Author: Karen Richards

In our latest blog post, Chris Yeomans reflects on her experience of a family conflict and how being still can transform a tense situation, giving us a helpful perspective on how feelings arise and how to deal with them.

For the last year and a half, I have been involved in a long – well I don’t know what to call it really.  I don’t think it’s a row if I haven’t responded in kind, so ‘trouble’ from my husband’s family is perhaps the only word. I have never experienced anything so unpleasant and with it the whole range of emotions and feelings:  deep hurt, grief, loss and bereavement, rage, a sense of injustice, despair.

Eventually, after a drawn-out and careful negotiation, during which my husband’s family called all the terms and I worked very hard at ‘letting go’, we met up for what they called ‘peace and reconciliation’, although I couldn’t see quite how this might happen if any mention of what had gone on before was expressly forbidden.  So it was very unlikely there would be any resolution, it seemed to me. But I tried to let go of that ‘opinion’ too.

But, for my husband’s sake, who felt he was losing or likely to lose his family, I found I could agree to almost anything and we met for dinner.  It was a surreal experience, sitting chatting and exchanging pleasantries, whilst all the time unable to blank out, completely, the way I had been treated and the things that had been said and written.  These were people whom I had genuinely loved and trusted and whose support I had greatly valued.  They had devastated me, but finally I found I felt nothing for them and I left the restaurant  feeling a free woman. Which led me to explore the whole business of feelings and emotions and maybe relationships.

I read a bit and searched on the internet, finally coming across this, which I more or less agree with  ‘Emotions come first, followed by feelings. Emotions are the body’s initial reactions to a stimulus, like a sudden rush of adrenaline or a physical sensation. Feelings, on the other hand, are the subjective experiences we have after interpreting these bodily reactions and thinking about them.’

I remember a monk once saying that the feelings of excitement and fear are almost indistinguishable, physiologically.  It just depends on you knowing what you are expecting to be experiencing and then giving them a label.  

And in that situation, I found I didn’t really feel anything very much.  It was socially not difficult.  But the relationships which we had, and which I had treasured, had been destroyed and there was simply nothing there.  So what does a relationship need to ‘work’?  It was so odd to be in the presence of people about whom I had once cared deeply and to feel absolutely nothing.

It seems to me that every genuine relationship is based, if not on love, at least on trust.  If there is no trust, it is impossible to have a relationship.  And also, following that old ‘I’m OK, you’re OK” theory, you need to know that the other person does at least have some positive regard for you.  That they ‘like’ you and interactions with them leave you with a good feeling.  I had none of that with these people.  I suspected they strongly disliked me, they certainly had expressed distrust of me, and they had treated me in a way I would not have thought possible.

So I was left that evening with this rather odd feeling of being on a film set, where nothing was real.  I was just glad to escape unscathed, though I think they’ve lost their appetite for a fight.

Being able, even in the toughest times, to know how to be still with the situation is invaluable.  And not to hit back, particularly when you know that the person attacking you is likely to lose control, be abusive or storm out of the house.

I have not so far had a lot of success in feeling genuine compassion for them.  Nor have I been able to bow to them as Buddhas.  Work in progress I suppose.  But for the moment I am enjoying the peace of being free from so much emotion.  I am transformed (people tell me!) and energised.  I don’t think I realised quite what a toll this was taking on me.  I was a broken woman, but I am healed.  To be relieved of such a burden is a truly wonderful thing.

This short item follows a train of thought that I had about the significant value of people who live or work alone. I offer you, Tree Survey

Last week, a survey of England’s non-woodland tree population, commissioned jointly by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and Forest Research, revealed that trees which stand-alone make up to 30% of the nation’s tree cover. These trees, which live and grow in parks, gardens, hedgerows, fields and streets, have significant value in improving our air quality, capturing carbon, regulating the climate and giving us humans protection against emissions from cars and industry.

A map of these benevolent trees, outside of woodlands (TOW) has been created, using aerial and satellite technology, which can inform the Government and other agencies about where the gaps in the tree population are and how best to support conservation in the future.

It got me thinking that the value of lone trees, apart from being rather beautiful, is perhaps underappreciated. Their underground mycelium transfers water, nitrogen, carbon and other minerals in the same way that larger groups of trees do and are just as valuable, if not more so, to creatures, including us humans, that do not live near forests or larger wooded areas.

It also started me thinking about people who, either by choice or through circumstance, stand alone.  The single parent, going it alone for their children; the reclusive artist, producing paintings that thrill the soul; the shy, neurodivergent person, who cannot face the outside world but who uses their talents, creatively ; the night porter, asleep in their chair; the meditator, rising in the early dawn to reflect upon themselves; the checkout operator in the all night supermarket; the solitary gardener, who weeds at twilight; the potter alone in their shed; the writer working into the night, not to create a bestseller but nevertheless transferring minerals of thought from inner consciousness onto the page, not worrying whether their words will be read; the cleaner, alone in the deserted office block; the delivery driver, on the long-haul trip. These are the singular, stand-alone people who contribute to the whole in their solitariness: their mycelium invisible but nevertheless doing its work, underground. You are valuable and as upright as trees and you are very much appreciated.

Are compassion and empathy out of fashion? In this post, Karen Richards gives a shout out for random acts of kindness.

Half-term and I am waiting at a bus stop, in the centre of Shrewsbury, with my granddaughter, Nel.  She is staying with me for the regular school holiday sleepover, with Nan and Granddad and her Telford cousins. But before that sleepless night of sugar fuelled frivolity, we sneak a morning together, just Nel and me, and visit Paws Cafe, where we have languished on deep leatherette sofas, drunk coffee and cola, eaten cake and spent a feline filled hour with the many cats that live there; nonchalant but friendly, indifferent yet seeking the attention of the many hands that reach out and stroke them, we leave relaxed and smiling and ready for the journey home.

There is no queue at the bus stop and no sign of a bus, either but a woman in a wheelchair, ensconced below the awning of a nearby shop, shouts out cheerily to passers by. She talks to babies, cooing and reaching out a hand to touch them. She comments on the weather and wishes people a nice day. Every so often, she  asks if anyone has any change. No-one has, but she persists. People carry plastic these days. Whatever happened to cash? I listen with my back towards her – my sight is firmly focused on the approach of the midday traffic – and slowly gather the drift of her story.

Still no sign of the bus. “We must have just missed one”, I tell Nel, apologetically. I’m not quite sure why I feel the need to apologise for something out of my control but I am sorry and concerned, too – I so want her to have a nice time.

The schedule for the rest of the day starts to niggle in my brain and I begin to rearrange future events in my mind to make the day work as planned. I have left my husband, who is particularly unwell right now, in the capable hands of my daughter but she will have to leave him soon, to get on with her own plans. There is an anxiety somewhere in my chest. I notice it, I embrace it, I become internally still. Out of this turning towards the worry comes a more settled state and then practical solutions start to dart from my head into my hands: text messages are sent, reassurances received. It is all fine. I look up the street in the direction that the bus will travel and mutter more apologies to Nel, who probably hadn’t factored this long wait into her vision of time spent with Nan. She is fine, too; alternating between texting photographs of the cats and chatting to me about school. 

And all the while, the woman in the wheelchair, sits underneath the awning and calls out, “I need seven pounds for seven days.” I park my concern about the late bus and getting home and listen, without turning to face her, while she explains to a passing shopper that there is a homeless shelter nearby but to gain entry she has to raise seven pounds for seven days stay. The passer by is polite, “I hope you get it” she says and leaves without depositing any money in her cup.

My mind less clouded by worry about getting home, now, I remember that I have a small change purse in my bag, kept for parking payments, supermarket trolleys and ice creams, in the park. I take it out and Nel and I exchange a glance, our thoughts are aligned. “Would you like to give her this?” I ask and bypassing the crumpled five pound note that has previously been stuffed , hurriedly between the seams, I take out a two pound coin and hand it to Nel. She smiles and nods. The woman thanks her, says “bless you” when she receives it.  But, it is not enough. It is not merely maths, my heart knows it. 

Surely she will raise the rest by nighttime, I think. Still, I face the direction that the bus will travel and ponder the five pound note, secure in my bag. I really want to give it to her. It is my natural inclination but I am fighting it. I can feel the imprint of fear in my chest. I listen to the fear and the sound of the woman’s voice, explaining again and again why she needs to raise seven pounds for seven days to a constant stream of people who wish her well but do not give her what she needs. I don’t give her what she needs, either.

I take a few moments to breathe and, contrary to the busyness around me, settle into the quiet of meditation and I ask myself, ”Why?”  I look at those fluttering feelings of fear and remember the young girl that I once was: the fresh faced adolescent who gave without hesitation; who responded to disasters by raising money from jumble sales and raffles; who gave her pocket money, without a moment’s hesitation, to anyone who needed it; who listened to people’s troubles; who sat on a grass verge with a dying pheasant and stroked its wing but who slowly got a reputation for being too kind and then, into adulthood, picked up on the subtle feedback, from society, that somehow kindness is synonymous with weakness and that to give freely is naive and demonstrates a personality that is not able to take tough decisions – as an employee too gentle to be effective (I have debunked this myth many times) and a mother too soft with her children for their own good (my adult children are upright, kind, talented and wise).  

Our true nature is kindness, pure and simple, but non of us is immune to the cynicism of those that we come into contact with, throughout our lives. Maya Angelou said, “It takes courage to be kind”. Those words are true more so now than ever.  It does not seem fashionable to care. For those who do, it takes a certain amount of courage to go beyond social conditioning and respond to the needs of those around us. For, “Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of strength and resolution “  says Kahlil Gibran.

On that day in late February, I open up my little change purse, take out the crumpled five pound note, smooth it out a little and hand it to Nel. She knows what to do. The woman thanks her and then shouts her thanks to me, too. 

“I’ve got it!” she cries as she turns her wheelchair in the direction of the centre of town “I’ve got my seven pounds!”

The bus arrives. Nel and I go home.

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
— Dr. Seuss

There are many different kinds of love – romantic, physical, spiritual, universal – each kind prompting a connection with something both inside and outside of ourselves. But love can also be ‘tricky’, requiring a certain groundedness and insight, as Chris Yeomans explores in her piece, Love is Universal Migraine

“Love is universal migraine,
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.”

I found myself recently quoting this poem by Robert Graves to a friend and it set me pondering. Love, being ‘in love’, seems to cause more problems than it solves.  Nigel Slater recently said in a radio interview that the thing he most didn’t want to be was ‘in love.’

Like so many I guess, I fell in love and got married (albeit at an unusually advanced age!) and slowly, or not so slowly, the shine wore off.  It became possible to see how far I was projecting qualities onto someone, based on the flimsiest of evidence, that I couldn’t possibly know for sure.  And that in its turn leads me to the thought that we can’t possibly know anything for sure, least of all the shifting and changing realities of another person.

I am ‘in love’ with Stanley Tucci. I am ‘in love’ with Monty Don.  I was once ‘in love’ with Inspector Morse and he is a completely fictional character. All of this is fantasy, based on an idea of what those people would be like if I were to meet them or marry them.  I am inclined to be hard on myself and dismiss it all as rubbish, but the same friend referred to above suggested that it would be more helpful to look at the triggers behind these thoughts.  What is it that hooks me in to certain individuals and what might it show me about myself?

The same can also  happen with spiritual teachers, particularly those who wear robes or other garments that signal their spiritual authority and the promise of some form of ‘enlightenment’. All sorts of different feelings get conjured up (robes being much like uniforms and we know that “every nice girl loves a sailor.”).  But when we see these scarlet and gold robed beings in their slightly old-fashioned, brown,‘going out’ clothes, we sometimes get a very different idea.  There is a balance of course, a middle way.  Awareness must, as with most things, be the key.

But how much does this happen all the time in daily life?  We meet someone and we decide instantly whether we would get on with them or not.  John Cleese in his book ‘Families and How to Survive Them’ says that we pick up tiny signals that give us clues about what we might have in common with a person, even ‘across a crowded room.’  If this is true, then our reactions might not be so random.

But the interesting part is discovering what can be relied upon and what cannot in the picture that we have built up of another person.  Years of friendship uncovers what seems genuine and real.  A brief acquaintance may never reveal any truths, relative or not.

So the moral to all this?  We will probably always judge a book by its cover, but it’s worth reading a few chapters before we are sure of what we are dealing with.

It has been six months since we last posted on Dew on the Grass. Life has been busy for all of us, in different ways. The summer seems to be a time for outdoors and family and then there are the general ups and downs of the everyday that draw on everyone’s energy. Still, as autumn begins to wrap us up in her “mists and mellow fruitfulness”, I have a sense of returning home, here to our little blog, and to the words that are waiting patiently to be written.

It has been a revelation to me, in recent years, to realise that the creative parts of our nature are expressions of our spiritual journey. That may surprise the reader who has always known this, or in fact, does not yet know it. I have had an impetus to write since I could first hold a pen and join words together into sentences. In infant school, I was encouraged by my teacher when I wrote short stories and I often got to perform them in front of the class. I attempted to write a novel, when I was nine, sent articles to magazines, which were rejected,  and in my early teens, wrote poems that I showed to no one for fear of judgment.

Like many people, especially women, perhaps, as I emerged from the creative freedom of childhood, through adolescence, and into adulthood, crushing self-doubt stoked the belief that writing was a waste of time when I could be doing something more productive and this halted the creative flow, tied me in knots and generally crushed the intuitive knowledge within me that writing my thoughts down on the page was a means of spiritual self-discovery. Furthermore, it took many years to understand that revisiting those words, moulding them like wet clay, and presenting them to a wider audience was not necessarily a pretentious act but one of trust in a process of growth that goes deeper than the words, themselves.

Of course, life is busy and always will be, there are many pulls on our time, but neglecting the creative life within us, whether that be writing, drawing, sculpting, or other form of creativity such as sewing or knitting, if that is our means of expression,  is like shutting off our air.

Artists who write about writing not as a commercial enterprise but as a way of delving deeper into the human heart and consciousness, such as Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron, have long advocated for spending time each day simply spilling out onto the page without premeditation of what gets written. The key to this method is to allow the words to arrive on the page, without letting our inner judge impede them. We sit, without expectation, in a space that is simultaneously empty and ripe with the potential for insight. It is a revelation to bring this type of trust to our relationship with creativity, whether it is writing or any other form of art. It lays us bare, all quest for accomplishment is necessarily dropped and we release that which needs to be seen.

This is akin to sitting on our meditation cushion, facing the wall. We have no warning of what thoughts or emotions will arise.  We can do this anywhere and at any time, of course, but, as with any practice, creating an environment that is conducive to the process is helpful. Sometimes, what comes is a need to change something in our lives. Even if the change is small, it can be profound. It is the space that speaks and connects us to our true nature.

One afternoon, quite recently, after carving some time into my day for reflection and writing,  I knew that I had to do something quite specific to support myself emotionally and spiritually. Previous visitors to this blog, and to entries that I have posted, may have picked up on the fact that my husband is chronically ill, and requiring a lot of care. He lives and sleeps on the ground floor of the house, whilst I slept upstairs in an enormous double bed, a relic of a former time in our marriage. The bed filled the room. I struggled to find a bit of wall space to place my meditation bench. The room was cramped and I felt cramped, along with it. It seemed to represent my feelings of being squashed: of being held hostage in a situation that I felt I could not escape from. Of course, being in these ‘no escape’ situations can, of themselves, be a catalyst for spiritual awakening and I did not want to turn away from any part of my situation. At the same time, I felt I needed the air to move and to unblock some energy. I needed to create space in the physical environment to breathe my way back to a regular writing practice.

So, with help, I moved the enormous bed into a spare bedroom and replaced it with a far less grand single bed, which I placed against a wall, found a lovely desk on an online auction site, which now sits, catching the morning sunlight, in the bay window, and, importantly, there is also wall space for my meditation bench. The centre of the room is empty. I may dance in it if the mood takes me!

The late Thích Nhất Hạnh once said that we have a right to meditate. I think we have a right to write, too. Or, sculpt, sew paint or practice whatever connects us to our inner life and spiritual home. To do this makes us richer, more integrated human beings – we just have to show up and let go.

References:

To Autumn by John Keates

Writing Down the Bones  – Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg – Shambala Press

The Artist’s Way – A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self by Julia Cameron – Macmillan Press

 

This week we begin a new series . We are inviting submissions of art, photography, poetry, and other writing on the theme of “In the Shadows”. Images should be sent in jpeg format and writing as a Word.doc. We can also work with Pages, if you are a Mac user. Please send your offerings to us by using the contact form, on the website.

By way of inspiration, here is a poem, by Mary Oliver, which is pertinent to the time in which we live and, as always with Oliver’s writing, ends with hope and wisdom.

 Shadows

by Mary Oliver

Everyone knows the great energies running amok cast
terrible shadows, that each of the so-called
senseless acts has its thread looping
back through the world and into a human heart.
And meanwhile
the gold-trimmed thunder
wanders the sky; the river
may be filling the cellars of the sleeping town.
Cyclone, fire, and their merry cousins
bring us to grief—but these are the hours
with the old wooden-god faces;
we lift them to our shoulders like so many
black coffins, we continue walking
into the future. I don’t mean
there are no bodies in the river,
or bones broken by the wind. I mean
everyone who has heard the lethal train-roar
of the tornado swears there was no mention ever
of any person, or reason—I mean
the waters rise without any plot upon
history, or even geography. Whatever
power of the earth rampages, we turn to it
dazed but anonymous eyes; whatever
the name of the catastrophe, it is never
the opposite of love.

In the last of our posts on the theme of Lost and Losing, Anna Aysea describes her experience of training with pain. This post, which is a little longer than our usual, recommended word count, first appeared on the blog Jade Mountains and has recently been republished in the Portland Buddhist Priory Newsletter.

Due to orthopaedic surgeries and treatments, I have been dealing with long periods of excessive physical pain. Because of my body’s condition, being without pain is a rare thing in general. So training with pain is a necessity. The following is an excerpt of sorts, some bits and pieces on my personal dealings with pain. I guess what I am learning, in the process is, in essence, applicable to any form of difficulty or adversary we may encounter in daily life.

Unbearable?

When in hospital, several times a day, you are asked to assess your pain level by giving it a rating between 0 and 10, zero being no pain, ten being unbearable pain. This made me reflect on the meaning of unbearable. There have been times when  the agony I was in completely filled the whole of consciousness, excluding all else, and I felt it was utterly unbearable. But having reached unbearable nothing much happens really, you do not drop dead, you do not explode in pieces, you do not vanish out of existence. Having reached unbearable you just continue to live, your heart simply continuing to beat. The truth is, despite the agony being unbearable, you continue to bear it, anyway. So, however excessive, I thought it would be contrary to the truth to rate my pain a level 10, since if it was truly unbearable I reckon I would have dropped dead. I think this is an important distinction to be aware of when dealing with all kinds of stuff: to see clearly how something feels, how your experience of it is and then how that relates to the truth of how things really are, the bigger reality.

Room for complaint

There is a difference between mild to reasonably severe pain and truly excessive pain in the way that  it affects the mind. With excessive pain there is no escape. It nails your consciousness immovably to a single point, the now, The Reality Of Pain, that reality excludes all else. One has no option but to face it without flinching and to endure it, whether you think you are capable of it or not. With milder forms of pain, there is more room for distraction, room for escape in familiar forms like being grumpy, feeling sorry for oneself, complaining. When I catch myself complaining, sometimes, I smile and think “Actually, if I have room for complaint, I am doing not too bad!”

I should say that the above way of differentiating is for internal use only. I don’t think you can reverse it to make inferences about someone else’s pain based on their “complaint level.” That would be trying to step into another’s shoes, which — apart from being impossible — does not really help and can lead to a judgmental attitude, which is bound to heavily tax whatever is going on.

Preserving resilience

There is nothing that drains your energy more than chronic pain that lasts and lasts without giving you a break. This can be quite exhausting and depressing. What helps me to get through bleak times is to find helpful distractions that lift the mood, like watching movies and television or chatting to friends and ways of relaxing the body as much as possible to minimize the accumulation of tension and stress. But by far the main thing that preserves your resilience in a situation of ceaseless pain is to not give in to gloomy thoughts, to stay focused and to keep looking at the distinction between the feelings, the experience of the now and the truth, the bigger reality of how things really are. Not losing sight of the bigger reality prevents the mind from getting into isolation where you feel all alone in your agony. I guess that loneliness is the most unbearable of all and can make you apathetic or spiral you down into the pits of depression and despair.

Endless night

When dealing with pain, the night-time forms the biggest challenge, since for some reason, everything is multiplied: the pain, the isolation, the loneliness, the arising fears. The nights in the first week after a major surgery, for instance, seem to last eternally.

I remember one such night about two years ago after a particularly extensive operation that took 8 hours. I think it was the third night after the operation. By then, the pain is not only from operation wounds and fractures, but every bone, joint, muscle and tissue hurts after lying in the same posture for days on end, because you cannot move and bedsores start to kick in. Any sense of time completely lost in the mist of the morphine haze from the two morphine drips, I spend the time subsequently by dozing off a little and then looking at the clock on the bedside table, hoping maybe it has advanced at least half an hour, but always to find that it is only a few minutes later than the previous time I checked. Time has become like a rubber band, every minute stretches and stretches and stretches, to infinity, making the dark night last forever. A little after 1:00 am, when the pressure on my spine from lying on my back for days has become terrible, I tried to shift, turn a little to one side, but impossible, I cannot move. I decide to call for the night nurse and see if I can perhaps manage with some help.

This human being

It takes a while before the nurse answers. Must be a busy night. When she finally comes, she enters the room only halfway, staying at a distance from the bed. Not a good sign. It’s dark in the room. Out of the corner of my eye I can only see her silhouette against the light from the open door. I sense agitation emanating from her. Something is not right at all. Throat bone dry and sore from the respiration tube, my voice is a hoarse whisper. Trying to over bridge the distance, I ask if she can help me shift a little to one side. She snaps: “You are not allowed to turn!” This is not true. She knows it and I know it. She is flatly refusing to do something. I’ve been on this ward frequently due to the unending schedule of operations. Notwithstanding the understaffed situation that seems to be common for most health-care institutions, usually the staff here is friendly and helpful, including this nurse, but she has the tendency to become snappy when she is stressed. It is a big ward and there is only one nurse during the night, and a lot of patients recently operated on at the moment, so gathering from her reaction, things must be rather tough tonight. But right now this nurse is the only human being in the whole universe that I’ve got to be there for me in some small way in this dark night, and yet she is not able to. She is very stressed and annoyed; her agitation fills the single-bed hospital room like a dark cloud, intensifying the shadows. I remain silent; I know I am in no position to argue the situation. She hesitates, not quite sure how to read my silence. She then turns abruptly and leaves the room.

Expanding awareness

I am alone in a hospital room 900 kilometres from home in a foreign country. Everything and everyone familiar is far away. It is just over 1.30 am, the worst part of the endless night still to come. A feeling of utter loneliness and abandonment engulfs me like a huge wave. My mind is trapped like a caged bird in this terrible now without escape. I focus to prevent it from being hurled into dark pits of desperation and existential fear opening up all around. The flat rejection of the nurse when I am most vulnerable and helpless is spiralling my mind into withdrawal, into isolation from sheer panic. I somehow need to find my way back. To reverse the withdrawal, I use all the willpower I can summon to focus and to expand my awareness. First to the hospital bed: I feel its size, its robustness, how it supports my aching body together with all the many tubes coming in and out of it; I then expand to feel the space of the room — it is pleasant and spacious; expand to its walls and beyond, to the ward, the fellow patients — lots of them, no doubt in pain and without sleep like me; to the whole hospital, the city, to my friends far away. When my awareness expands to include it all, I become suddenly aware of this stream of love and care coming towards me from all those thinking of me, wishing me well. They may be far away and at sleep now and yet this stream is still pouring forth from them like a river of light. The stream simply leaves no room for feelings of entrapment, despair, loneliness, abandonment, such powerful emotions a moment ago, and yet where did they go? They have simply evaporated in the light of the stream when I was able to reverse the isolation and reconnect. The darkness that fills the room. Where does it go when you turn on the light switch? Like darkness, these feelings, despite their all powerful and overwhelming appearance, don’t seem to have a real substance in the end.

Nothing has changed: the lonely hospital room, the excruciating pain, the endless night ahead, the terrible weariness and exhaustion, all still there. And yet my experience of it now is very different. There is a sense of being carried, being embraced, me and everything I am going through. It is all right to just be and endure without flinching or needing to escape.

This week, Karen Richards writes about her Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) in the second in the series Losing and Lost.

Fear of missing out (FOMO) is the feeling of apprehension that one is either not in the know about or missing out on information, events, experiences, or life decisions that could make one’s life better. It was, according to Wikipedia, first identified by a marketing strategist, called Dan Herman, in 1996 and has since been exacerbated by the use of social media. But, the fear of missing or losing out is not a modern phenomenon, though it may have an acronym, now.

I have suffered from a fear of missing out since I was in my early teens. I remember being in awe of the different roads that it was possible to take in life and wanted to take them all!  There were so many subjects that one could study, craft skills that could be acquired, books to be read, and careers that could be had. It caused a sort of existential anxiety that I may die not having experienced all that could be experienced: that I may inadvertently take the wrong path and end up in a dead end, from which I could not escape. I was, passionate and enthusiastic, inquisitive about many things, had a capacity for hard work, and loved to be around interesting people but alongside this passionate enthusiasm was a deep sense of dissatisfaction and an underlying fear that by doing one thing, I was losing out on another.

This often led to me taking jobs that ultimately did not satisfy me and starting projects that I would later abandon, not through boredom but because of a nagging feeling that this was not ‘it’. I remember, at the age of nineteen, when I decided to leave nursing, before completing my training, the Head of the School of Nursing told me, “Nurse, you have the capability, just not the ‘stickability’. How right she was. Ironically, her words ‘stuck’ with me. They helped me to begin questioning why I was not satisfied. So, when I first encountered Buddhism, in my mid-twenties, I was ‘ripe’ to begin discovering, for myself, the root cause of my dissatisfaction, why suffering exists, and how to be still in the midst of it. It takes a lifetime to answer these questions but being willing to meet the fear, head-on is the beginning of understanding.

Like most of us, I have had many challenges in my life, not least of which has been the restrictions that come from being a carer for my invalid husband. As his illness and disability have progressed, both his world and mine have reduced, in the physical sense, to the extent that he is all but housebound and within the house, his world has been reduced to the few meters of space between his bed, the bathroom, and his chair, in the living room. As his carer, this has reduced my world, too. There have been times when that early existential fear of losing out on life has risen within me. The dreams and ambitions of my youth, are still there, in some measure or other. At times, I have been gripped by the claustrophobia of not being able to leave my house and simply walk as long as I wish to, jump on a train, or take a holiday. But this is a distorted view of reality.

Whilst any of these activities can be vehicles for training, they are in no way the goal. They are not the ultimate experience and cannot of themselves bring true satisfaction. The practice of meditation and Buddhist training provides the remedy for existential panic. The medicine for dissatisfaction is to meet life right where it is.

As the late Thich Nhat Hanh has said, ‘The way out is in’.  The reality of this is that no career, hobby, or visit to far-flung countries is as satisfying as the adventure experienced on the journey to meet the True self. The more I get to know myself, the wish to escape lessens and the present moment opens up and offers the True jewel.

This week, we begin a series of posts on the theme of Losing and Lost. Our first contributor is Chris Yeomans who writes about her lived experience of the slow loss that occurs when a partner has Alzheimer’s. It is both moving and relevant.

Alzheimer’s seems to me to be predominantly about loss. And so, to a lesser extent, is old age. I look at myself. I am not that young woman who lived a life decades ago, not the child that young woman once was. And yet of course there is a continuous thread in my brain, and in the brains of those who know me, which are the memories of some of those times. Selective of course. Defective certainly. But there is a certain consistency and some agreement with friends and family that they broadly represent a shared reality.

Dementia disrupts that thread. Memories are simply lost, never to be recovered. And with those memories also some recognition of patterns of behaviour. I behave in the way that I do because I have a memory of how I have behaved in similar situations, that behaviour born of genetics, circumstances, and conditioning. I can modify it to a very small extent, but I am unlikely to be able to change it completely.

The challenge of relating to someone with dementia is that those patterns no longer exist. The brain changes mean that the very person changes and seems no longer to be who they once were. That is loss of course. The loss of a person. Except that it is difficult to accept the grief of the loss because that person is still here. That body/mind continues to live a life, but the brain, which controls all things, has changed. The loved physical manifestation of that person does not now represent quite what it did. And that is a hard thing to get your head around.

I have changed too. I am not that young woman from way back. My body doesn’t do anything like the things it used to do. I am slow. I am stiff. I have lost youth and flexibility. My husband now looks like an old man in ways that he didn’t ten years ago. Change. Loss. The basics of human life.

Change is hard. I find myself caring for someone who is no longer the person that he used to be. That person has changed into someone that I wouldn’t, sometimes, necessarily, find it easy to be with or relate to. And so I have to deal all the time with the question of acceptance. And that too is quite tricky. In relationships, there are lines to be drawn. There are things we can accept and things that we challenge. But in a relationship with someone with an impaired brain, there is no point in trying to challenge, as there can be no learning or changing without memory. The person I live with has changed but is not yet a complete stranger. And even with increased mental impairment, that body will continue to remind me of the person who once engaged with me. It will be hard, I’m sure.

This week, Karen Richards explores the reasons that we have borders and boundaries and what life would be like without them.

My neigbour brought me samosas and birthday cake, left over from a party. We chatted, by my open front door, on a warm September evening. I invited him in and he thanked me but did not cross the threshold.

Instead, we ‘put the world to rights’, on the doorstep. He asked after my husband’s health and I about that of his mother and father.; an exchange of pleasantries. sincerely meant, we turned our talk to food and family, hopes and fears.

He told me he dreamed of a community in which we all came together to pool our resources in a common space, with a commonly shared garden in which to grow things, to sit and take time to talk to one another.  I smiled and said I had the same vision. That, when I look out of the bedroom window, and see the little patchwork squares of garden, each one sectioned off by larch lap fence panels, I sometimes want to rush out and flatten those boundaries to make one great quilt of land; to say, ‘Hey, let’s share this space, arrange it with benches and a communal vegetable plot, flowers beds and a little firepit to sit around, fairy lights and a games area for the kids”. A place to talk and laugh and not be islands, sufficient only to ourselves but to enjoy our oneness and interdependence.

We basked in this possibility for a while, as if we had just discovered something new and achievable but, when I eventually thanked him again for the food and closed the door, I went once more to my bedroom window and gazed on the very different plots of land below me. It was a nice idea but perhaps an unobtainable ideal. For, without boundaries, my wild, cottage-style patch would creep out into next door’s neat, minimalist garden and my energetic lurcher dog would torment Ruby, the cockerpoo, that lives at number 4. Watching the children playing and digging in the dirt would, perhaps, be an idyll to some and an annoyance to others. Would we live in utopian harmony, or would we come to resent that we did not have a space to call our own, unique to us, to express ourselves on our own terms?

Across the globe, there are bigger patches of land, each with its own borders. The inhabitants of these patches mostly live in harmony with those on the other side of the fence and some, sadly, do not. Some share the same space but are so different from one another that finding common ground is difficult. Others see beyond the differences and try to make it work.

Borders and boundaries have their usefulness. There is a protective nature to them that provides us with the privacy and peace to be ourselves. At the same time, they can compound the notion that we are separate from one another, becoming a barrier to seeing life as it truly is and enjoying the fruits of our oneness with all life. It is a lifetime’s work to flatten our own fences and enjoy that oneness. Better to start sooner than later.

I hope you enjoy this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugrAo8wEPiI