I’ve been thinking about reading again recently — what it means to me, what it gives to me, why, even though it’s a solitary activity, it makes me feel connected to the world. I like Sarah Clarkson’s use of the word journey, in the passage below, to describe the act of reading. Reading, like life, is a journey. You never know where it might take you.
Reading, rather, is a journey. Reading is the road you walk to discover yourself and your world, to see with renewed vision as you encounter the vision of another … Reading is a way to live.
From ‘Book Girl‘ by Sarah Clarkson
Reading is a journey
PS It’s good to be back in the blogging world. I’m changing the format of my posts slightly this year, but it’s still all about celebrating other people’s words. So … here’s to another year! xo
At not yet thirty, she can feel her life shrinking into the gentle sameness of her days and she knows she is pacing back and forth in a comfortable cage of her own construction. She needs someone to bump against, to disrupt things. she can’t go on like this, she knows. She must resolve the tension between longing and fear.
From ‘The Fragments‘ by Toni Jordan
I’m back! I’ve missed blogging. I’ve missed you all, too.
And I’ve gone on collecting other people’s words, gone on taking photographs of the world around me, gone on wanting to have a place to keep the words I’ve collected and the pictures I’ve taken. So I’ve decided, rather than ending this blog completely, as I first planned to do, to pop in every now and then with a quote I love or a photograph I’ve taken. I’d like to keep the practice up, and I hope that some of you will continue to enjoy reading the words I’ve found, or seeing the photographs I’ve taken, as you might have done in the past.
Last year, as some of you may remember, I lost my job. In the end, instead of looking for a new job straight away, I decided I would take a few weeks or months off first. And so that’s what I’ve been doing in the weeks since I last wrote: living on my savings and trying out, meantime, new habits, new practices. I’m trying to disrupt some of my old ways, like Caddie in the passage I’ve quoted above; I’m trying to stop pacing back and forth in a comfortable cage of [my] own construction; I’m trying to let my life expand, rather than to shrink. There’s no time like now!
Because there is always a way through … always
Thank you for accompanying me so far on my blogging journey. Thank you, too, to the readers who wrote to me and encouraged me to keep posting, if only sporadically: who told me I was missed. I hope you all find pleasure in the posts that are still to come.
Happiness doesn’t come in the way I expected; not a massing of good things over time, but a succession of small, strange and unowned moments — the sun makes a hot oblong on the bedroom floor and I stand in it with my eyes closed. The coriander germinates in the window box and up comes the seedling. The bled radiators stop knocking at night.
From ‘Dear Thief‘ by Samantha Harvey
I thought it was apt to write a post on happiness today, to accompany my previous post on sadness — though perhaps both posts are, after all, about the same thing, simply taken from opposing perspectives.
But also it seemed apt to me to write a post about happiness because today’s post, I think, will be my last post, at least on this blog, twenty-one words.
Over the years, I’ve written about many things on this blog — the sea, the sky, vomiting, writing, books, therapy, running, walking, travel, birds, flowers, hope, to name a few. But in many ways, I see, looking back, that I’ve been exploring, post by post, what it means to live a small life in the happiest, or at least the most meaningful and most humble, way I know.
Happiness, as Harvey says, isn’t something you can accumulate or amass; it most surely isn’t something you can own. It flits into our lives and out again. Writing this blog has been, for me, both a meaningful and a humbling experience — and in that sense it has been a happy experience for me, too. I don’t know if my posts have brought you, my readers, any moments of happiness, but I hope so: I do.
I spent over half my life waiting for the accumulation of happiness and then I realised that it doesn’t accumulate at all, it just occurs here and there, like snow that falls and never settles. Not the drifts that you and I imagined we would plough ourselves into, but instead gently, opportunistically, holding one’s tongue out to catch the flakes.
I’m not sure yet whether I’ll leave this blog up for posterity (i.e. for a little while!) or whether I’ll take it down altogether, or whether, perhaps, I’ll change its privacy settings so that you can only access it by contacting me first. (Please feel free to do that, if it’s what I do.)
In the meantime, I’ll go on running and walking and hoping and reading and looking, looking, looking.
I’m still on Instagram and post there regularly — mostly photos of the beach and of nature (no selfies, I promise!). Please feel free to hop on over and join me there if you’d like.
Fleeting
Thank you to everyone who’s read this blog. Take care of yourselves. Keep reading and looking. Keep savouring those fleeting moments of happiness, whenever they come your way.
Why was she so sad? The unspoken question had dangled over the [therapist’s] beige couch and the framed degrees and the economy of Kleenex. He commanded a cache of Ohs and I sees in varying grades of volume and texture, knew when to prod and when to sink with her. Why was she so sad?
Ada was sad because she was sad because she was sad. She experienced extreme difficulty in reaching past the tautological.
From ‘Infinite Home‘ by Kathleen Alcott
Some time ago, for much the same reason as Ada in the passage above, I quit therapy. I had come to my therapist feeling sad; but years of therapy later, I still felt sad. It seemed to me at last that, whether my sadness was unique or universal or — like Ada’s — purely tautological, the time for exploring it was over.
In the years that have passed since then, I’ve learned that I feel better when I try to make peace with sadness than I do when I try to overcome it. There is much to be said for acceptance and for patience. And for seeing things through.
I took the pictures in today’s post on a day when I had just heard that I will be losing my job at the end of this year. I felt, that day, as though I had been cheated of something — of an income, yes, but also of something less tangible, some essential part of me that I couldn’t actually name. I felt anxious and old and vulnerable and as though I had failed. Most of all, I just felt sad.
What I saw
I couldn’t sit still with my sadness that day; I couldn’t see it through. So I did the only thing that seemed manageable to me in the moment: I took myself off for a run by the beach. I ran what seemed to me a long way, the furthest I’d ever run, in fact — although the distance didn’t matter, really. What mattered was that I was outside: moving, breathing deeply, looking around. Seeing. Sadness, I’ve found, stops me from seeing. But stepping outside returns my vision to me, at least for a while.
Losing a job — especially a job that you love, especially when you are nearing fifty — entails a specific kind of sadness, one that is wrapped up in grief and fear. Still, I’m curious. What do you do when you are sad?
Other people’s words about … the vastness of the ocean
For every day went ahead like a ferry on its cables, from one shore to the other, passing on its route those same red buoys tasked with breaking up the water’s monopoly on vastness, making it measurable, and in so doing giving a false impression of control.
From ‘Flights‘ by Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Jennifer Croft)
A false impression of control: breakwater in the foreground and a line of buoys on the horizon …
Still, Connell went home that night and read over some notes he had been making for a new story [that he was writing], and he felt the old beat of pleasure inside his body, like watching a perfect goal, like the rustling movement of light through leaves, a phrase of music from the window of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.
From ‘Normal People‘ by Sally Rooney
I have a friend, whom I very much respect, who has been writing fiction for as long as I’ve known her, without any desire to seek either publication or readership. It seems to me that she writes purely for the pleasure of the process itself, and for what that process brings her; it seems to me that writing, for her, is an entirely internal process of discovery and exploration, requiring no further justification, either to herself or to others.
Light through leaves (1)
Since my own decision to stop writing a while back, I’ve gone on thinking about writing and the role that it plays, or has played, in my life. And I’ve come to find my friend’s concept — whereby writing is a private act, an act for no-one other than herself, with no thought to the future or to the past — consoling and inspiring in equal measures. I like the honesty of her act. I like the wonder in it. I like the courage. Sometimes, it takes courage to do things just because.
Light through leaves (2)
So I hope that my friend experiences, when she writes, those brief, flickering, sun-dappled moments of joy Rooney describes so beautifully in the passage above. I hope she feels the old beat of pleasure inside [her] body.
