the zucchini fritters). Airdre and I co-edited the recently published Enacting a Pedagogy of Kindness: A guide for practitioners in higher education (available now online). If you’ve read it, we’d love a review. A kind one, of course!

    We talked about writing and editing and reviewing and about how being direct is much maligned and how we both don’t do small talk and the importance of acknowledging the good bits in a piece of work and tense and tone and voice. Airdre and I have another connection – not just our writing one. I discovered earlier this year that the house Airdre used to live in, in northern NSW, was the very same house that my great-grandparents had lived in 90 years before. I wrote about it here. So a lovely morning with Airdre has made me happy this week.

  2. What caused me some discomfort this week was the result in the US election. I won’t say any more about it, but it discomforted me. You could say, it fazed me.

  3. What I’ve re-started doing that I haven’t done in ages, is digital drawing. In mid-2022 I started drawing using Procreate, an iPad app. It’s a very powerful tool and I found some great tutorials to follow along with as I learnt how to use the program and started to develop my skills. Back then I was in the retirement phase of my life and had loads of time to learn. Since moving on from retirement – back to full-time work – I have had way less time to do any drawing and I realised recently that I miss it. I came across more tutorials through the week and have decided to give them a go and see what I can learn and create. I need to emphasise that I have never been someone who draws and I have zero skills. But I enjoy learning and trying new things and so I gave it a go.
One of my ‘drawings’ from mid-2022 – drawn using Procreate


That’s it from me for another week. Next Friday I have my final oncology appointment. It’s the final thing in my cancer ‘journey’ (hate that term but can’t think of another one) and I am very much looking forward to that particular journey being well and truly over! I will probably pass on the Friday Feels post next week – just know my Friday will feel pretty darn good!!

Posted in Life, Mid-life blogger, Writing

Friday Feels

Posted on by Sharon

It’s November.

I know. I don’t know where the year has gone either. One minute you’re waking up on New Year’s Day and then next minute it’s November.

It’s one of the good things about writing blog posts – or keeping a diary; you can go back and see that the year hasn’t whizzed by in a flash, and that you have actually done things throughout the year, and March did happen, as did a whole pile of other things. The same could be said of your life though, which is one reason for cramming a lot in: there’s lots to ruminate over, reflect on and remember, and when you do that, you feel the length of months and years and time spreads out, expands, slows down a tad.

But that’s enough philosophising for now. Onto the regular three Friday questions and an F-word.

The questions are:

  1. What made me happy this week?
  2. What town did I most enjoy this week?
  3. Who came back to Australia this week?

And my F-word? Future

But first to the questions.

  1. What made me happy this week? I was at the International terminal earlier in the week, and it was so lovely to watch the interactions between those arriving and those who were anxiously waiting for them. The grandfather beaming at the sight of his tiny granddaughter; the mother weeping at the sight of her grown son; the sons, daughters, grandchildren, second cousins twice removed who each had a bunch of flowers and excitedly presented them to the family patriach as he tried to embrace every crying member of his family at once; the pregnant, exhausted mother, her trolley piled high with bags and car seats, watching carefully as her eldest pushed the soon-to-be middle child in a stroller, looking for a familiar face in the crowd to relieve her of some of her burdens; the young couple meeting, perhaps for the first time (he had a bunch of flowers in what could have been a pre-arranged signal), posing for photos at all points of the arrivals hall. It really was a Love Actually moment, and that made me happy.

    2. What town did I most enjoy this week? Weird question Sharon! I know, but it was a lovely day on Sunday and we went to Kyneton and decided to wander along Piper Street. Kyneton is a strange town in a way. It seems to have three distinct shopping areas, with Piper Street being the most interesting. The buildings are old, the shops are diverse, the cafes are interesting, and the people are lovely. I was told at least four times that the dress I was wearing was some variation of “lovely”. (Just for context, I think it’s the most hideous thing I’ve ever owned.) We had a lovely lunch at Home Grown on Piper – Tim said it was the best Reuben he’s ever had. And then we wandered, and bought things, and chatted with people in shops, and spent ages and $$ in The Stockroom. It was really delightful.

    3. Who came back to Australia this week? Very specific question Sharon! I know, but apart from all the other people who came (back) to Australia this week, the one I know best is Mum. She’s been away for about 6 weeks, cruising on rivers in Portugal, visiting Salamanca in Spain, spending some time in London, a little village near Colchester, and catching up with family in the west country (think Bristol, Cheddar, Bath). I hope when I’m 86 I’ll still be travelling the world like that.
Mum arriving back in Australia


My F-word for the week? Future. More specifically, THE future. I’ve just finished reading Tim Winton’s latest release, titled Juice, and it’s a sobering look at the future. It’s not a happy book it has to be said, but it sure does make you think. This is a book set far into the future – Winton said in an interview that it’s about 300 years into the future – and it’s a warning that if we don’t do something now, we’ll be leaving future generations in a world of pain.

One bit really got me: The main character – I don’t think we know his name – is telling stories of his early years, when he was 16 years old. His world is full of ash and heat so unbearable they have to cover themselves completely and live way underground in the summers. Think a Mad Max kind of landscape. He meets some people who show him images and videos from our time – from now, our present, what they call “the Dirty World”. He says, “We believed that the world was the way it was. That it did what it did. In the way it always would. Because that’s how things were. This idea that our travails were the result of others’ actions had never occured to me. … To be told that my trials were not random accidents but deliberate acts undertaken with the knowledge of their consquences? … It was infuriating to the point of derangement.”

Deliberate acts – the burning of coal and gas to generate juice so that the oligarchs maintain their power.

Now that’s a sobering thought.

If you’re into apocalytic fiction that has more than a tinge of reality, then this is a fabulous read. I finished it very early one morning through the week and cried myself back to sleep.

That’s it for me for another Friday. I’ll see you next week.