Category: health

We’ll see

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Other people’s words about … getting sick

In the laboratory on the other hand it is rare that something totally out of the blue occurs. You set your own conditions and to a large extent the future is predetermined. Only some of the details are fluctuant. And even if something unexpected does occur you can usually work out the mechanism, uncover a logic that is always present in nature even if we don’t see it a lot of the time. Whereas in the clinic it sometimes felt as if there was not logic at all and that, when you were talking to the patients about what might happen to them, trying to answer their questions and so on, you might as well read their horoscope. “We’ll see,” you would say whenever a patient asked something as basic as “Will it work, doctor, the treatment?” or “What will happen?”, entirely reasonable questions, you might think, but completely unanswerable. “We’ll see,” you could only say, “we’ll see.”

from ‘This Living and Immortal Thing‘
by Austin Duffy

I used to be one of those people who loved watching medical dramas on TV — the ones set in emergency departments or in GP clinics or centred around a class of student surgeons. (You know the ones I mean.) It wasn’t the medical crises they depicted that I loved; it was the human dramas that the writers of the show wrote around those medical crises, the love stories, the broken hearts, the moral dilemmas — all those.

I’ve grown weary of those medical dramas, though. I don’t know if that’s just because I’ve become a more seasoned and cynical TV watcher overall or because I am more conscious now, as an older woman, of my own real-life encounters with the medical system. Whatever the reason, though, I recently very much enjoyed watching the TV dramatisation of Adam Kay’s memoir, This Is Going To Hurt (which I read some years ago). It’s a series I can highly recommend, even for the most seasoned watcher of medical dramas. (For starters, it’s so much more than a medical drama.)

Another jetty photo! March 2024.

[It felt as though] you might as well read their horoscope, writes Austin Duffy’s narrator, an oncologist turned clinical researcher, in the passage I’ve quoted above. He captures here something I once thought I’d found in the medical dramas I watched (until I saw through their paper-thin, highly sexualised plots). We seek treatment from doctors for our illnesses and frailties, Duffy’s narrator reminds us, but they, our doctors, are only frail, too. Most of the time — I truly believe this — they are working in the dark, making the best guesses they can about how to make us better. Sometimes they get it right; sometimes they get it wrong.

Austin Duffy is himself an oncologist, and he writes beautifully about the medical world and how it intersects with the other parts of our lives, our hopes and longings and dreams. I find it humbling to read the reminder he gives us, through his narrator, that our bodies write their own narratives — and that sometimes (mostly?) all that we, like his narrator, can say about the course of our illness is … ‘We’ll see.’

Lately I’ve been reading …

My novella, Ravenous Girls, is a story about two sisters in the 1980s, one of whom is receiving treatment for anorexia. Outside of fiction, there is some fascinating, erudite and nuanced writing about anorexia and eating disorders, as the articles I’ve linked to below all demonstrate. Each of these pieces, in their own way, moved me and made me think.




 

Becoming

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Other people’s words about … leaving home

Much as I love my mother, much as I love that fabulous fridge, the free heating, the coffee grinder with whole, organic beans, much as I love reading on the sofa while she shifts and grunts over her Sudoku, I really did need to get away.

Meanwhile, some oozing, inner self knew what I was doing when I loaded up the boot of her car and broke her heart. When I made my mother drive me across town to a damp room in a run-down street, whose only attraction was the fact that she was not in it. I was going to fall apart. I had been so good, I had done all the things. Now, I wanted to sleep under a hedge and wake to the rain.

I also wanted to move out of this crap, overpriced town but I had not figured out where to go yet, so I was in a house in Ballybough that belonged to someone’s dead granny, first of all with Lily and, when she left for London, with her friend Stuart and one other randomer in the box room. Every time I went online, I found light-flooded interiors with potted plants the size of our kitchen. Outside, the red-brick streets were starting to look curated and I was just flicking through a life that wasn’t mine. Just flicking through.

from ‘The Wren, The Wren‘
by Anne Enright

I remember going away, leaving my childhood home, like the narrator in the passage above, Nell, does when she leaves her mother Carmel. I found it harder to break away than Nell and so I bought a plane ticket and flew overseas, because that was the only way I could make myself leave —- it required money; it required fear; it required loneliness; it required a non-refundable, one-way plane ticket to the other side of the world. I am not speaking figuratively here. As soon as I was on that plane, I felt afraid but I could not jump out —- that’s the thing about planes; you can’t jump out —- and so I went on flying away, leaving home (although, like Nell, I grew up and came home again eventually).

Path to the beach, Silver Sands, March 2024.

Last year I turned fifty-three and yet the stories that most move me, the books I most often read, are still, even now, about young people coming of age —- or if not young people, then people at moments in their lives when they become bigger or older or wiser or sadder, when they become in essence someone new, which is after all another form of coming of age. Perhaps what I mean is that I love stories of becoming.

Being fifty-three is a time when you come of age in another way. It is, you know, especially for women. I am right in the throes of that now, my last coming of age, perhaps.

It’s funny in some ways, because all the things I taught myself to do when I was younger, all the things I taught myself to do in order to grow up and look after myself and find a way of moving through the world with more ease (which is perhaps the very definition of finding a way to grow up) no longer work, not at fifty-three. My coping mechanisms, that is to say, are no longer effectual at helping me to cope — not because they no longer work, I don’t think, but because I simply can’t do them anymore.

Crooked tree and seat, The Washpool, March 2024.

For example.

You teach yourself to be intimate with other people -— a man you love, a friend you adore, another friend you trust. You teach yourself to be fit and strong. You teach yourself to drink a little wine every now and then, because it helps you to relax. You teach yourself to be okay with solitude. You teach yourself these things -— I taught myself these things -— but now these things, most of them, are slowly becoming inaccessible to me, simply by virtue of the fact that I am fifty-three. And fifty-three, I am finding, says no to these things. Physically, I mean. It says no.

Cracked mud, March 2024.

So I look down the tunnel of my fifties and I see what every other fifty-year-old before me has seen, no doubt. And I do not feel, no matter what decision I make, as though I am growing bigger or wiser or sadder or in any way newer. I am growing older, definitely. There is that.

But then there are books like The Wren, The Wren. Because I lied a little when I said that all the coping mechanisms I taught myself as a younger woman no longer work for me. One of them still does. I read. I read. I read.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Unfathomable

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Other people’s words about … unrequited desire

My husband saw me watching him over dinner each night and never asked me what was on my mind. Maybe he knew it was all terrible, unfathomable. Maybe he knew me better than I realised. And isn’t that a perfect cruelty. And isn’t that a marriage. Two people locked in a box together. I still talk to him, Violet, as much as I talk to you. Even a mouse in a trap will self-amputate rather than remain stuck, I tell him. if you’d only touched me, I tell him. All that summer I was dying over and over, I tell him, but I’m only telling the air, the empty room.

from ‘Cursed Bread‘
by Sophie Mackintosh

I don’t think I’ve ever read a more powerful, fevered narrative of desire than the story that Sophie Mackintosh’s narrator, Elodie, tells in Cursed Bread. Elodie desires her husband, who once desired her but doesn’t any longer. She desires him and she tries to make him desire her. She kisses him. She touches him. She climbs on top of him. He rolls away every time, which only makes her desire grow stronger.

Elodie’s longing for her husband, and her longing for him to long for her, is not the only thing that Mackintosh’s novel is about, but — for me, at least — it is the most powerful element of the story. I’ve been looked at in pity and in fear and I’ve learned that the only way to really be seen is through desire, Elodie writes. To be looked at and found whole. Found alive. Please look at me. I promise you that I am here.

Summer bike ride, Aldinga, January 2024.

There is an element of tragedy here that the only way Elodie can imagine herself being acknowledged and seen is as a sexual being, and yet this, too, rings true to me. As she herself might say: And isn’t this the story of desire. Isn’t this the story of every woman who has ever wanted to be seen.

At fifty-three, I find myself intrigued by stories about desire in a way that I wasn’t as a younger woman. Perhaps it’s because I understand at last how much we, all of us — all of us women, at least — long to be seen. Perhaps it’s also because I understand at last how easy it is to confuse being desired (and desirable?) with being seen.

Hospital waiting room, February 2024.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Inkling

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Other people’s words about … self-perception

The evening was cold with a bolt of black cloud over the dome of the courts. Inside, a maitre d’ approached. He led me to a high marble table with several stools and a can of light on a chain.
Thankyou, I said. I’m waiting for two more.
They were already late. I wondered if the robust twists of bread stacked in a basket to my left were real or fake. I didn’t see anybody that I knew. The food was expensive but I would not be paying for it. At times like this I simply felt too large. I am not a large person but I felt too large, as if I’d bloated, as if I were rangier and wider and more ungainly than other people.

from ‘This Happy‘
by Niahm Campbell

I’ve experienced the feeling that Niamh Campbell’s narrator describes suddenly coming over her in the passage above — the feeling of largeness, of having an outsized body in comparison to other people’s bodies — so many times in my life that I’ve lost count. Till now, though, I’ve always assumed that it was one of those quirks that is unique to people who have lived with an eating disorder.

It’s certainly true that one of the motivations behind my anorexia was a longing to shrink my body. And I’m not alone in this; over the years I’ve met other people with anorexia who have expressed the same motivation. In fact, back when I was a teenager, in the early days of my treatment, the nurses frequently used to say to me and my fellow anorexic patients, ‘You deserve to take up space.’ It was a kind of motto they came out with when we were feeling low, when we said hateful things about ourselves; they would chant it at us — in an effort to distract us, or perhaps to dissuade us, or even, impossibly, to cure us.

You deserve to take up space.

Those words, that chant, never quite resonated with me. My sense of largeness didn’t feel spatial; it felt physical and embodied, the way one person might have a louder voice than another, or coarser hair. Still, even as the feeling came over me — even as at certain moments it took up all my awareness — I understood that it wasn’t an accurate one. At heart, I knew even then that my body wasn’t any larger than anyone else’s, and that it was my perceptions that were distorted rather than my body. It was just that I didn’t know how to adjust those perceptions.

In many ways, I think, I still don’t. Instead, I’ve learned to ignore my perceptions, to see them as a false signal blinking at me that I choose to ignore. Maybe that’s a rudimentary way of dealing with them, but it’s the most effective response I’ve come up with.

Branch across the path, December 2023.

Because today is the last day of the year, the last day of 2023, I’m going to move on now to an entirely different topic. I want to finish this post with a beautiful poem by Lisa Holstein called ‘Happy New Year’. The poem comes from her collection Dream Apartment; its words are poignant and filled with sadness but also beauty, and so I can’t think of any better ones with which to bring in the new year.

Is it selfish to wish for more than to survive?
I see you, bare arms gleaming in the sun-

struck snow, I see the browned roast
you brought to your wine-stained lips

the stack of books you read, and those boots
that last fall you loved yourself in.

I see you in them again on this roll call
morning stroll through what intimate data

strangers tell me about their lives.
Once upon a time I asked them to

or they asked me, who can recall,
I’m into it, I guess. I like to watch,

at least, I can’t seem to stop, but I can’t
bear to share, so I’ll tell you here:

the cat finally came home last night—
spooked by so many fireworks barking,

he hid somewhere unsearchable for a while
no matter how I called and called.

He chose me, I like to say since the day
I found him starving on the porch.

I know the night is full of unsteady boats
on cold seas and horrible cages

and people far more alone than me
I’m sorry for your loss, your cancer,

the accident you had no way to see coming
and the one you did have an inkling of

I’ve learned how important it is to say
because of how difficult it is to say

and how loudly loneliness fills the silence
although, like anything, it depends—

for instance, I still can’t unhitch my breath
from even the softest whisper of your name.

Late groundsel flower, December 2023.

Lately I’ve been reading …

All that food

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Other people’s words about … not eating

Mae doesn’t look convinced, but she hands me another bowl, which I pass to TJ. He holds it in the space between us, locking eyes.
You didn’t take any, he says.
I took plenty, I say. I’m stuffed.
No. I watched you.
You must’ve blinked.
Then try some more.
I just told you–
Don’t be a dick, says TJ.
Boys, says Mae.
Her voice is terse enough to shut us up.
Mae holds our gaze until we’ve settled. Then she pours more wine into her coffee mug, twirling her food with a fork.
It’s been too long since we’ve been together, says Mae. Let’s make it a nice evening.
So TJ shoves the bowl of tomatoes my way. I scoop more onto my plate. Then I take bites from the spaghetti and the chicken, and it’s all delicious, and the three of us eat silently, until there’s something like a hum between us.
Is the bathroom still in the same place, I ask.
Mae points down the hallway. I don’t look at TJ when I stand. But once I’ve locked the door behind me, I turn on the faucet, and it’s maybe another five seconds before all that food leaves me.

from ‘Family Meal‘
by Bryan Washington

When I was a teenager receiving treatment for an eating disorder, people had certain fixed ideas about what kind of person was likely to experience anorexia. By ‘people’, I mean not just family and friends but doctors, psychiatrists, medical researchers. Anorexics, people thought then (because that was what we called people with anorexia in those years, anorexics, a label that many people would now object to), were generally white, middle-class, well-educated, high-achieving, likeable young women with a tendency towards perfectionism.

Perhaps, back then, this was true. Or perhaps, more likely, if you were anorexic but you happened to be male, poor, uneducated, older than twenty-five, queer, or a person of colour — or any combination of these things — then your anorexia went unrecognised. Undiagnosed. Untreated.

We know better than this now, I am thankful to say.

Fringe Lily, December 2023.

In the passage I’ve quoted above, Cam, one of the narrators of Bryan Washington’s second novel, Family Meal, is grieving the loss of his boyfriend, Kai, who died in unexpected, violent circumstances. Cam is Black and queer; he is also addicted to many things, including drugs, sex and, yes, starving himself. He is surrounded by friends who see what he is doing to himself and try to talk to him about it, try to show him that they see, and that they care, and that he doesn’t need to be alone. It takes him a long time to see this for himself, though.

Cam’s experience of struggling with food is different from mine, and that’s partly because of who each of us is — precisely because I did, after all, fit most of the anorexic stereotypes I’ve listed above — although it’s also partly because everyone’s struggle with food is, simply, different. But I am so glad, so glad, that contemporary literature that includes stories about anorexia and disordered eating has broadened to include other stories than ones like mine.

And it’s funny how, no matter what your background, no matter what your life experience, the feelings don’t change. I’m fucking suffocating from the weight of myself, Cam writes.

I remember feeling exactly the same.

After the rain, Flooded scrub, November 2023.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Fumbling

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Other people’s words about … growing up

I also felt like I was being pushed into a world where I didn’t understand the rules. The summer before we moved, a bunch of my friends at camp were caught kissing boys behind our cabin with their T-shirts off. I didn’t even know why a girl would take her T-shirt off with a boy, but I knew it was very wrong to do so, because they all got into big trouble. I’d started going to after-school ballroom dancing lessons in New York, which was something kids from my part of Manhattan did, maintaining an Upper East Side fantasy that we all still lived in an Edith Wharton novel. At the last dance, a boy put his hand on my bottom. Again, I couldn’t understand why a boy would want to touch my bottom, but I knew I didn’t like it. But I also knew that admitting I didn’t like it — like admitting I didn’t know why a boy would want to see my chest — would make people laugh at me. So I said nothing to him, to anyone.

from ‘Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia‘
by Hadley Freeman

One of the things I loved about Hadley Freeman’s memoir Good Girls is that, as well as recounting the years during which she lived with anorexia, she also recounts her life post-anorexia, post-‘recovery’. While the story she tells of her rapid and precipitous descent into anorexia in early adolescence is vivid and poignant, it’s the rest of her story that most spoke to me — the years during which she maintained a pattern of restricted eating that wasn’t quite anorexia but also wasn’t quite wellness or sanity, the years when she lost herself to drug addiction, the years, finally, when she began to come to some kind of peace with herself.

It’s time that eating disorder narratives did this more often, I think. I said nothing … to anyone, Freeman writes in the passage above, and, elsewhere, So much of anorexia is about suppressed conversations. But I think this is as true, if not truer, of those years when a person who has survived anorexia begins to make their way back into life, those years when a person begins to try to make something of their life other than an anorexic one. (And they are years. For most people, the transition away from anorexia is long and slow and painful.) We need, in our narratives about anorexia, to engage with the whole experience, not just one part of it, the most clearly visible part. We need to tell the whole story. I hope that in the future there will be more writers like Freeman who do so.

Looking out onto Lake Burley Griffin, Canberra, November 2023.

I’ll return to this theme in future posts, because there’s so much to unpack here, and because it’s one of the things I was most conscious of when I wrote my novella, Ravenous Girls. In fact, though, what most drew me to the passage I’ve quoted in today’s post is something else. Here Freeman, describing her pre-anorexic period, her pre-adolescent years, writes, I also felt like I was being pushed into a world where I didn’t understand the rules. This is how I felt, too — at twelve years old, at thirteen, even at fourteen. I was what people kindly describe as a late bloomer, which is to say that I entered adolescence reluctantly, lingering in childhood for as long as I could, wishing that I could somehow stay a child forever. Teenage rituals, those fumbling intimacies between boys and girls that Freeman describes here, puzzled me. I knew this marked me out as different, or at least I believed that it did, and so, like Freeman, I remained quiet. I regret this quietness now. I see, looking back, that I was muting myself, retreating into a silence that wasn’t healthy or sustainable. As Freeman notes, it’s in suppressing conversations that anorexia steps in, and that was certainly true for me.

Ravenous Girls isn’t only a story about anorexia, though that’s a part of it. It’s a story about silence and muteness. Perhaps these are themes I’ll continue to explore for the rest of my life. It’s a theme that endlessly fascinates me.

For sale, November 2023.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Loss

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Other people’s words about … doing what we love

It was a lie that Timo had not loved [playing] piano enough. He had loved it very much, but in a way that was difficult to describe. It was apophatic — he could only describe it through its negation. He only understood how much he loved the piano after he had given it up. Even that decision in hindsight seemed arbitrary, a whim. An act of petulance. But he had loved it, and he still did. Every day, he felt like a struck tuning fork, vibrating all the time. Except that it wasn’t pitch he was tuned to but something else, some horrible frequency cutting through the universe. Loss, he thought. It was loss.

from ‘The Late Americans‘
by Brandon Taylor

In the passage above, Taylor’s character Timo is a graduate student in Iowa who used to study music but then gave up. Sometimes, when he is on his own in the apartment he shares with his boyfriend, Fyodor, who works at a meat-packing plant, he sits listening to classical music recordings, losing himself in the music he so loves. But when Fyodor comes home, Timo switches the music off immediately, mid-piece, refusing to talk to Fyodor about this thing he so loves — refusing, also, to allow Fyodor to share in a part of him that in many ways still feels like the truest part of himself.

The Washpool, September 2023.

When I read the words I’ve quoted above, I thought about the times that I’ve given up writing over the years. Though I’m not beginning to claim that I am as talented a writer as Timo is a musician, nonetheless, writing for me has always been a channel of creativity, a tool that helps me make sense of and navigate the world. I don’t know why, honestly. I do know that I have a longing to make something beautiful (though this is another impulse I don’t really understand), and that writing is the only way I know how to (try to) do this. Maybe that’s why, every time I’ve ‘given up’ writing ‘for good’, I’ve returned to the practice later.

I’ve written before about how I’ve learned over the years to value my writing practice for the practice itself rather than for any measurable outcome. That’s partly what I’m saying again here, in response to the words I’ve quoted today. But it’s more than that, too. What Taylor expresses so beautifully is the same sense of loss I always feel when I stop writing. His image of a tuning fork vibrating to the wrong frequency describes this feeling beautifully. At the same time, I’d also describe the feeling another way, as a feeling of being muted. Silenced. When I don’t write, I feel as though I have lost my voice: I feel as though no-one hears me.

I understand, as a writer who is published very infrequently, that few people hear me, anyway. But writing is my way of speaking to the world, and not writing is the opposite of that. Not writing feels like grief.

The Washpool, September 2023.

Meanwhile, I’ll be back soon with another post about writing, and with a little piece of news, the news I’ve been hinting at for months now. Watch this space! ❤

Lately I’ve been reading …

Grasp

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Other people’s words about … reading

After most of my long days at work, I would arrive back at the flat, pour myself a glass of wine or vodka and read, mainly short stories and poetry. I wasn’t reading novels because I didn’t want that kind of continuity; I didn’t want to carry over any part of narrative from one day to the next. Sometimes I read poetry in languages I didn’t fully understand — with a sense of the meaning, but reaching for it, grasping after it. One of my other pleasures was smoking, but I didn’t dwell or savour; I narrowed it down to lighting up and the first few drags — after that I lost interest. I read like I smoked: fixating on my new favourite in its entirety to begin with and then honing in on the exact phrase or phrases that gave me the fix, then reading only for those, discarding the rest and when that poem had been emptied out, moving on to the next.

from ‘Signs of Life‘
by Anna Raverat

I’m not a smoker and I love reading novels far more than I do short stories or poetry, but still, I found myself smiling in recognition when I read the narrator’s description in the passage by Raverat above about her approach to reading. I experience myself, these days, as a greedy reader — greedy for beautiful words, phrases, images, moments, greedy for the fix they give me, while often the plot or theme of a novel remains distant or abstract to me.

Pathway, Sellicks Beach, July 2023.

Reading has been an important part of my life for as long as I can remember, though the reasons for its importance to me has varied over the years. These days, it feels like an escape for me from the world, or perhaps more accurately an escape into someone else’s world — that world they create with their words. And, like anyone addicted to their fix, I’m not about to give it up.

Little green bench (a place to read in when the warmer weather returns?)
Sellicks Beach, July 2023.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Today’s reading list is exclusively about animals and pets — for all the animal-lovers out there! xo


Ravaging

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Other people’s words about … growing older as a woman

The things they don’t tell you about menopause are multiple and ever-changing, newly horrifying with every fresh wave.

I know there are positives. Apparently you no longer care what people think about you. Apparently you have come into your power, you are a wise elder, you don’t give a shit about what anyone else might say.

Only you do. The thing no-one tells you about menopause is that you look like you don’t care because your face is set that way, because you get used to trying not to care until you imagine it is true. But you do care. It is ravaging and you do care, you really do.

from ‘Fat Girl Dancing‘
by Kris Kneen

I can’t think of a time when I didn’t care about what other people think about me. I have always been someone who cares too much about this, who compares myself with others and finds myself wanting in every way I can think of to be found wanting.

This hasn’t changed as I’ve got older. Like Kneen, I’ve heard the truisms around ageing; I’ve listened to and read the interviews in which famous older women tell their interviewer that at fifty/sixty/seventy they feel wiser/calmer/happier/more beautiful than at any previous stage in their life — and I’ve believed them. (Let it be said, I am somewhat suggestible when it comes to what other people say. It comes with the territory.)

Sunset, Taperoo Beach, June 2023.

I was thinking, when I first read Kneen’s words, about writing a post here about how we as women are objectified; about how that’s why, when we reach menopause, we feel the way Kneen describes; about how, though objectification feels odious, being silently discarded feels even worse. But this morning as I sat down to write this post, I found that what I wanted to say was something else.

What I really want to say is that one of the things I have come to realise as I grow older is that the pieces of received wisdom I’ve absorbed over the years rarely work for me when I try to apply them to myself. Over and over again over the years, I’ve had to discard those generalisations — about living, about being a woman, about growing older, about finding some level of happiness or contentment or peace — and find my own truth.

At fifty-two, I certainly don’t feel that I am coming into my power, and I could not feel further from being a wise elder. But I do know that in the years that lie ahead of me, if I am lucky enough to live them, I will continue to need to find my own path through life. I will continue to need to turn away from those truisms and pieces of received wisdom about how my life should appear to me. And I will continue to need to be less suggestible. Because I do care; I really do. I always will.

Black and white, Taperoo Beach, June 2023.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Solace

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Other people’s words about … stepping outside

I went outside. Often I walked till the late hours. The sky’s was a darkness I could deal with. I wanted to stop living by the measures of everyone else: before and after, death and life, sea and self. Being out there — in towns where I spoke to no-one, in green deserted parks, along the edge of the gulf’s water — allowed me to turn inwards. It reflected the silence I felt in me. I wanted to be outdoors for good. Yes, I went outside.

from ‘The Memory Artist‘
by Katherine Brabon

Pasha, the narrator of Katherine Brabon’s novel The Memory Artist, is a Russian man in his mid-thirties, a writer trying to make sense of his life post-glasnost, post-perestroika. While the story in Brabon’s novel is about the effect of political repression on people, and particularly on artists, I found uncanny echoes in Pasha’s voice of my own thoughts and feelings (although not, clearly, in response to any political repression or trauma, neither of which I have experienced).

Sky and Sea, Snapper Point, April 2023.

I wanted to stop living by the measures of everyone else, Pasha writes, by which he means not that he wants to stop living, but that he wants to accord his own values to this life he is living. Where he finds it most possible to do this is outside, under the great arch of the sky.

It’s a similar impulse, I think, that makes running so appealing to me — running through the scrub, running on the beach, running beside the sea. It’s outside where I find some of the things I most long for in life: silence, neutrality, the sense that I could (if I went on running long enough, if I stayed outdoors long enough) dissolve.

Sometimes, when I’m inside going about my day — working, sleeping, eating, showering — I remind myself that the sky is just a few steps away, literally at my feet. It feels to me like the very definition of solace.

Sun and shadow, Aldinga Beach, April 2023.

Lately I’ve been reading …

An apology of sorts: today’s list is lengthy, I know, but it’s been a while since I last posted here, and meanwhile I’ve been enjoying my online reading! I hope you will dip in and out of the list below and find something that you enjoy.