H IS FOR HOUSE.

We have a friend moving in with us today. Our house in town is a modest dwelling in the suburbs. Technically three bedrooms, but actually only two as I have converted the biggest one to an office. It was already pretty full, with me and my husband and our two large hounds and two cats. It might be a little cramped with the addition of another adult and his five hounds. And a house, of course, is finite. It's made of bricks and mortar. Or, if you're rich and posh, vast blocks of stone chiselled out by hand many centuries ago. But whatever the material, it's a foundation and walls and a roof, and it doesn't magically expand.

H, however, also stands for home, and a home is another thing entirely. A home is not bricks and mortar and roofing. A home is made of love, and care, and patience, and the infinite small accommodations of goodwill that humans make for each other. A home is a living thing, and like most living things, it is stretchy. 

With the chaos of Moving Day, and the fitting in of everything, I've been inspired to really get into my declutter, which had rather stalled, what with injury, and eye surgery, and so on. I have always in my mind's eye the memory of my grandparents' house. They had what they needed, and nothing extra. Shopping was not a recreational exercise for my grandmother. She bought the best she could afford, took extremely good care of it, and replaced it only when it had worn out. Her whole married life, she had the same china, the same silver, the same furniture. There was none of this modern 'doing up' of rooms, either. All of the rooms in her house remained as they had been set up when she first moved in And that house was the happiest, most peaceful place in my childhood. So that's my ideal, although the category of 'things one needs' seems to be rather larger these days, with the addition of so much technology. 

So I'm really looking forward to seeing my house get properly weeded out, and embracing that more disciplined lifestyle that brings with it so much peace and comfort. But I'm also looking forward to discovering what our family will become, with the new additions. Because, above all, a home is made up of the people in it, and all the myriad connexions between them. 

We're going to be just fine.

G is for Generosity

 Generosity. We don't hear a lot about it nowadays, except when being pestered by telemarketers pimping the latest in 'charity' scams. It's one of those old-fashioned virtues, like patience and temperance and fortitude, that don't quite fit with the modern world and it's me-centric culture.

There's far more to generosity, though, than giving out money to panhandlers, or buying lavish presents for one's friends. The other part of this underappreciated virtue, perhaps the greater part, is at once easier and more difficult, but far, far more subtle. It usually doesn't cost much in concrete terms, but can come at a great price in the intangible. I'm talking about generosity of spirit. For example: the ten minutes you take to think yourself into the other person's viewpoint in an argument. That's cheap in one sense - it costs no money at all. But in another way, it can be, as the poet put it, 'hard and bitter agony'. For to achieve this, we must let go of our conviction that we hold the only correct view. We must admit that the other person's view may also be completely valid. As valid as our own, and perhaps more so. The other person may be right. We may be wrong, or both of us may be right; one of the hardest preconceptions to give up is that belief that every question can have only one answer. A really good example of this is the dialogue between adherents of different religions. 

There's another kind of generosity, too, that's largely uncelebrated nowadays, when everyone is about showing off their fabulous lives on social media. It is the small, humble acts of service that go largely unnoticed and often unseen. And these can be the hardest ones of all. I am constantly challenged in this area, myself. It's one thing to open your home to a friend who's temporarily homeless, or to rescue stray animals. It's quite another thing to respond with the same gentle patience the sixth time your old, incontinent cat wets his bed as you did the first time that day. To just shut up when your husband did the laundry incorrectly. To listen to someone's story that she's told you a hundrred times, and pretend you haven't heard it before. These things, so small, seem to take an herculean effort.

This is where, I think, the power of habit can really work for us. Once aquired, habits of kindness and patience are a practically endless source of strength. They help us to rise above the baseness of nature, to become better versions of ourselves. This is the real purpose behind religious events such as Lent, and Rmaadan. They are training exercises, boot camps where kindness, self-control, and so on get muscled up. I've no data to support my theory, but I'd be willing to bet that the people who really put in a sincere effort for Lent are probably better people all the time than they would otherwise have been. Ramadan, too - it isn't just about fasting, but about everything. 

End of life care, for any species, challenges us to be our best selves.

F is for Festive

Now that it's all over, the presents unwrapped, the feasts eaten, and in some houses the Christmas tree already stripped, it seems appropriate to look back on the season we've just weathered, some joyfully and some not so much.

What is the nature of this festival we celebrate each year? Despite how secular our society has become, it is still a major driving force in the economy, with people, especially the poor, rushing like lemmings each year to immolate themselves on cliffs of debt. Of course it's the poor; we are the ones who exist in this society to be milked, like cows.

So, the nature of Christmas. To a few die-hard Christians, Christmas is our second greatest feast, the celebration and reliving of Christ's miraculous birth, the beginning of the long, beautiful path of our salvation. To many people now, however, it seems to be the occasion for celebration of all that is worst in us: our greed, our gluttony and pure selfishness. I'd like to think that this is a catharsis, leaving us cleansed and improved for the new year, but sadly, this kind of thing doesn't work - like orgies of gluttony or drinking before embarking on a strict diet or regime of sobriety, what it really does is undermine our moral fibre and render it impossible, in the short term, to rise above the mire.

Of course, there is a great deal of lip service paid. 'Joy, peace and love', proclaim the banners, as beneath them hordes of shoppers elbow each other out of the way. People who couldn't be bothered giving one the time of day for 50 weeks of the year suddenly realise their entire life will be ruined if they don't get to have lunch with us in that particular week. In workplaces, there's a lot of hugging and kissing; people who spent their year stabbing you in the back and sometimes even sabotaging your work slobber all over you as if you were their long-lost mama come back from the wars. It's all about as real as tinsel, and as useful, although perhaps not quite so pretty.

This whole shitshow is exemplified, like most productions, by its leading characters. Just as Dr Zhivago was the poster boy for the film of that name, as Bruce Willis represents the Die Hard films, we see at the head of things the leading man of the day. Once, long ago, this role was filled by Our Lady, by the Holy Family as they trudged their way to Bethlehem, by the Baby Jesus. Now, however, they have been relegated to the status of extras, and the leading role is filled by Santa Claus.

Let's look at Santa Claus for a moment. Fat, jolly, and giving out stuff to children. He gets shoved down our throats with every bite of media, with every look around a shopping centre. He's even on the stamps this year. He's supposed to be harmless, and good, and fuzzy. Yet, what is Santa, really? Functionally, he leads us away from the actual meaning of Christmas, inviting us to focus on the gratification of all our basest desires: gluttony, greed, self-indulgence taken to ridiculous extremes. Wallow in the things of the world, he tells us. Ho, ho, ho! Who else can you think of that tempts us away from the right life to wallow in the cheap satisfactions of the body? I'll give you a clue - its name can be arrived at by a simple rearrangement of the letters of 'Santa'.

One of the Native American peoples, I am told, has a legend that inside each person are two wolves, one good and one evil. They battle each other for dominion of your soul. Which one will win, asks the querant. The one that is stronger, goes the answer. The one you feed.

Whom will you follow, next Christmas season? The one who leads us to kindness, to charity, to mastery of the self? Or the devil?

E IS FOR ELEPHANT - Eating an Elephant, One Bite at a Time.

We have all come across this tired old saying. How do you eat an elephant, one bite at a time, yeah yeah. It was a stock trope of management courses in the eighties, and somehow it's still endured, for all these years. I believe Bishop Desmond Tutu was the one who first said it. 

But old sayings persist because they contain a kernel of truth, and in the eating of an elephant, just one bite at a time, we can arrive at something that really is fundamental to all human endeavour, and that's persistence. Without it, nothing gets done, or nothing big, anyway. And it's the big things that make us so happy when we've achieved them. I still remember my joy when I was accepted into Law School, but that was nothing, nothing at all, compared to how I felt at the graduation ceremony. And I did that one twenty minute study sprint at a time. 

So, fast forward to this year. Last Christmas, on  Christmas Day, I started learning Italian. I've worked at it every day, sometimes for hours, sometimes for just a few minutes, but the thing is I haven't missed a day. And a week short of the year, I'm now coming to terms with the subjunctive. I've read a few short stories. Sure, I'd have done better if I'd had the opportunity to hang out with Italian speakers on a regular basis. My practice has been limited to my husband and the man at the bakery whom I see perhaps once a week for a few minutes. But still, I'm happy with the achievement. By the time another year has passed, I hope to be able to watch television in it.

So, you ask, what other elephants are to be eaten? Well, for me there are a couple. I've been trying and failing for years to quit smoking. That's one. The other is that my lifestyle has gone from very active to almost completely sedentary. First because of Covid, then there were some other factors. After Emily's death I was deeply depressed, and did almost nothing for more than a year. I was just starting to pull myself together six months ago when I injured myself,  and that's still a thing that has made me more sedentary than ever. And as a result, I have got fat.

So, I still smoke and I'm fat. Tackling both of those things at the same time, particularly in December, is generally thought of as unwise. However, I have something going for me that I never had before. Apps.  Apps are the bomb. They take away all the worry and uncertainty. And importantly, they make everything objective. You don't have to keep track of how much you've eaten, smoked, whatever, because the app does it all for you, and therefore - and this is the big thing - you're not carrying it in your mind, so you a) aren't thinking about it all the time, which always makes one want to do more of the thing one is trying not to do, and b) your mind can't play tricks and 'forget' things. So the apps are a very, very powerful weapon, and if people say I'm staring at my phone too much and getting like a Gen Z person, well tant pis, at least I'm modern.

So those are my elephants now, and I'm nibbling away. Regaining the disciplined habits of work that I lost when I lost my girl, that's another one, but I'm still floundering around with that. But the point is that I will do it, because I a) want to and b) know how.

D IS FOR DISTRESS

Yesterday, waiting for the lift, I heard a baby crying in a room just off the lobby. Not just a little 'I'm hungry' cry, but a full-on screaming fit. It went on and on; I had plenty of time to listen to it, as the lifts here are rather slow and service 43 floors. It got me thinking about distress and its manifestations.

A baby crying is an ordinary event, and we generally don't take it too seriously unless we are the one walking up and down at four in the morning trying to get it to sleep. But listening that morning, it was borne in on me that to the baby, it is quite different. It doesn't know anything, doesn't understand anything, and its distress is very, very real. If we saw an adult crying like this, we would be shocked, unsettled, deeply disturbed; hopefully, we would be anxious to help in some way. And yet, the baby's distress passes almost unnoticed. Of the five or six people waiting for the lift, no one said anything. And yet, I feel sure that the baby's distress, in that moment, was equal to anything that life could throw at any of us. 

For a startling contrast, I witnessed a very similar piece of distress shown by a workman on the Brisbane Metro works the other evening. Although this man was not actually crying, I think it was a similar kind of meltdown. This chap was screaming, so hard his voice was cracking, and making little rushes at people, waving his arms. The gist of his screams was hostile, so although he clearly needed help, I'm sorry to have to admit that I did not attempt to help him. He was just too scary, and I thought probably one of his workmates might do something presently. I'm trained as a Mental Health First Aider, but in no way have I any training that could equip me to handle someone who has gone full-on berko. The first aid training is more to give people someone safe to talk to when they are struggling, and to help people to seek professional assistance in a non-judgemental way, that kind of thing. I knew I was out of my depth with this character. So I left the scene and got as far away from him, as fast as I could. I didn't want to be there and witness it if he attacked someone, and if he didn't, well Brisbane is a relaxed, tolerant place, and the way people seem to respond to mad people carrying on is just to ignore them and let them get on with it; to mind one's own business. 

What I'm taking away fron these two incidents, though, is the reflection that often when someone is behaving badly, or in some way offensive, there is a hidden distress driving that behaviour. Now I'm not saying we should make personal unhappiness an excuse for bad behaviour, by no means, but I do think it's worth always bearing in mind the possibility of some iceberg of terrible distress floating below the surface, when a person is rude, or ugly in some way. This is a very stressful time of the year, when so many of us can be taken without warning by a tide of loss and regret when we think about those who won't be celebrating Christmas with us this year, and we can all stand to be a little kinder. Always.

C IS FOR CHRISTMAS

 C is for Christmas. It had to be, didn't it, given the time of year. 

Pretty well everyone who knows me knows my views about Christmas as it is mostly celebrated in today's society; I've lost a number of friends because of my frank expression of those views. I'm okay with that, though. If a person can't handle the fact that you have different opinions, she isn't much of a friend. Most civilised strangers can manage that much, after all. To recap, though, for anyone who hasn't heard me holding forth about the Satanic Greedfest, the modern push push push of relentless consumerism, and the celebration of greed, gluttony and mindless conformity turns my stomach. Sure, it's nice to have a happy get-together with family and/or friends, to share a meal, to exchange some gifts, all good. But we take it to excess and excess in anything is usually harmful. Take, for  example, the attitudes one encounters about food on Christmas Day. Having eaten as much roasted meat, veg etc as I wanted, you would think it would be reasonble to decline the offer of a huge bowl of plum pudding, wouldn't you? Especially when aside from having already eaten enough, I say I don't even LIKE plum pudding? Apparently not. You are supposed to force it down like a goose in a foie gras factory. I say no, which makes me a scrooge and also a grinch, whatever that is. 

I make no secret of the fact that for me, Christmas is about celebrating the birth of our saviour, Jesus Christ. Appropriate celebrations mainly happen in church, although there's that yearly outing to hear a Messiah, I always look forward to that. This year, the dates didn't work out so we will have to listen to a recorded one, but Robert and I will make that a special date night and we'll put it on in our sitting room wtih appropriate ceremony. A quiet day with extended family, a few gifts and a nice lunch, and we're good. 

I know this isn't enouugh for everyone, and even though I think it SHOULD be enough for everyone, we all have a right to do things our own way so I'm not running about preaching. That's not what I am doing here. All this preamble is by way of context, leading to what I'm going to say next.

C is also for Crisis, Calamity, and other things of that nature.

On 25 December, as we loll about getting stuffed and drunk and picking fights with our rellies, someone near us is going through hard, hard times. Someone is celebrating his or her first Christmas alone. Someone's dad won't be home in time for Christmas even though he promised. Someone hasn't enough to eat. Someone doesn't even have a roof over his head or a safe place to sleep. And that's just the humans. More and more lately, people are surrending elderly animals to shelters to make room for a new puppy or kitten. This shameful activity peaks just before Christmas, because the kind of people who can do this regard their animal companions as chattels, and are fine with giving them as Christmas presents.

C is for Challenge.

My challenge to you, to us all, is in these last few weeks leading up to the big day, that we keep our eyes peeled. We look out for someone who's alone for Christmas. A bereaved person, one who's recently moved to our area, a new immigrant who doesn't know anyone yet. Someone homeless. Someone unpopular. And we INVITE them into ours. It isn't hard to set an extra place at the table, and even find a small gift. We always have way too much of everything anyway, don't we, people? Too much of everything is a kind of understood thing at Christmas. And they won't be in the way, I promise. It will enrich your Christmas, for you and everyone involved. You might make a new friend; you'll certainly make memories. 

Do it for me, okay? Just try it. 

B is for Beauty - the small perfections of ordinary life.

 When I was a child, my mother worked as a schoolmistress. She hated the work; it really isn't a suitable job for someone who dislikes children, and I don't remember her ever coming home in a good mood. She would usually arrive home and go straight out to spend an hour or so watering the garden with a hose, and come back in a more peaceful frame of mind. Usually. I do, though, remember her constant complaining, in particular about chalk dust. Back in those days, of course, every classroom was dominated by the huge blackboard at the front of the room. Chalk dust, if you were the teacher, apparently rained on you constantly, and settled into every crevice of your skin, particularly in your hair, at least according to my mother, who was not noted for her restraint of expression. Sometimes, if she was feeling benevolent, she would offer me five cents to brush her hair for her after dinner. I hated doing it; she only washed her hair once a week, like everyone back in those days before conditioner was invented, and it was always greasy and, to me, smelled bad, and in general I detested physical contact with humans anyway. But it was five cents, not to be sniffed at, and in any case it wasn't safe to decline the offer. 

Anyway, chalk dust, for my mother, was The Enemy - an ever-present scourge that could never be totally vanquished, but only held back by great effort. Looking back, I wonder what other teachers did, and why they didn't just use one of those ubiquitous chiffon scarves to tie over their hair.

I'd forgotten all about my mother's daily skirmishes with the dreaded dust, until I came across this photograph. This is chalk dust through an electron microscope. It's so beautiful that it took my breath away; it reminds me of those intricate, delicate ivory balls, with the layers of rotating spheres, that Chinese craftsman used to make. I hope they still do; it would be a tragedy if that ancient craft were lost.

Chalk dust

This reminded me of another set of microscopic photographs I had seen, and I went on the hunt. Thank you, Mr Google. These are human tears, but as you'll see, the different circumstances in which they're produced produce a very different image. The basal tears, ones that are generated more or less constantly to lubricate the eye, evoke for me a Chinese landscape, but those of laughter and grief, aside from their aesthetic qualities, tell a story that one can almost decipher intuitively; the tears of laughter resemble an aerial photograph of a thriving city, whereas the blasted scape of the tears of grief shows us the city in ruins.

Basal tears

Tears of laughter - a prosperous island nation

Tears of grief - a blasted ruin

And the list goes on. Here are some of the other images I found. 

This glorious blazing sun is a single grain of ragweed pollen.

This lacy confection is mucus in a pig's trachea. Basically, pig snot.

All these things are  useless at best, noxious at worst, and in any case humdrum, and yet when seen in fine, how beautiful they are. It's made me think about perspectives. The regalar roundof daiy life is full of these treasures, if only we could see them. And it's made me think about the small things in life, how often we overlook what could be a little injection of joy. We walk to work in the bustling city, but failing to look up, we do not see the flight of birds, winging across the sky in perfect formation. We travel to another city, grumbling all the way about the cramped seating, bad food and the rudeness of the stewaardesses, but fail to notice the breathtaking cloudscape just the other side of the window. We buy our milk from the grocery, but never notice the man who serves us. We don't see his constant small acts of kindness, or the way his face lights up when he smiles a greeting. 

The pressures of the quotidian can blind us to so much, if we let them. I've resolved to try to be more aware of these special moments of beauty. It could make the difference between a bad day and an okay one, or an ordinary day and one filled with glory.