“Did it turn into a prince?” my sister, the Midget, asks.
“I didn’t kiss it.”
“Someone might have tried.”
If someone had tried, I would have used both of the two English words that 5-year-old children in Spain seem to understand: no and stop.
I’m all for children having fun with nature, but I don’t want to be held responsible for a child eating a live frog.
Which begs the question, what was I doing with a bunch of five-year-olds and a frog?
It started the other day, when it was explained to me that many parents volunteer at the village school. Once a week, in each class, four volunteering parents go into school and give up an hour of their day to run activities with the kids. Other times parents give talks on their professions, or people who speak different languages go in and allow the children to ask them questions.
I found myself volunteered into a class of five-year-olds, equipped with a load of magnifying glasses and pots for collecting things in, and sent out into the school gardens.
Children in Catalonia speak Catalan. At school, they learn Spanish and English, but whilst these kids could probably sing ‘head, shoulders, knees and toes’ at me, anything more complex was not going to happen. Their English is only a little better than my Spanish. I could have said, “In English, ant,” a thousand times to some children, and still they would just point. Other children managed to tell me that the ant was black and had six legs, probably the effect of extra English lessons and English speaking au pairs.
I lead the activity by the only method I could think of. I scrambled around in the dirt with excessive enthusiasm, picking flowers, tearing off leaves and catching ants, spiders and a single, beguiled frog.
In England, I couldn’t have done it. We have rules back home. Us English are seen as very frightened people on the subject of child protection. A lesson I learnt the first time I was in Spain.
However, here there is a different feeling about who owns the school, the families of the village have taken responsibility for making the place theirs. There are three classes of five-year-olds, because the parents demanded it. There are parents (and extras like me) who partake in maintenance work, planning, teaching and catching frogs.
Education is not just a system, but a community effort.
The flight back from Malaga ended in a rather distressing experience at Manchester Airport.
Almost all of my companions on the aeroplane had not grown up with the Internet and whilst technology to me, who had my own computer when I was 6, can sometimes be a bit daunting, to many of my fellow passengers such an exciting and innovative technology as an electronic passport scanner was as terrifying as a mysterious disease or venomous spider.
This isn’t a blog post about doom, so I shan’t concern myself with the idea that maybe these people are right to have such fears. Fear of something complex, especially if it uses your personal data, is understandable. Yet, sometimes we do get carried away with it.
Like in the queue for the e-passport machines
These people had been contentedly sitting in a metal box in the sky for the last couple of hours, and they’d been perfectly fine playing candy crush on their iPads, arguing over the last muffin and dozing gently to the hum of the engines, but once their feet were on the ground and they had to wait in a queue for ten minutes, they became much less bearable.
Jokes are made about the English people’s ability to queue, but I’m not so convinced. Whilst these men and women didn’t push or shove, they weren’t very good about making the experience a pleasant one.
They just kept complaining
The more complaints and worries were aired, the more people didn’t listen to the instructions, or read the instructions, or dare to just stick the damn passport in every way until it worked. I pitied the poor man standing at the front of the e-passport machines who had to repeat himself again and again in his loud, bellowing, increasingly desperate voice. At the back of the queue, the tension increased. More mistakes were made, progress slowed and the queue took longer.
Now I’m not going to say that getting through the e-passport machine is always a smooth adventure, it’s not, but it most certainly isn’t the end of the world. I couldn’t help but think that if there was less complaining and more listening then the queue would move much faster. Yet the queue was stalled by the immense fear associated with scanning your passport and looking at a camera.
When we’re emotional, especially when it’s a feeling like fear that we really don’t want to accept we feel, we react in some truly creative ways. I had underestimated the range of possible complaints. It’s alright complaining about the staff cuts and the impersonal nature of the procedure, but it’s unfair to also expect cheap air fares.
I don’t have much tolerance for complaining
Complaining about immigration, then stating that you’d be better off in the immigration line because there are fewer people waiting in it, and then going on a rant about immigrants when you have a house in Spain also seems rather unconsidered. I found filling out the forms to get my Egyptian visa at Cairo airport stressful enough, I wouldn’t envy doing it with children or for a more complex visa.
Complaining that the queue was much slower now that the people had been replaced with machines also seemed naive. Unless of course you’ve been flying through Manchester Airport, from Malaga, and landing at a time where there was only one plane load of people to be processed, like ours, and only if you’d measured the time taken for the whole plane load of people to pass through passport control then could you really make a comparison. More likely, this wait was more acute because it was the only one currently being experienced. And dear man, you were at the back.
By the time the family ahead of me got to the front of the queue, the oldest lady, presumably the mother or mother-in-law of the chief complainer looked at the machine as if when she stepped into it, she would be gobbled up.
I’m not saying only this one man was complaining, this was most certainly not the case, no, every conversation I heard was a complaint.
Why do we pick a fear and then exacerbate it?
I do not know, but I do know that fear stops us listening. Whilst I’m unafraid of e-passport machines or silence, I am afraid of many things, like being judged as not good enough, conflict, getting my interpretation of people wrong, and disappointing anybody.
Most of the time though, my problem is in recognising that I’m afraid. Fear often appears in disguise.
We rarely dare say to a family member or friend, is this you speaking, or your fear?
Which means most of the time, when if comes to working out why I’m upset or angry or suddenly having a rant about something I didn’t even know I cared about, I have to remind myself to stop and consider what else I’m worrying about. Fear makes me behave irrationally. It limits my ability to be creative and warm. It makes me rather a pain to be with.
This blog post is one big complaint, and I think it’s because I am terrified of life being swept away in mindless negativity. Quite frankly, these people were old. They were stood in the company of their loved ones and were ignoring each other. I waned to point out that standing in the passport control queue might not be the most wondrous place to be, your legs might ache, you might be thirsty, hungry and tired, but each minute that passes is another minute you’re never getting back.
He’s not everyone’s favourite artist, but he’s cast a spell upon me. He doesn’t tell you what exactly is going on in his paintings, he makes you work. You can’t just look at a Picasso and think, what is this? A man’s face? He’s got a weird nose and what’s up with his deformed eyes? Next painting.
It’s easy to quickly make many assumptions about what it is we’re looking at, first impressions are given excessive weight because they’re all we have. At least in the beginning. We draw conclusions without knowing we’re doing it, every day, all the time.
I watch them. The people listening to their audio-guide about one painting, whilst walking the length of the gallery staring at the other paintings as they go. I’m sorry, but this isn’t how to get your money’s worth from an art gallery, especially one with paintings as potentially powerful as Picasso’s are. You have to put the work in.
It’s like going to the opera wearing earplugs
There’s one particular picture that resonates with me, but I’m not sure why. I stare at is so long my audio-guide gives up. It resets back to start and asks me to select a language. Some paintings are too painful to look at for too long, others I stare at wide-eyed, grinning like a small child given a chocolate ice-cream with sprinkles and a flake. I already have the feelings. The paintings just act as a map showing me how to feel. All I have to do is be there, with my mind in the present and without too much prior judgement.
I need that map. Sometimes I keep everything I feel so carefully walled in I get stuck trying to decipher how I actually feel.
Picasso’s paintings take you stage through stage of different aspects of emotion
Each one shows you something different about yourself.
How did I learn to stop and look like this? I know that my parents and grandparents taking me to galleries when I was small certainly helped. A little part is schooling, a practical understanding that there are different artists communicating the same messages of love and hurt but through different mediums, different techniques and different perspectives. Life drawing teaches you to focus on what it is that you really see, not just what you believe you see. I know that if I spend two hours staring at the same scene, I’ll see it differently to if you just take a quick glance.
And then there’s my paintings. When I’m just creating with no purpose other than the compulsion to do so, I find myself creating something that tells me more about how I feel that I had been willing to admit.
Other people use music or stories
Yet despite taking the time to wait for a picture to talk to me, when the face is animate, when it’s a real person I’m looking at, my immediate assumptions dictate everything. I leap to conclusions and pretend to myself that I understand, which might well be a useful survival instinct, but when you’ve passed the ‘is this person intending to do me harm’ stage of analysis, these quick conclusions begin doing more harm than good.
Left long enough they begone ingrained as beliefs
It’s impossible to understand all that a person’s face is fighting to tell and hide. You can live with them for many years, and still be stunned by how they behave. The Mother, for example, left my car radio on loud when I collected her from the station one afternoon recently. I would have bet a whole week of washing up on her turning it down. I was wrong.
Picasso can make the simplest construct of a few lines and some bright colours appear to have depth. It isn’t a false depth. It isn’t an illusion. People really aren’t all they appear at first sight. If you want to see depth, you have to be patient, even if it means eventually having to ask for help because your audio guide got bored.
I watch swans fight on the canal. It’s grey, people walk with pace, hoods up, handbags clutched close. In the library an older man taps his pen on the desk. He holds a calculator with numbers large enough for the Mother to read without her glasses and talks on the phone often, they’re all transactional conversations interspersed with incisions of politeness, as if he believes that the participants have more than a cursory sense of care about each other. I try not to stare, but I’m fascinated. I think I had the same phone when I was twelve years old. I want to tell the man that the library has computers with calculators and email and online complaints forms but looking at him, and looking at me, I’m left questioning which of us is doing better.
I feel small, fragile, insignificant. I’m just another woman sitting in one of many libraries. I once had a card for this place and would be allowed to access the Wi-Fi and take out books, but it’s lost now. I no longer live here, I’m just abiding my time, hiding from the grey drizzle, in between homes, at crossroads in my life. I make do with the warmth and electricity, the desk and reading a few chapters of a book I’ll likely never finish. I no longer belong here. I’m not sure I ever did.
The book is The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck. I flick through to the section on love and learn that love is little more than the allocation of importance. ‘I love you’ becomes ‘You are of significant importance to me’. The rest of romantic love is classed cynically as fantasy, infatuation and lust.
This town used to be important to me, I used to run along the canal and look forward to hearing the saxophone player on the high street during my lunch break. I knew the fields where you’d see the cows, the garden which had piglets and the bookshop close to work, where I could ground my emotions and find myself before going back to my desk and the hovering question of what’s next.
I moved on.
The town is just a town now, a place that I used to know. I am just a woman sitting in another library. I’ve lost my love for this place. It’s no longer equated to my freedom, it’s no longer an important piece of my life. Instead, it’s just a junction on my road.
From time to time, conversations land in one of two disaster zones. Everyone tries to speak at once or nobody says anything at all.
When either of these things happen, I find myself thinking about the art of conversation itself, and wondering why it’s gone wrong. As an attitude to have, this isn’t helpful. I realised (whilst supposedly meditating) that such analysis actually is a hindrance and becomes a barrier to actually having the conversation.
Too many voices
Sometimes there’s a rush, and everyone wants to speak at once. Everyone has so many ideas and thoughts and corrections to add to the conversation. When I’m thinking about what you’re going to say it’s easy to lose awareness of the cadence of conversation and forget to observe the people around you enough to know who else is about to leap in on the same beat. Of course, it doesn’t really matter. I laugh, say go on’, or ‘you first’ and the conversation continues. The thought that I ought to be more aware is a negligible worry that dissipates with my fascination of what comes next.
When nobody speaks
Then, there are those other times when nobody speaks. A natural lull falls in conversation. One pattern ends and the next hasn’t yet begun.
There’s a slim line between ‘awkward silence’ and a comfortable pause. What’s more, the same pause in conversation can be both at the same time, but to different people. Once you analyse the situation and define it as awkward, you feel awkward and it becomes so. Anything that’s subsequently said feels desperate, difficult and unnatural.
Why conversation fails
Often, I feel like the sacrificial lamb that says something to make a fool of itself in order to end the forbidding silence. It can be easier to witter onwards than go back and look at why such feelings of awkwardness are happening.
Most often, it’s a case of being more concerned with how I’m interpreted by my companions than with what my companions actually have to say. With all the Buddhist teaching I’ve had recently I can’t help thinking ego, ego, ego. More people leads to more people to impress which results in more overwhelm and an overload of gobble-de-gook or conversationalist’s block.
No wonder I often find strangers, whose judgement I don’t fear, easier to talk to than my loved ones.
Other times an awkward silence happens because the conversation is edging too close to something I don’t want to talk about. Maybe something that I feel uncertain about, or that I’m acutely aware than I have no idea how to express in a manner that’s not going to get me labelled as crazy or will just end up leading to more awkward questions.
And sometimes it’s not knowing what to ask or say because I feel I should already know the answers, or because I’m worried it’s a question or a topic that’s boring or uncomfortable for my companions. Just because I want to talk, doesn’t mean the person I’m facing wants to hear about that particular whim at the forefront of my mind.
Mostly though, if I’m honest, it’s just me trying to protect my ego. I don’t want to take a risk that I’ll say something stupid, irrelevant or boring that is going to make my friends think less of me. And by doing so, by having such inhibitions, I’m selling myself short. I’m not speaking when I should and I’m latching onto irrelevant conversation topics just for something to say.
I feel awkward, and therefore interpret the conversation flow as awkward, when I put self-preservation above learning from the people I’m with.
To me, this is a profound and useful thought to acknowledge.
It comes from practicing silence. Closing doors as quietly as possible. Tip-toeing around in socks. Lifting your chair rather than just giving it a shove when you want to tuck it under the table. Stirring your milk into your tea without the spoon touching the sides of the mug. And not speaking.
I spent just under 10 days in such a silence as I learnt to meditate.
Silence of Thought
Whilst meditating, my thoughts were supposed to be silent too. My mind was supposed to be focused. But silencing your thoughts is hard. It’s a process of disengagement rather than shutting them up and it’s not something that comes naturally.
Hence, whilst feeling the subtle effects of my breath, my mind also reflected on the experience of silence.
Silence of Technology
As well as not speaking, I sent no messages through any electronic device. I had no access to a computer and my phone was in a locker in a locked locker room that was out of bounds. I wonder if I have had been away from a phone or computer for such a duration since my age reached double digits. I rather doubt it. Maybe on a long scout camp, but even then I imagine I had my mobile.
Despite only being in Hereford, I was more isolated from my family and friends than I’d been a few months previously when I’d been in Egypt.
Silence of Reading
‘Course boundary’, ‘Female course boundary’ and the signs telling you how to exit the buildings in case of a fire, were the only words I read. I didn’t write either. I had no pen and so was forced to remember what I wanted to write about on my escape.
Not writing was an interesting challenge because on a daily basis I write lots. I write for professional reasons, but I also write to organise my thoughts and my emotions. I do much of my reasoning on paper. Not writing meant that my thoughts hung around longer and kept running in repeating loops around my head.
The Power of Silence
After the silence had broken, a group of us gathered around a couple of tables, drank tea and reflected on the experience. One woman bravely leant back in her chair and said boldly, “Well I found that I’m much funnier than I thought.”
Eyes connected, and an acknowledgement of ‘me too’ went around the table. We all laughed at ourselves.
The woman who had spoken up had spent days of the course in floods of tears, but reflecting on the experience as a whole was much moved by the resilience of her mind. Now, cheerful and loud, she seemed far removed from an emotional breakdown.
I get the impression people expect silence to be boring or perhaps intimidating. Dare to give all those deeply hidden thoughts room to manoeuvre and perhaps they’ll take over. Of course thoughts surface. Faces and unkind or thoughtless comments from years ago battle for attention. Worries, to do lists and regrets are loud thoughts, dominating thoughts. We’re well practiced in giving them priority and forgetting our minds are actually creative, amusing and fun.
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