The ebb and flow of things

Hello friends,

You may or may not have noticed that the Spring took a little hibernation. Sometimes life is so – and we need to answer to the ebb and flow that calls to us.

As a society, we have an inclination to not allow things to ebb and flow, or to fight against it in the endless campaign for year-round excellence and productivity. Friendships and relationships, we are taught, should be extremely deep and long-lasting, work and projects should be high-achieving and goal-oriented, hobbies ought to be capitalised on and excelled in. And often, this striving approach saps all the joy from the thing you’re doing and leaves it all flat and miserable. Roosevelt said comparison is the thief of joy, but I think it’s more accurate to say that expectations are the real drain.

Just like wood expanding and contracting in an old house, making the floorboards creak, things change. Our focus shifts. We grow together and apart. But, because of our expectations, we feel unnecessarily guilty for that natural shifting. I feel like I miss my old friend the Spring, but I don’t feel bad about it. We’re still friends.

And so, here is a short one, just to finish the year. Thank you for joining me if and when you have, and I hope you have a lovely end to your year.

Living the life you have been given

At this time of year, there is a sense of time escaping, or perhaps it’s more that time has suddenly gone – and here we are, standing at the far end, looking back. The feeling of the slippery momentum of life can set us off balance, and leave us thinking that we need to review, set goals and conjure an imagined version of who we could be.

There can be a tendency to analyse choices made, roads not taken, ideas left incomplete. Perhaps you feel in a wonderful mood, all puffed up with content at the person you were this year. The point is: it’s an interesting illusion. You don’t actually need to summarise anything: you are here now. The need to reassess, write down and action-plan the new year can seem like something important, to improve yourself, to move forwards in life, to make “resolutions”. But the truth is, if your heart is aligned with your best self – if you check in with your actions and speak mindfully as much as you can, life will direct itself towards the best possible scenario. It is a self-driving car. In fact, the more you try to drive it, the more you may miss the open doors and windows to alternative lives more interesting and fulfilling.

This idea is captured with signature subtle brilliance in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize-winning 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. It’s not a new book, but just in case you haven’t read it, I won’t spoil the plot – but I will share a quote:

“There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one. It is possible to feel both simultaneously: the fleeting sense of what might have been and the overwhelming understanding that you are living the life you have been given.”

Reminiscence of a Shard of Glass, by Kelsa Kuchera, 2024

Talking of books

It’s been a super year of books. In a nostalgic swing away from tech, my social media algorithms have been full of “granny crafts” and real-bookshop-romanticism. The only problem is that you can’t knit and read a physical book at the same time – well, I can’t anyway.

Here are some of my favourite things from the book and yarn worlds recently:

I picked up The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk at the English Bookshop on a whim, because I loved Drive Your Plow… so much. It didn’t disappoint, a clever, slowly unfolding plot that weaves shocking real quotes about women from respected male authors with a grotesque gothic brooding that is both literary and vaudevillian in the best possible way. One of the best books I’ve read in a while, and a brilliant companion to the short but expansive I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman. In contrast to Tokaczuk’s novel, Harpman’s landscape is sparse, harsh and tantalisingly unsatisfying. (The good kind of unsatisfying that leaves you Googling theories and reading Reddit threads.) In both books, the focus is the perception of women, but approached from opposite perspectives. Give them a go if you haven’t already… and then please email me all your theories.

“What does having lived mean once you are no longer alive?

(Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men)

Wondering how crochet leads to enlightenment? This Ram Dass talk has the answer:

“At that time most of my audiences were very young and they tended to wear white and they tended to smile a lot and wear flowers. At that time I wore beads and had a long beard. I recall that in the front row of my audience there was one woman who was about 70, she was wearing black oxfords and a print dress and she had a black patent leather bag. I looked at her and I couldn’t figure out what she was doing in the audience cause she was so dissimilar from all the rest of the audience.

At the end of the lecture I couldn’t resist, I just kind of smiled to her so intensely that she just had to come up and speak to me. And she came up and she said “Thank you so much. That makes perfect sense. That’s just the way I understand the universe to be.” And I said, “How do you know? I mean, what have you done in your life that has brought you into those kinds of experiences?” She leaned forward very conspiratorially and she said, “I crochet”. And at that moment I realized that the ways in which people arrive at spiritual understanding was certainly a much wider variety of paths than what I had anticipated. I had begun to think that my way was the only way, which seems to be a common illness of people who get into spiritual work.”

So that’s my new excuse for taking my knitting everywhere with me.

Taxi!, by Natan Elkanovich, 2024

Here Today and Gone Tomorrow
By Margaret Fishback

Unfortunately happiness
Depends a little more than less
On undependable, and hence
Absurdly charming elements

Until next time, may you be well, happy, whole and free.
Love T&B x

~~~~~~

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