memory

During a TED interview with Chris Anderson, Daniel Kahneman (who received a Nobel prize in psychology) tells two stories that I’d like to tell you by way of explanation – and apology – for harping on and on about the end of my marriage.

The first story is about colonoscopy. In its early days, colonoscopy was an intrusive, excruciatingly painful 30-minute procedure, climaxing in its final minutes. For long after, patients felt traumatized by the last 30 seconds of this procedure (no anaesthetic was used), with the previous 29 minutes and 30 seconds a mere blur. This speaks to me about the final stages of my marriage which, while not excruciatingly painful, had an intensity that has had the effect of putting into shadow everything that went before it. When my memory feels clouded in this way, I feel cut off from the marriage I once had and am left holding a burst balloon. I struggle to leap-frog over the memories of my separation to roam freely over decades in which I had no reason to think that my marriage would one day end.

The other story, also by Daniel Kahneman, is about holidays. In this study, participants were offered the holiday of their dreams in which everything would be paid for with no strings attached. Except for one thing. On their return home, their memory would be wiped clean and they would have no recall of having been away. The participants were then asked if they were still keen to go on holiday. Kahneman assumed that the majority of participants would say yes; because, despite losing their memories of it, they’d still experience the holiday of their dreams. But to his surprise and consternation the majority said no; knowing that they’d have nothing to show for their holiday on return, made them not want to go on it. What Kahneman realised is that we are, as humans, story-making animals; a large part of the value of what happens to us reflects the way our mind uses our memories to build up a sense of ourselves going forward out of what happened to us in the past.

My third story on the theme of memory is the comment of a close friend who said to me recently that, if she were me, she’d be angry that James hadn’t broken up with me sooner because, if he had, I’d have had more chance of finding someone else to spend the rest of my life with – rather than my wasting precious years with someone who would ultimately end things with me.

All these stories touch on my tussles with memory. I feel as if James’ leaving has put into shadow everything that went before it. My memory of the decades that I spent with him has a different quality, a different valence, now that it’s all that I’m left with. Of course I have philosophical moments too, in which I can see that my relationship to James is a part of me that would be impossible to lose. There are also plenty of occasions, often when gardening or driving, when my memory gives me plenty of footage of happy times.

We spend so much of our life knowing – in theory – that everything must end. However, the child in us never really believes this. In our deepest self we expect to go on and on – just as we expect our marriages to go on and on – for ever and ever. Easter and Christmas will come and go, with the same rituals, the same smiling faces, for ever and ever.

Except that this Easter won’t be the same for me. My son will be sailing and, with any luck, my daughter will be mountain-bike riding with friends. I don’t mind; I want them to do things that make them feel free and alive. I, meanwhile, plan to paint the front hall and to continue tackling the bottom of my garden (brambles…). My dog won’t be pleased, but I am looking forward to completing jobs that I’ve been half-way through for over a year. Perhaps this will give me some time to remember the past more truly.

holding space

Yesterday, towards the end of my training in yin yoga, I asked the teacher what she thought the term ‘holding space’ meant. Her answer was immediate. ‘The energy with which you bring to a space’. She said more. It was reading the room and holding your ego, and your personal life, at bay. It was keeping an eye on the light and temperature in the room. It was being fully present in the service of others. And it was being a container for whatever happens in that space during the allotted time.

The teacher – I’ll call her Sam – held space beautifully, in all these ways, throughout my five-day training. She was open and receptive, all the while keeping an eye on the clock and where people’s energy levels were. She chatted warmly between lectures and kept us ever moving forward through chunky material in what she called ‘the manual’.

This was my second shot at yin yoga training. After the same training with the same teacher two years ago, I left feeling overwhelmed with new knowledge, but also with an unanswered question about Traditional Chinese Medicine rolling around my head. Were the Dantiens, the meridians, the organ pairs and the Qi a form of science, or were they just elaborate metaphors? Did they form a science that people like me, from the West, struggled to accept, or were they meant as sophisticated symbols that made sense of the human body in a totally different way to the framework through which Western medicine understands the body?

I’m not a good student – especially as I grow older. In my defence, once you’ve been a teacher, it’s hard to go back to being a student. I’m not good at sitting on the floor for hours at a time taking notes from slides projected on a wall. Six days ago, when I started the training, my grasp of anatomy was basic. And while I now know a lot more about it, I’m still not fluent. Will I, I wonder, ever be? But even basic anatomy was easier to wrap my head around than Traditional Chinese Medicine. According to it, our organs are distinct characters with roles to play and jobs to do. According to it, a spleeny person is quick to anger and keen for clarity. A kidney person is strongly earthed and hankers for order. As if this wasn’t enough to get on top of, mapped over the organs lie the meridians, the dantiens and the four elements of wood, metal, fire and water. Life is super complicated in this traditional Chinese world; and yet, in the moments when I fleetingly got it, it was utterly simple too.

You would think that after 100 hours of learning about yin yoga I’d have grasped it. Perhaps I should have done more homework – or need to do so now. Perhaps if I’d journaled each night, as Sam urged us to do, I’d have made more sense of it. But I didn’t do these things. Instead each night I came home and took my dog for a long walk on the beach; it seemed like the least I could do after he’d spent the day on the back doorstep, waiting. After getting back home, I stayed up late letting go of the day, knowing that at 6am I’d be up again for another day of training.

On the third evening, as my dog and I returned from the beach, I stopped to pick flowers at the roadside for the yoga studio that I teach at weekly and practice at most days – and do flowers for just because I like to. It was a beautiful night and I felt relaxed, knowing there were just two days of training left. It wasn’t until 11pm, relaxed and ready for bed, that I realised my phone was missing. After looking everywhere at home, I decided it must have fallen out of my hoodie pocket into a bush as I was cutting flowers earlier that evening. Or perhaps it slipped on to the floor of the yoga studio while I was doing flowers there. With that, I grabbed a torch, jumped in the car and returned to the darkened studio. But there was no phone there. And despite the strength of my torch, I couldn’t see it in the bushes at the roadside either.

Eventually I gave up looking and got back into my car. The dashboard lit up as I turned on the ignition and a yellow bomb warning light came on. Assuming that the car would get me home – it’s a Skoda – I pressed the accelerator. More unfamiliar warning lights joined the yellow bomb one. Within seconds, I lost control of the steering wheel and only just managed to get the car to the side of the road before it stopped dead.

Warning signs flashed through my mind. ‘You’re completely alone’, one said. ‘Now you’re really stuffed’, another said. ‘How are you going to get to training in the morning?’ one more piped up. Not until I’d locked the car and was walking home in the cool midnight air, did the voices quieten and my attention turn to the darkened streets I was walking up.

First thing next morning, I dusted the cobwebs off my bike and rode it to the studio, arriving for meditation with a minute to spare. As the days passed, I was surprised by how much I relished not being contactable by phone during the day – and by how much more time I had now that I couldn’t fill my in-between moments with my phone. (As an aside, while I was at the training, my son found my phone through a ‘find my phone’ app and it wasn’t in the bushes by the side of the road but behind the hand-basin of a public toilet a kilometre up the river.)

Two kinds of people, in my experience, do yoga trainings. Pretty much everyone who trains in yoga is shy; this seems to be a given. But some of us, and this includes me, speak up despite their shyness. Mindful of how much I’d spoken in past trainings, I was determined not to give too much away this time around; I definitely wasn’t going to over-share. So for the whole first day I said nothing in class. Zero. On the second day, realising how stuck I felt not speaking, did I join in; it seemed perverse, against my nature, not to. And yet even though I spoke up over the coming days, I felt awkward when I did and there were moments when my voice wobbled. It was only on the last day of training – yesterday – that I realised what the problem with my voice was, and that it was the same thing blocking me from learning about Traditional Chinese Medicine.

As it turned out, on the final day of training I had to leave two hours early to take my daughter (bung leg) to the doctor. All of a sudden, or so it seemed, I had to say my piece about my awkwardness during the training. After packing up my belongings, I got on to my feet. I began by saying that Sam, the teacher, had been kind to draw on my knowledge of psychology over the past days. But that rather really, rather than being a clever clogs, I’d spent a lot of time up the back wrestling with myself. Sitting up the back, struggling to absorb a whole new way of viewing the body, I was doing an existential audit on myself. I was remonstrating with myself with a list of ‘if only’s’ as they bounced around my head. If only I’d stuck with just one thing in my work life, rather than waxing and waning between three. If only I hadn’t compromised myself with family life and had managed – despite everything – to keep my career more alive. If only my awkward personality and frustrated ego didn’t make communication harder than it might otherwise have been. If only, in other words, I’d been more like Sam and less like me. Because if I had, if I’d have made better choices throughout my life and stuck with them, I might now be at the front of the room holding space like Sam, rather than at the back of it taking notes.

Standing before the group, I said this out loud. I said it even though it made me squirm and I knew that I wasn’t obliged to say it. So why did I? I said it because I wanted to clear the air before I left, knowing that Sam must have wondered about my manner towards her. I said it because I didn’t like feeling envious and wanted, now that I was finishing the course, to return to being me – to someone who liked her life and understood why she made the choices she did. And I said it because it seemed the honest thing to do, because I wanted Sam to know how much I admired her knowledge and her passion for passing it on to others.

After a small silence which felt like forever, Sam came towards me and asked if she could give me a hug. Another student around my age gave me one too. Then I left the studio, folded my course certificate so that it fit in my rucksack, hopped on my bike, rode home and took my daughter to the doctor.

life advice

‘How has it come about that we have been educated to have expectations

about life that are so likely to leave us feeling defeated?’

Adam Phillips, ‘Against self-criticism’

At the end of last year, The New York Times asked readers for the best life advice they’ve been given so far. Out of 600 replies they printed 20. Here are the 5 pieces that resonated with me, and why.

1. Intimacy isn’t something you have. It’s something you do.

Now that I’m on my own more, this advice seems especially apt. I can do intimacy with my dog – really I can – by chatting to him as I cook (he’s my sous chef), or playing hide-and-seek together on a hot day. Equally, I can use my phone to confirm everything that I’m missing out on during the tail end the festive period, or I can use my phone to reach out to others and do intimacy in my own way.

2. You cannot learn anything when you are talking.

As the ex-wife of a big talker, this seems eminently true. It may even explain how I learned all that I did.

3. Walk towards the monster (the pain, the scary thing, the grief).

This advice has been hard to follow these last weeks when, apart from teaching yoga, writing, walking the dog, cooking some meals and tending the garden, there has been little that I’ve had to do. (Thinking about it, I probably didn’t have to shampoo the carpets which, all the same, was very satisfying.)

New Year’s Eve was my monster – the evening that I couldn’t avoid, pregnant with possibility and what if’s that bubbled up from my unconscious. Did I walk towards it? Not exactly. I met it sideways. I chatted to people on the beach while my dog scavenged in the sand dunes for abandoned take-away food as we waited for the early fireworks – and then fed the dog non-stop treats as they exploded in the sky. Once back home, I watched the Joan Didion biopic which was as moving as it was fascinating.

So, not a monster at all…

4. Never take criticism from someone you wouldn’t go to for advice.

This seems salient, especially for someone like me who has a habit of bossing myself around from within by a superego that I’d never ask advice from because, like most superegos, it has a reduced and skewed view of who and what I am.

5. Give up all hope of changing the past.

Oh wow. This advice is sage and, perhaps for that reason, hard to follow. What I wouldn’t give to dart back to the past and change a few key coordinates so that I wouldn’t end up in the marriage-less state I now find myself in. And yet, and yet. Because when I can let go of this hope, there is such relief to be had in not trying to change what was never in my control in the first place – my life; and to realise that my desire to remake the past according to my wishes reflects a hard-won emotional truth, which is that ‘the pain of uncertainty is greater than the pain of regret’ (Amy Summerville). Not knowing how things will go in the future, in other words, is more stressful than wishing things were otherwise in the past.

Yet there is something very welcome about letting go of my fantasy of a long and happy marriage, like a helium balloon released into the sky, and instead to accept that I had the marriage I had, a marriage far too complex to describe in a paragraph or two, much less to pass judgment on, before clapping the book shut.

At the beginning of yoga class, the teacher will often ask us – our eyes closed following a breathing exercise – to set an intention for our practice. Recently, I’ve set the same intention: ‘Let me stay open’. This simple wish seems to cover everything – that I may stay open to whatever happens in the year ahead rather than defending against it. If I can do this, I tell myself, it’s enough.

marshmallow test

Choosing not to have whatever it is that we want now, for the sake of a greater good in the future, is an easy enough principle to understand. Share your toys, wait for sweet treats and take your turn – these are the basics of what we aim to pass on as parents to our kids. Until I listened to Walter Mischel read his book, ‘The Marshmallow Test’ on audio, I thought this about summed it up.

Intrigued by listening to the audio, I borrowed ‘The Marshmallow Test’ from the library, and soon realised that the psychology in the book was about a lot more than marshmallows. (And in case, like me, you’re wondering about marshmallows being offered as a treat to 21^st-century children, M&M’s are now the sweets of choice.) Yes, this book is about self-control and our struggle to master it. But it’s about other things too.

What rang true for me came in a discussion of – wait for it – pension funds. The idea is that to the degree your perception of your current self is divorced from that of your future self (which Mischel describes as ten years older than however old you are now) you’re likely to struggle to withstand temptations in the present (a holiday, say) for the sake of a shadowy future good (a bigger pension in old age). As Mischel explains, MRI scans can now show that some people treat their future self as a stranger, as distinct from their current self. Why then, they think, put money aside for a relative stranger? Luckily for pension funds, others feel more intimacy with and compassion for their future self. For these people, ten or twenty years hence doesn’t seem that far off. And because they can imagine themselves as older versions of themselves, they’re naturally inclined to provide for that not so shadowy future.

Something similar goes on with the people that I teach yoga to. Most people come to yoga because they feel called to it. It might be a niggle in one shoulder. Perhaps it’s loose knee joints. It might be a sports injury or decades spent hunched in front of a screen. Some people react with annoyance at whatever brings them to the yoga studio. Their body has let them down; in a better world, their shoulder would know better and pull itself together on command. Others are more philosophical. For them, a dicky knee is part and parcel of getting older for which the best response is calm resignation, an acceptance of fate. Others assume that they’ll attend yoga class to rehab their shoulder/knee/lower back, in the same way they might have a few sessions with the physio, before returning to multi-day hikes and playing tennis under lights. Thankfully, there are also people who come to yoga and get it, if they haven’t already, straight away. They know that they’ll be strengthening their core, aligning their posture and reversing hours they spend sitting down for the rest of their life.

I used to think that the people who saw their yoga journey (or preferred strength training) as ongoing – as a single not a return ticket – were more switched on both medically and philosophically. Perhaps they are. However, reading ‘The Marshmallow Test’ made me realise that, compared with someone who treats their dodgy shoulder as a temporary annoyance, someone who embraces yoga (or other strength training) is often more in touch with their future self. Their future self is no stranger; but simply a more wrinkled version of the person they already are. Providing for themselves, by keeping their core strong and inflammation at bay, is their way of looking after the person they are on the way to becoming.

Recently, I had my own brush with the marshmallow test. At my last dental check-up, as usual, the dentist said very little when he inspected my teeth. But my hygienist who, after 12 years of cleaning and polishing my teeth I consider a friend, was less discreet. She told me that the enamel on some of my top teeth was eroding and that I needed to be careful if I wanted to keep them into old age. Lying in the dental chair, panicking, I tried not to show it. Lose some of my top teeth! How horrid and shameful that would be, I thought to myself.

It took a whole week before my panic subsided enough to ask myself a practical question. What was I doing in my daily life that might be wearing down the enamel on my teeth? It didn’t take long to twig that one of the things I was doing, and had done for years, was to drink a lot of green tea which, I discovered with annoyance, has a particularly high acid content. So, that could be one culprit. Another might be dark chocolate, often gulped just before teaching a yoga class. There was also my personal history of too much brushing and the luck of my genes. My first response to this bad news was flat denial. Give up green tea in the morning and dark chocolate at night? You have to be kidding. No way.

To cut a long story short, another week passed before I realised that it was up to me how I responded to the news that my tooth enamel was wearing down. I could frame my decision to give up green tea and dark chocolate as a sacrifice, as one more thing to be deprived of as the years piled up behind me. Then again, I could do something much simpler. I could draw a line and just step over it. I could choose not to make a fuss and to substitute green tea for a tea that isn’t acid forming, to switch out dark chocolate for carob, and to thank the stars above that with any luck I’ve acted in time.

Thankfully, apart from the missing caffeine hit, Rooibos tea ticks the boxes for me. I can drink it happily in the morning – as I write this in my notebook – knowing that by swapping out my teas I can stay on good terms with my future self; and that, whatever happens to my health in years to come, I’m walking towards my future self with eyes open.

Lucky, I suppose, that I’ve never liked marshmallows.

question

‘If someone took control of your life tomorrow, what is the first thing they would change?’

When I first stumbled on this question, by Atomic Habits author James Clear, I felt hooked by it. It seemed obvious that anyone stepping into my life, from the outside, would want to change something big before they even sat down and had a look around. This new broom would not stop at one significant change – like getting out of bed on time in the morning. My new CEO would look around at the lack of structure, up-and-down rate of productivity and hit-and-miss approach to my ‘big rocks’ and clap their hands in anticipation of all the sweeping changes to come.

A month has passed since I happened upon James Clear’s question. Since that time, I have been thinking and reading, not about motivation and getting things done, but about kindness and compassion – both of which have a very different trajectory to that of self-evaluation. Kindness and compassion are founded on a withholding of judgment, on a refusal to give one part of oneself the job of evaluating another part. Such that what seemed like a fantastic question a month ago (If someone took over my life tomorrow, what is the first thing they would change?) now reads like a recipe for mental illness. Why on earth, I ask myself, would I want to invite someone in that I don’t even know to do an audit of my days?

I’ve spent way too much of my life in conflict with myself. Looking back, I can see that much of this conflict was founded on my assumption that someone else – mother, father, conscience, therapist, supervisor, agent, editor, grown-up kids – was in a better position to know me than I was. Mostly this conflict wasn’t conscious. On the outside, I believed in democracy, feminism and free-will, just like everyone else I knew. But in times of insecurity, indecision and self-doubt, I fell back on the belief that someone else was better placed to advise me than I was.

Often this fantasy took the following form: if only I was more single-minded, self-directed and goal driven, I would feel less pulled about by the needs and demands of others. If only I could reach that quiet, still place that meditators speak of, all would become clear. However, I’ve never reached those sunlit uplands in any kind of reliable way – fleeting moments, enough to know they’re there, is all.

Lately I’ve been drawn, not to the sunlit uplands, but to the grassy lowlands. I know when I’ve reached them because, when I look around, I can see that my life is fine as it is. I don’t need to ask someone else to tell me what I should care about or what I should do, because I already know this for myself. I don’t have to keep striving onward and upward, because I’m already where I want to be.

Every night, before I open the book that I’m reading in bed, I open my notebook and write down in a loose column the main things I did that day. When my ex-husband left for Italy, I started this green notebook – a present from a niece – to make it clear to myself that the rest of my life was beginning and not ending. Although I rarely look back at my entries, I like having this record. Writing each entry helps me to let go of and say goodbye to my day. Opening this notebook is part of my evening ritual, a way of handing over my bag at the gates of sleep.

‘All the misery in life’, wrote Pema Chodron, ‘comes from the gap between how we would like things to be and how things actually are’. Without this gap – without this marshaling of one part of oneself to adjudicate over another part – most of our conflicts fall away. When we cease to call up the judging part of ourselves, the part that calls out our failings and ‘could do better’s, we are just as we are. Or, as military officers like to say once they’re done giving commands to their subordinates, ‘As you were’.

dog guilt

Sitting on a stool in a local cafe, I crawl my way through the national newspaper, agog at how much can go wrong on one planet over the course of a single day. I’ve just taught a lunch-time yoga class, and had hoped to order something to eat. But the kitchen closed five minutes ago and the only food available is spiced nuts and deep-fried somethings. Still, when my soda water arrives with slices of lime, its paper straw furry with bubbles, it refreshes me. Also, the very fact of sitting in a cafe, when half of all Australians are barred from doing this due to Covid, feels salutory.

It seems trivial to be talking about dog guilt – ‘what exactly is that?’ – when so much is awry with the world. However, this feeling, which has been on my mind for months, will remain with me even after the world calms down. So, what is dog guilt? Well, it’s the feeling that my dog prompts in me when I don’t meet his needs, when I don’t take him for walks or play with him; and all for the reason, inexplicable to him, that I have More Important Things To Do.

It is the lot of dogs to be confounded by their human owners. ‘What do you mean’, Digger’s eyes say to me (Labrador eyes are very expressive) ‘that you don’t have time to take me for a walk?’ Of course, I do know that Digger doesn’t have the actual thought that I should spend more time with him. Any more than he forms the wish that I would stop listening to Audible books when we’re on bush tracks together. No, he much prefers to yank on his lead in his annoying, pay-back way. I am also aware that, as intelligent as Digger is – a point which my daughter questions, although I think this is to absolve her of dog guilt – that as a dog he doesn’t think as I do. He has no idea how guilty he makes me feel when he looks up at me with his hang-dog eyes.

Three years ago, when Digger was a puppy who gnawed on chair legs with crocodile teeth, my daughter lived at home. I would never have got a Labrador puppy had it not been for Emma; more precisely, if it hadn’t been for our need, as a family, for a friendly, solid dog after the trauma of having to put down our previous neurotic farm dog. I knew, in some abstract way which didn’t feel quite real – in the same way that until recently climate change hasn’t felt real – that one day Emma would move out of home, leaving behind a by then large dog who needed regular walks. In those days, I accepted this wilful blindness of mine. Faced with the choice between family happiness and long-term personal freedom, I chose family happiness.

Even after I gave up asking Emma to take Digger to puppy school – the deal that she and I struck on collecting Digger from the breeder – I refused to peer around the corner. Despite mounting evidence, in my mind Digger was still more Emma’s dog than mine. Emma, I told myself, was simply too busy with her sailing to attend Saturday morning puppy class. Besides, as Emma always told me when we walked Digger together, she was far better at dog training than I was.  

Kids are mostly immune from feeling complicated about their family dog’s quality of life. Last week, when I told Emma that the woman who runs the dog kennel where Digger rushes round with 20 other dogs, suggested that I try Digger on a raw food diet, Emma scoffed. I could only contemplate feeding our dog raw food, her rolling eyes hinted, because my nest was emptying. ‘Besides’, Emma added, as if this nailed it, ‘Digger’s just a dog’.

As is so often the case when it comes to strong opinions, Emma was both right and wrong. She was right in that I do care about the quality of our dog’s life. I do feel responsible for Digger’s well-being. In this sense, he is my dog. My thinking about Digger goes like this. With any luck, I’ll outlive him. This means that, for the next ten years or so, the least I can do is to give him a decent life. However, Emma was also wrong. Because I feel certain that, when she is in a position to get her own dog, which I know she wants, that she will care just as much about her dog’s wellbeing as I currently do Digger’s. Once she has a dog who looks up at her with the pointed longing that I’m trying to describe, dog guilt won’t seem like a middle-class affectation. When it’s directed at her and she is its target, she too will feel its prick.

In the meantime, I ward off Digger’s hang-dog expression by taking him for two walks a day, and other things too. I anyway figure that it’s good for me to be forced into the elements by my canine pedometer and antidepressant rolled into one, no matter how blustery the weather. In this sense, dog guilt has its upside. However quickly the sky seems to be falling in other parts of the world, on muddy paths with my raincoat zipped up, I stay sane and happy.

Research shows (don’t you love paragraphs that start with ‘research shows’?) that part of the benefit of spending time in nature comes down to the microscopic exchange that occurs between the spores, funghi and sap of trees and the teaming microbiome that lives on the surface of our skin. Through a complicated dance that is beyond my powers to explain, being in nature triggers the release of serotonin and dopamine, the happy hormones.

So it’s not just natural beauty that leaves me feeling good about life, as I return home after walking my dog. It’s the invisible exchange that joins me, mesh-like, to the world that I’m surrounded by. Who could have thought that a twice daily dose of dog guilt could be so beneficial?

kitchen timer

‘Working hard at something we don’t care about is called stress,

working hard at something we do care about is called passion’.

Simon Sinek

When I first read this idea, that working hard at something we don’t care about is called stress, and working hard at something we do care about is called passion, I copied it into the yellow notebook I carry round with me. ‘Yes’, I thought, scribbling down the words, ‘that sounds right’. Sinek’s idea seemed like something that, were I too a marketing consultant, I might have come up with myself. It was oddly familiar, perhaps because it taps into the kind of beliefs I grew up with and now feel surrounded by.

As someone who experiences quite a lot of stress, I found Sinek’s idea unsettling. ‘Surely stress and passion are more complicated than that?’ I asked myself, the next day. I opened my notebook and stared at Sinek’s words. In his pithy definition, he seemed to be promoting single-minded passion over compromised, stressful work. Stress – that feeling of too-muchness, of facing more than we can handle – is bad, he seemed to be saying. While passion – that needle-point focus on one goal – is good.

These days, these mid-life days, a significant amount of my time at home is spent working hard at things that I ultimately don’t care about. I am not a masochist. Nor, touch wood, am I dim. It’s rather a psychological dilemma that I face. And it’s this. I don’t seem to be able to get the conscious and unconscious parts of my mind to come to an agreement on what is worth caring about. I’m unable to stop my unconscious mind from caring about things like clean sheets, compost and soaked legumes, that my socially-conditioned conscious mind thinks might not, in the scheme of things, really matter. Hence the stress I often feel engaged in household tasks.

To get around this, I’ve taken to setting a timer on arriving home late afternoon. It’s the only timer in the kitchen that isn’t broken, I suspect because it knows that I like it the least. After fishing this timer out of the utensil drawer – perfectly placed to catch breadcrumbs from the oven above – I set the minute timer to 60 and clap it to the metal top of the hob. With this satisfying clap, of magnet fastening on to metal, I tie up my denim apron and go for it.

The next hour is broken into household-sized fragments – trips to the bins outside, the laundry downstairs, the bedrooms upstairs and the fridge in the pantry. All the while, the dog sits on the back door step, with an occasional bark to put a neighbouring dog in its place. There he sits, lone sentinel to my bustle next door – the chopping of vegetables, the unpacking of the dishwasher, the hum of the carpet sweeper.

For years, I waged a personal war over the value of the time that I spent housekeeping. Until one day I said ‘enough’, and fished out a kitchen timer from the drawer. I’d read somewhere about the Pomodoro technique, and thought it worth a try. Initially, I set a timer as an experiment. And from day one, it worked. I think it worked because it put a frame around my housekeeping, creating a before and after, a domestic bubble. It helped to overcome my resistance to certain tasks, and to breathe into the hour ahead.

Nowadays, each time I fix the kitchen timer to the stove top, the same thing happens. I relax. This white electronic timer stops me from feeling stressed. It tells my unconscious that there is no need to worry, that only a finite amount of my afternoon will be given over to household tasks. It functions as a green light, allowing me to beetle about the house, doing as much washing, cooking and gardening as possible inside an hour. Importantly, setting a timer helps me over the initial hump of housekeeping (and in my experience, there is always a hump). Its ‘tick, tick, tick’ stalls my thoughts, protecting me from all the other things I could be doing during this time. In accepting my place in the domestic wheel of life, my inner chatter fades and I just get on with it.

This moment of surrender, of the metal timer hitting the stove top, so quick as to be unnoticeable, is when the magic happens. For the next hour, I’m safe from conflicting thoughts, from stress. I’m in the zone, and can enjoy simple household tasks that, while I don’t relish them, leave me feeling good about life as a whole. Inside this hour, I’m able to care about things that I otherwise might not, and in this way gain release.

I don’t love housekeeping. I’ll never be passionate about it. (My psychological life would be simpler if I did.) The pleasure that I get from looking after my home is inverse. What I love is not feeling emotionally complicated about housekeeping – about prepping food, tending plants and cleaning the hob. I love feeling in flow, without resistance, at one with my home. And when the hour is up, I feel proud of being able to stay on top of my home’s running.

Usually, I go over the allotted hour. When the timer goes off – ‘beep-beep, beep-beep!’ – I rarely whip off my apron. Still, as a strategy, setting a timer does seem to work. I think it’s because, by objectifying the time that I spend on domestic tasks that my ego, Simon Sinek and society at large don’t credit, my housekeeping becomes real. Rather than trivial daily tasks, it becomes something almost solid that can be measured by the tick-tick-tick of a white plastic timer. Even though the dog on the back doorstep is often the only other living creature aware of my doing it.

We live in a world which puts a higher value on pursuing our passions than on caring for others, our home and ourselves. This is not a good or bad thing, it just is. Still, what this means is that many of us going around feeling that the work of looking after our family, ourselves and home is at odds with the work of fulfilling our ambitions. Perhaps we are a mother, struggling with home schooling, or an older man nursing a knee replacement. Or perhaps we are doing our best to stay on top of a generally happy but messy household, in the run up before dinner. In all these situations, we’re liable to feel as if we are living back to front. Our day is full of care, yet there is less room for passion than we might like there to be. And it’s this discrepancy, this feeling of being at odds with ourselves, of somehow falling short of our heart’s desires, that accounts for a lot of the stress that we feel at home.  

Passions, much like true love, have survived our modern age intact. No matter how confused our society may be, about what matters most in life, our passions are admired, even revered.There seems something pure and inviolable about our efforts to realise our ambitions and passions. Whether this takes the form of a new digital brand, a sustainable start-up or a life-long violin practice, being passionate and ambitious is widely considered a good thing. Rarely do we criticize or subject our passions and ambitions to scrutiny.

As a rule, stress is less well regarded. Stress, psychologists tell us, is an effect of how our mind perceives what happens to us. An event in itself isn’t stressful, only our response to it is. This explanation places the onus on us, as individuals, not to experience as stressful something that a more resilient person might be able to move on from. In this way, feeling stressed is, through a behavioural glitch, our fault. Stress is a personal problem, rather than an effect of the confused beliefs that infuse society as a whole.  

There’s a problem here. This explanation of stress – that events aren’t stressful, only our responses to them are – is based on the assumption that our society broadly agrees on what matters most. But clearly it doesn’t. This is where things get sticky for those of us who do a fair amount of caring. Because in the absence of a consensus about matters most in life, the caring work that we do – work that our unconscious mind knows matters and that our conscious mind doubts the value of – gains little credit. And so by an awkward twist, rather than the caring work that we do increasing our sense of self-worth, it generates stress.

When we care for others, ourselves and our home, our ambitions and passions are shelved for a while. Perhaps this is why most of us have a finite amount of energy for caring. The work of caring about things that we both do and don’t care about, for the sake of people and a way of life that we love, just is tiring. All of us need breaks from caring in order to refresh ourselves. We need time off from trying to square the circle – from getting the unconscious and conscious parts of ourselves to agree on what matters most.

The solution to spending too much time in caring work is simpler to describe than to do. Instead of pouring all our time and energy into things that, on our death bed, we’re unlikely to consider important, we need to be able to lose ourselves in activities that we do care about, that we are passionate about, and that don’t generate stress. Not least because when we’re free to do those things that we like doing most, the split within us, which arises when we care too much and for too long, and that we experience as stress, gets to heal.

Which brings me back to my kitchen timer, and to the way it helps to frame my domestic role. For the brief second in which I fix it to the stove top, I feel in good company with all the efforts that I feel sure that other people are making, in homes around the globe, to keep their domestic life afloat. They may not, as I do, turn on a kitchen timer or tie up an apron. Still, like me, they feel the tug of everything else that they could be doing with the time and energy that they give to housekeeping. Yet they still go about preparing dinner and bringing in the washing. Perhaps because, like me, they feel, in a deep part of themselves, that it’s worthwhile to do so.

It seems odd to be thankful for a plastic kitchen timer. But I am.

inner voice or mental chatter

Every day I spend time alone. Writing. Doing yoga. Housekeeping. Walking the dog. I am not solitary. Most days, I write in a cafe, attend a yoga class and chat to other dog owners. Still, inside my head, for periods of time, I am on my own.

Yet hardly ever am I truly alone. Let me introduce you to my inner world. First there is my inner voice, my guide and my compass. Early this morning, I sat on the end of my daughter’s bed, as she played the guitar. When I asked whether she’d made up the piece she was playing, she said yes and added, ‘Happy Mother’s Day’. ‘Thank you’, I said. And as I rolled off the bed and headed for the bathroom, my inner voice echoed my daughter’s thanks.

If I was only guided by my inner voice I would likely experience no stress, no conflict. But clearly, I do. At the merest hint of fear, negativity or insecurity my inner critic comes bounding into awareness. The thing about my inner critic is that I know her better than she knows me. Mostly, I can see her coming, and try not to encourage her. She is my scolding, berating voice which I once attributed to my mother but later realised was a product of my own mind. She is the one who pushes me back down and keeps me in my place, and cares not a jot for excuses.

My inner voice and inner critic are the main characters in my head. Occasionally they share centre stage, but generally one makes way for the other. There is a third character in my mind, although this is closer to a chorus than a character. It’s mental chatter. At the beginning of a yoga class, when I am pretending not to care that a couple of regulars haven’t come that week, my mental chatter can get pretty noisy. At times, it gets so noisy that I blank out on my yoga sequence and have to look at my notes, or I’ll forget which side of the pose we’ve just done, until a student pipes up and tells me.

A few weeks ago, walking along the beach with my dog and listening to Ethan Kross read his book Chatter on Audible, I realised that I am not alone in my experience of mental chatter. Performance anxiety, the jitters, imposter syndrome, blanking out – whatever you want to call it, it’s a common response to intense inner pressure.

Until Ethan Kross spelled it out, I’d never thought that each of us has a psychological immune system which we have the power to strengthen. I simply hadn’t realised that it is in my power to develop my inner voice. It had never struck me that I could develop my inner voice so that, under pressure, she makes the calls and not my inner critic.  

I wouldn’t have tried this trick if Ethan Kross hadn’t suggested it. But I figured it was worth a try. The following week, when I blanked out in yoga class and couldn’t for the life of me remember what came next, I got my inner voice to silently call me by name. Admittedly, I was skeptical. I thought that saying to myself, ‘Helen, focus on what you’re doing’ would feel weird. I worried it would feel admonishing, like something my inner critic might say. But Ethan Kross was right and I was wrong. I really could get myself out of a stress-induced funk simply by getting my inner voice to call me by name and to tell me to focus. I didn’t need months of therapy to solve my dilemma. I could solve it myself, just like that.

gratitude journal

Twenty years ago, I’d have more likely to write down a list of my resentments, than to keep a gratitude journal. My resentments would have flowed seamlessly on to the page, with colourful gripes about housework, teaching and the juggle of motherhood. I still have some of these gripes. The difference is that nowadays I make less of them. As much as possible, I let them go. The question, ‘Is this serving me?’ is generally enough to dispel my moans.

I started a gratitude journal when I came across a line by Adam Phillips that stopped me short. ‘Some of our desires’, he wrote, ‘obscure our keener satisfactions’. It sounded obvious when I read it – like so much wisdom that I struggle to absorb. There I was, judging myself by my ability to fulfil my worldly desires, blind to the fact that, as I waited for the world to fulfil them, I was giving away my power. The more I desired something, coveted something, aspired to something, the less energy I had left over for the little things that I found satisfying. The more I looked for reassurance and credit from the world, to affirm my value, the more I overlooked the under-the-radar satisfactions that made me feel whole and grounded. I was so in thrall to my next big goal, I didn’t notice how much power I was handing over to a world that was too busy spinning to appreciate my efforts.

Eventually, I drew a line in the sand. It was, I realised, up to me what I chose to do with the time available to me after I’d met various external demands. But, before I could do that, I needed to work out what I found satisfying. I knew a lot by this point, half a lifetime’s worth, about achievement. However, what I discovered, on starting a gratitude journal, is that I knew a lot less about – I hadn’t given much attention to – what I actually liked doing. I knew there was no shame in not being sure about what I most liked doing. Still, it was an awkward admission.

I started a gratitude journal when I accepted that I would never realise my youthful dreams, and that not getting what I wanted, according to those dreams, was fine by me. Because that what I’d got, in lieu of my dreams, was possibly even better.

Keeping it simple, and treating it as an experiment, I put a notebook and pen next to my bed. Each night, before opening my book to read, I jotted down three things that sparked joy for me that day. That was it.

Slowly, over days and weeks, something unexpected happened. My gratitude journal became a window into what I might do with the rest of my life, after my kids had left the house. It was a yearning for a small lamp in the darkness.

Keeping track of my positive moments, across the day, proved powerful. My memory has a lot to remember and, frequently, not enough time to do this in. It’s good at remembering things relating to my ego – slip-ups, embarrassments and occasional achievements. But it lets go, too quickly, of happy moments. Keeping a diary of these moments acts to sharpen my mind so that I look out for, am alert for, more such moments.

I don’t usually flick back to old entries in my gratitude journal. But when I do, I’m struck by how simple the moments I record are. It might be a look or snatched comment from one of my kids. It might be the sight of the beach in the late afternoon, with mountains behind and sky above. It might be playing a card game after dinner.

Keeping a gratitude journal has brought home to me the kinds of things that I like doing when I’m not working. I am, to a large degree, what I pay attention to. This seems so obvious. It is so obvious. Then why is it so hard to absorb?

Keeping a gratitude journal has increased my appreciation of the little things in life. And all it involves is a notepad by my bed in which I jot down three things that sparked joy for me that day, before switching out the light.

3 questions

A good friend, keen for people to share the intimate meaning of their life with others, asked me to take part in her facebook page, TheKeyof3, by answering three questions. Here goes:

1. What is something important that you have learned in your life?

I have learned that an embarrassingly large part of my mental life is given over to resisting things – to putting them off. As I write this I can picture a sizeable cupbard in my mind, stuffed with things that I don’t want to do. From a 3-month-overdue letter to my mother-in-law, to niggly household admin. There is nothing new or surprising about this. Most of us feel nagged by the things we know we should do. However, where once I chastised myself and wrote admonishing lists, now I shrug and move on. I still keep a list. But I measure success differently. (Even ticking one item off my list each day feels like success.) For I have learned that I will never overcome my resistance to the things I don’t want to do. But nowadays I’m able to distinguish my resistance to writing to my mother-in-law (in my head) from picking up a pen and writing to her (in reality). Increasingly, but not always, I’m able to push myself over the hill of my resistance and to see tasks for what they are. What a relief!

2. What act of kindness has most profoundly affected your life?

For nearly 20 years I lived in London, after growing up in Adelaide. Although I flew to the UK in a plane, there is a way in which, existentially, I fled there after my father died. I didn’t feel at home on my childhood home, and decided that I may as well live on the other side of the world. I will ever be grateful to the people who befriended me when I got to London, who saw in me something that I couldn’t see in myself, probably because I was in flight from it. A young Australian in London, I was welcomed into many people’s homes – for a weeknight dinner, a weekend on the coast, an Easter-egg hunt. Countless kindnesses – little things that felt like a very big thing – were shown me. So powerful was this experience that I have spent the rest of my life returning my own kindnesses to others.

3. What have you done to overcome a significant challenge in your life?

This year I completed a yoga teacher training course, along with 22 others. I took the course as a dare. It was my way of preparing myself to age gracefully. It wasn’t planning to become a yoga teacher. However, the effect of the training was to plant the seed of a desire to teacher yoga to others, as a way of passing on something that has been of immense sanity-keeping value in my life so far. The average age, among the trainees, was 28, and I am well into my 50s. Mostly, during the 5-month course, I ignored my age. But despite doing handstands and the occasional wheel, the more I ignored my age the more it wouldn’t go away. My challenge, on completing the training, was to put aside the teasing of my grown-up kids and to book a studio, not knowing if anyone would come to my yoga class. I overcame this challenge, this fear, by trusting in something deeper than my conscious doubts, and by using as my mantra the phrase, ‘This is the yoga’, whenever blind fear breaks through my faith in something deeper. This is the phrase that the lead yoga teacher used as a refrain whenever obstacles – COVID, injury, any contingency really – came up. Because obstacles do come up. Doing this course taught me that I overcome obstacles by doing the scary thing anyway. And just maybe this, rather than success, is what matters.