What I know I don't know

"The more you know, the more you know you don't know". 

Aristotle

Yes indeed. The more I know, the more I know I don’t know. The more I read, the more I realise I have not yet read. But then, why do I persist in measuring my achievements – or rather, my lack of them – by what I manage to put inside my head? Surely it is what we do with such learning - or alternatively, our lack of it - that really counts.

Another quotation: The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them (authorship apparently uncertain). But if we don’t use our knowledge to save or to improve lives, then we have no more right to a sense of achievement than the neither the lazy nor the illiterate.

So from what I know I don’t know, to what I know I haven't done . . . My self-judgements tend to turn rather monotonously around what I have previously called the “tyranny of the everyday”: tasks that are never completed, or never remain so for very long. Washing, washing up, basic household cleanliness, accounts to be counted, bills to be paid, papers to be tidied. If I ever manage to achieve something vaguely long-term, such as sewing on a button, I feel like I deserve a medal. All so trivial, and so very, very boring, but if these chores remain undone life pretty soon becomes very difficult.

How does the average person move beyond this? Through measuring achievements in the workplace? A pay rise, a promotion, a bonus? A commendation from someone above in the hierarchy? The satisfaction of a job well done?

All this conveniently limits the time we have to consecrate to the most important goal I suppose we should really be trying to achieve – namely, being good parents, partners and friends. This delimits almost the entire sphere of influence that most of us can ever hope to have, and as such is our most significant contribution to the health and happiness of humanity. With my misplaced faith in the written word, I sometimes despise myself for not taking more time to read parenting books (or at least sufficiently re-read the ones I have already attempted, to allow me to action their very sound advice on such occasions as, say, when we are late for the school bus). And yet I also suspect that to agonise and intellectualise too deeply over such relationships could be a default recipe for failure.

There are some who have the opportunity to impact many more human lives, either by means of their innovative talents in culture, art, technology or human understanding, or simply by seeking celebrity for its own sake, and thus feeding the bizarre passion we seem to have for vicarious living. (These achievements rather often seem to be, so history and the internet tell us, at the expense of their own personal and/or family lives.) To successfully innovate, there are undoubtedly some that just struck it lucky, but most of the time the minimum requirement must be a rather thorough knowledge of all that has gone before. So now we’re back to where I started.

And so to the usual paradox. Instead of trying to rectify any of the above-mentioned failings, I am wasting time, energy (of all kinds) and yet more words.

If my 4-year-old had a mobile

This morning I had to leave my son at holiday day-care, screaming his head off.

He’s never been too keen on holiday club, for reasons he hasn’t been able to clearly express to us. This morning, he’d grumbled a bit on leaving home, but then seemed to be making a real effort to put a brave face on it, saying ‘don’t worry, I’ll be fine’ to his obviously deeply- concerned baby sister, and even yelling “yay!’ as we pulled into the car park. But as we entered the building, something changed. His face grew serious, then crumpled, then as I moved to go he simply dissolved into tears.

Anything I said only made him worse, so in the end I was obliged to leave him assaulting the ears of the long-suffering, council-employed teenage baby-sitters, and scurry away to leave my daughter with the nanny, then scurry even faster to get to work on time.

On the tram I wrestled with my demons, tears in my own eyes. I called my husband, who really didn’t appreciate me trying to off-load some of the emotional guilt in his direction: his take on the situation was along the lines of ‘life’s not all good, he’s got to learn to take the rough with the smooth’, and even better, ‘he must have been picking up negative vibes from you.’ No consolation there then.

So what to do? I felt as if I had to take action somehow. I finally realised that my reflex was to try to use that verbo-emotional sticking plaster of the digital age: the text message. I wanted to text my son, to say everything would be okay, chin up, mummy was thinking about him, mummy would come to get him as soon as she possibly could. As I sometimes do with my husband, sending him little “courage, I love you” messages full of xxs if I know he a tough day ahead, or just to briefly alleviate the boredom of commuting. A little good deed done, or a bad one undone, and so easily. A little text would alleviate my guilt and make everything okay.

I realise that even once my son is old enough to read, and old enough to have a phone of his own (heaven forbid), such messages would be of dubious benefit. Emotional sound-bites from a stressed-out mummy would not, I suspect, do much more than add guilt and anxiety to his side of the equation. Then, as now, would it really help him if I try to explain that mummy simply has to work, and that my holidays are a week shorter than his? Would it help if I tried to explain that we made choices? That we decided we needed a house that was big enough for him and his sister to have their own bedrooms, with a little bit of garden for him to expend his copious amounts of energy, to run and shout without disturbing the neighbours, far enough away from the city to allow him fresh air and garden fruit, and necessitate use of at least one car on a daily basis? Would it be possible to explain that, even if we did live in a tiny 2-bed suburban flat, and avoid absolutely all unnecessary expenses, both mummy and daddy would probably still have to work to make ends meet, including some of the school holidays?

It is not a problem with “collectivity”, as the holiday club director will no doubt try to tell me next time she sees me. My son is not nervous or anti-social, he is always asking to invite friends around or self-invite himself to theirs, and it is extremely rare that he objects to going to school. At present I count myself lucky that I am not one of those parents having to leave their children screaming and protesting at school 5 days a week, 30-plus weeks a year. Perhaps these parents are also feeling guilty because they have no choice, or guilty because they do have a choice as school is not in fact compulsory until the age of 6. But would we be doing our kids any favours if we kept them in the protected, parent-focused home environment for as long as absolutely possible?

My mother didn’t work, from my birth until I was at university. She stayed at home to raise the kids, a luxury afforded by the nature of my father’s employment (in a scientific domain), and by a carefully managed family budget (I remember going years without a holiday, for example). We were lucky, I know. This maternal presence meant I could read before I went to school, there were never logistical problems with childcare, and I always felt extremely well-supported at every step of my education. However, as an adult, I sometimes wonder if the results were exclusively positive. I rather doubt that I can be defined as more well-adjusted and ready to face the world than any of my peers whose mothers worked. Are maternal sacrifice and parental pressure more formative paradigms than maternal multi-tasking and somewhat blended childcare arrangements? And can me taking time out of both work and childcare to blog about this issue possibly gain anything other than the creation of yet another contradiction…?

A metablog - blogging about blogging

One aspect of blogging that I have really come to appreciate is the obligation to repeatedly re-read my own writing. I’m not really a spur-of-the-moment blogger: each entry usually undergoes an extended notebook-to-electronic document transferral process (or once a back-of-till-receipt-to-notebook-to-electronic document process, as described in First Entry) that entails much re-reading and editing. Furthermore, before starting (or re-starting), I have usually let a few entries accumulate before actually posting anything online, to be sure that it was really worth (re)starting anything, enforcing even more re-reading before publication.

Even once posts have made it online, I have been known to re-read them. Sounds crazy, when I think of how time to read anything - be it for professional or personal development, intellectual pleasure or pure entertainment – is at such a premium, and that there are so many more useful, interesting and well-written things I could be spending my almost non-existent reading time reading. And yet, usually during tram journeys, when I am simply too tired, after a rough night or a working day, to contemplate exploiting my commuting time in any vaguely productive fashion, and when the possibilities of Facebook and its hyperlinked off-shoots have been exhausted, I have occasionally been known to waste precious subscription 3G megabytes on reading my own blog via my tiny, eye-strain-inducing Smartphone screen. This can even lead to further post-publication tweaking and adjustments. It could seem rather narcissistic and egotistical to spend such time reading my own writing, but to look at it another way, if I can’t be bothered to read my blog, how can I expect anyone else to do so?

My point is, I have learned a lot about my writing style this way. I see that I overuse hyphens and colons, and regularly have problems with awkward, over-long sentences. My comma technique could definitely be improved. Blogging cannot really be used to rehearse and refine the formal, academic style that is necessary in my professional life, but writing in such a different context has served to raise my awareness of such style issues.

I occasionally also return to some of my much earlier writings. I couldn’t say when the “need to write” explained in my first blog entry kicked in. As a child I was a committed diary keeper – although for these I have not yet braved a re-read, in fact I’d probably struggle even to find them. I don’t remember at precisely what age I started keeping separate note-books for fragments of ideas for poems, song lyrics, essays, even some loftily-named “philosophies”, but most of it dates from the most intellectually-stimulated, emotionally-charged and narcissistically self-absorbed period of my life – namely late teenage-hood and early university days, before the tyranny of the everyday really began to take over. Very little of my material has been read by anyone except me, not even my nearest and dearest, although I did allow (persuade? coerce?) two female housemates, on two separate occasions, to read some printouts. I remember that one declared my writing to be ‘rather moving’; the other declared me to be completely bonkers. Any aspirations I could have possibly had of becoming a published writer were effectively felled at the first submission I ever attempted: two of my poems were rejected by an amateur poetry magazine which, I distinctly recall, had a stated editorial policy of publishing everything.

Some of this stuff is lost to me forever due to my appalling handwriting. Other examples are now frozen in time capsules of un-updatable software programmes. But some of it has survived the ravages of time and technology, follows me around via my paranoid data-backing-up process, and very, very occasionally still sees the light of day. None of it is any good. I will try to resist the temptation to post any of my archaeological finds here, although I suspect I will give in, because they make pretty much pre-written blog entries, and some of it is not entirely irrelevant to the extremely vague thematic of this blog. Then as now, I was fearful and muddled: then, as now, I wondered, worried and generally wasted words.

Blogging versus Motherhood

As I said in the entry It’s been even longer, I don’t intend this blog to be about motherhood, but it is about contradictions, so here is one. In the same entry I questioned my return to blogging when I have so many other pressures on my time: in particular, why am I blogging when I should be being a mother. By which I mean, a better mother.

Such is the nature of our lives, and of my children, that I can’t really deprive them of my actual presence and attention by blogging. As hinted at in previous entries, most of my writing is done when they are asleep and I should be (although right now, I am being extra self-indulgent by writing this during daylight hours, between forkfuls of my late, microwave-reheated lunch, while my son is at school and my baby daughter finishes her nap in the bouncy chair next to me. The lunch aspect being the reason why I am not obliging myself to immediately dive into awaiting housework (washing up, laundry) or my thankfully-sometimes-doable-at-home work (current focus: exam corrections).

What I mean is, I sometimes feel guilty about the time I spend writing when I could/should be, for example, making flashcards to teach my son to read, baking cakes for his play dates, or absorbing parenting books to help me better master one of the most challenging jobs in the world (and practically the only one in which no one checks qualifications and suitability before engagement). What’s more, sometimes, writing about anything other than the sheer beauty of my daughter’s smiles and gurgles, or the glorious ecstasy of watching my two children gazing lovingly at each other, lying in our bed on a Sunday morning, seems somehow just plain ungrateful.  What? She writes/thinks about inane concepts like the downfall of humanity? Doesn’t she realise how lucky she is to have two such beautiful, healthy children, a good job, a nice house, etc. etc…

And of course, by devoting blogging time and space to such a subject, I have added a further layer of paradox to the theme of this blog that does nothing whatsoever to assuage my guilt.

With a hey-nonimity

In my last entry I gave away a lot more about myself than I ever intended in this blog. Originally I endeavoured to be completely anonymous – trying not to reveal my location, my job, even my sex. This was partly because this blog was not supposed to be about me, but to deal with more abstract concepts – although of course, as thematically it revolves solely around my personal wonder and worrying, it is in fact entirely, unavoidably, egotistically and uninterestingly about me, probably laying aspects of my inner psyche horribly bare to anyone who can read. The attempt at anonymity was also partly because I was paranoid about making some kind of false move or faux-pas in the blogosphere that would cost me my job, or cause some such miserable scandal of the type only social media can dish out, as we hear about so often (“teenager’s misspelt text message goes viral”…)

Of course, I’m sure to any vaguely astute reader, I have naively revealed all about myself numerous times. However, in returning to the blog I have purposely relinquished some of that anonymity for various reasons. Although I don’t intend this blog to be about motherhood (I’m sure there are plenty of blogs out there dealing more efficiently and helpfully with such a subject), my everyday life is still so greatly taken up by the unavoidably female aspects of parenthood – namely, recovering from childbirth and breastfeeding – that I imagine it will inevitably show through in my writing. Furthermore, there is simply so much more interesting stuff on the internet that I’m sure nobody is really likely to find or care what I write.

So what else have I given away in previous entries? I have referred to my “other half” or my “partner”, so not so much to learn there. The reader knows that I live in or near a city with a tram service, and I may have mentioned mountains somewhere. I’m a teacher – and I imagine my subject area can easily be guessed (answers on the back of a postcard please. I wonder why they say that anyway. Whoever writes on the front of a postcard?) I have a sister, and I have lost at least two grandparents and a mother (for that matter, so has she). I like music (ooh, and so much more there).

And who cares anyway?

Anyway, as a breastfeeding, sleep-deprived mum of two with a house to look after (somewhere) and a job to do (teaching something), I guess I should be in bed rather than rambling further.

It's been even longer

I know I’m breaking all the rules of blogging here. I’m sure I read somewhere – and anyway, it makes common sense – that to be successful (i.e. followed and read by enough people to make it worthwhile) a blog must be regular, and consistent in theme. Well, it’s been over a year since my last entry; for all the usual reasons and a few less usual ones: our seemingly-insanely busy (but probably fairly standard) everyday routine, compounded by a few life-changing events. One of these was the death of my mother after a long illness, which I have alluded to, although not directly, in various previous blog entries. Then, more happily, since my last entry I have managed to conceive, carry and give birth to our second child, the arrival of whom approximately coincided with the death of my partner’s father, and us buying and moving to a new house. So, we’ve been occupied, to say the least.

I’m returning to blogging thanks to a good friend of mine: one day we randomly started talking about writing, and I let slip that I had this obscure, entirely-unread blog. She actually did me the honour of reading it, discussing it, and sharing some of her own ideas and words. What’s more, she persuaded me to keep writing. More of that in future I am sure.

I have been so unbelievably busy, not-to-say sleep-deprived, since my last entry that I hadn’t really felt that need to write that drove me in the first entries (as explained in First Entry). However, once I accepted the idea that I was going to return to it, the anticipation of doing so made a tiny part of my brain feel nice somehow, somewhere in the background beneath all the other stuff it had to deal with. I started writing entries in my head during night feeds and inane household tasks, enjoying the intellectual challenge of trying to order ideas and construct paragraphs mentally, and to hold on to them until such a point as I could write them down.

The feeling faded as I kept putting off the moment – I of course couldn’t allow myself such a luxury before finishing such-and-such a piece of work, and then there was the tax return to submit, and then…and… But tonight is the night.

Why oh why am I trying to return to blogging, when there are so many other things to be done? My baby is only three months old and still waking me at night, so any time not spent doing something absolutely essential is time that should be spent sleeping. In the day-to-day, any moment when I am not directly dealing with either or both of the children, I am usually obliged to dive quickly into one of the absolutely unavoidable household chores – namely washing up, laundry or cooking. The slightly less incessant tasks like hoovering or cleaning windows go – well, out of the window (hah, hah). (This problem is compounded by having just moved to a house in which some of these tasks have not been done in the three years since the previous residents departed, or I think in some cases, in the hundred-or-so years since the house was built).

Then, my job – I might as well tell you; I’m a teacher – is far from being one that fits into a closed schedule and can be left at the office at the end of the day. There is always correcting, grading or admin to be done, or preparation for the next day, week or year. If ever these tasks seem finished, or at least sufficiently un-urgent to allow me to contemplate doing something else, I could/should be improving my practice by reflecting, reading and researching.

Then, I could be reading a good book, or picking up a long-neglected musical instrument, or finishing my sister’s Christmas present (a knitted scarf). I could be attempting the novel that I have had rattling around in my head for literally years. I could study a foreign language, do my physiotherapy stretches, get some badly-needed exercise. So why, instead, return to my (almost) entirely-unread blog?

Well… we’ll see how it goes. I still rather like the title. And the colour scheme. And, if I ever permit myself to liberate any brain cells from the tyranny of the everyday, I still have some ideas – and worries – concerning the state of society, the future of humanity and the wonder of the world.

So it seems I’ve broken another presumed rule for successful blogging – that is, to keep the entries short and to-the-point. And having made that observation, I guess I’d better stop here.

It's been a while

It’s been more than two months since my last entry. This was due to a chain reaction of circumstances – a heavy period at work, followed by a possibly-not-unconnected bout of illness, followed by another heavy period at work trying to catch up following sick-leave, and culminating with a life-changing event, the anticipation of which I have touched upon in previous entries. But I am NOT ready to tackle that in a blog yet.

I started this blog in a slightly less hectic season work-wise, and was quite surprised at myself for managing nearly two months’ worth of regular entries. Then I lost momentum, and was not even sure whether I would pick it up again – there novelty of blogging, especially when one remains entirely unread, wears thin after a while.

One thing a period of illness allows me, is the leisure time to read. As I’ve mentioned before, I am a keen reader, and have real difficulties putting a fiction book aside once started. Thus I can rarely allow myself the luxury, except on long journeys by public transport (alone, not with a toddler) or when sufficiently ill to lack the energy to do pretty much anything else. Thus recent acute bronchitis meant I could indulge in a fair few novels (it was not a long illness, but I can read pretty fast). I would like to share a few thoughts about the most thought-provoking of these books, and the reflections they induced concerning the subject of this blog. Of course my indulgent meanderings cannot do justice to the power and skill of these novels (I can only say that you would be much better spending your time reading these books than some inane online blog).

I read The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende, telling the story of four generations of a Chilean landowning family, encompassing issues of poverty, class conflict, political unrest and fascist oppression, with a poetic dose of spirituality and the supernatural. I read Inés of My Soul, also by Isabel Allende, about the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of Chile and the horrendous suffering and bloodshed involved on both sides. I read The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, which tells the interweaving stories of several characters set in London during, and immediately following, World War 2.

These books are cracking good yarns, with amazing plots and effective prose. All these books include vivid and moving depictions of shocking cruelty and suffering inflicted by humans on other humans. They also tell stories of survival, of the strength and resilience of which humans are capable in situations of immense difficulty and suffering. All these books are fiction, and yet draw on historical events so closely, that the experiences described clearly reflect real experiences lived by people of those places and times.

This reading experience once more brought home to me the abstract and indulgent nature of the concerns that supposedly drive this blog. If death is potentially around every immediate corner, and every day is a fight for survival – as it must have been for many during the Blitz, during times of military persecution and fascist rule, during the Spanish conquest and all other episodes of aggressive colonialism – then a person has no space to fret about the potential fate of the entire human race and planet Earth. Generalised ecological and economic worries are luxuries afforded only to those who are not battling significant, immediate personal hardship.

I also have the luxury of wondering if/when the collapse of the current economic and ecological systems will bring about human suffering of the immediate, intense nature of some of the scenarios depicted in these books. It may well already being doing so in ways of which I am shamefully ignorant.

Makes you realise how lucky you are.

In the beginning

This blog started life on the back of a till receipt. I kid you not.

We were staying one weekend with some relatives of my Other Half, for some form of family gathering. It was Sunday afternoon, and my young son, after a few difficulties due to the unfamiliar location, had finally been persuaded to take his afternoon nap. I think the older cousins were playing a card game or watching TV. OH was taken up interacting with seldom-seen relatives. I was subject to that special kind of boredom that comes when staying with in-laws – not your house, not really your family, not your place to initiate anything.

I don’t know why I hadn’t taken a book to read and make the most of an extremely rare opportunity. In the end, I finished up piddling around with my smartphone. In the absence of a wifi connection, I used up precious subscription megabytes browsing the internet via the mobile network, and this was how I encountered a new blog by one of my facebook acquaintances.

It’s amazing how facebook has changed the nature of our human relationships. Friends of friends, that I met once in a pub, or distant relatives I would only otherwise encounter at selected weddings and funerals, have somehow become “friends” on facebook. I can learn more about them than I otherwise would have done, and often more than I want to know, and all in a sort of voyeuristic way without ever being obliged to exchange with them directly.

I’m not completely denigrating the experience, however. In my personal situation, living at a significant distance from many friends and a large part of my family, facebook has often made a positive contribution to my life. For example, it was by facebookian means that I was able to discover that this particular acquaintance, or more strictly a relative of a relative-by-marriage, whom I’ve probably met only three times, is an eloquent and witty blogger.

I had been toying with the idea of a blog as a release for my writing urges for a while, and already spend several frustrating online sessions searching for a blog name and pseudonym. The thematic idea was in place, but finding a name or title that had not already been thought up and registered or otherwise become Googleable proved more difficult than I ever would have imagined. I attached far more importance (and time) to the exercise that an as-yet-unwritten, and unlikely to be widely-read blog by an anonymous wannabe writer really warranted (but then, everything is relative: it was probably a fraction of the time some people spend online gaming or aimlessly browsing, for example).

But I hadn’t actually written anything, and wasn’t entirely sure ever to get around to it. That chance encounter via a 2” by 3” screen was the catalyst that got the ball rolling (to mix metaphors slightly). If they could do it, I could do it; more to the point, if they allowed themselves to do it, then surely I could be forgiven for some bandwagon-jumping.

So there and then the urge to write became irrepressible. I managed to locate a pen, but learned that the only usable paper in the house was in the same room as my sleeping son. Not wishing to risk waking him (equaling immediate termination of any writing opportunity), I instead located an improbably long supermarket till receipt from my wallet. I hid myself at the foot of the stairs, ostensibly to listen for my son waking. And I wrote. These notes were later transcribed, first into a notebook and then typed, to become the first entry for this blog.

But I was on borrowed time. My son, always a good sleeper, had already gone down for nearly two hours (a naptime that I know could make many parents heartily jealous). Sure enough, he woke before my three-inch-wide strip of paper was full. But at least it was a start, and one that, albeit some weeks later, and in several painful stages, actually became something readable (if not, well, read).

First entry

I’ll be honest from the start. I’m writing this blog because I need to write. It is a compulsion that ninety-nine percent of the time I successfully suppress beneath the obligations of work, parenthood and day-to-day life. I’m not pretending - although of course I’m hoping - that there will be anything worth reading.

So the obvious question: why inflict my self-indulgent, self-help-therapy musings on the wwworld? Well, it seems that I’m a would-be wanna-be writer who needs to at least they have the possibility of would-be readers. And now the internet makes this so ridiculously easy that I don’t even feel particularly guilty about it. I’m not making anyone read this, after all.

So why the title? The vague theme of this blog, insofar as it can be said to have a theme, is my attempt to get to grips with the inevitable fears of our times. There seem to be so many reasons to be terrified of what the future holds, soon or perhaps a little further ahead, probably in my lifetime and certainly that of my children.

It seems blindingly obvious that the current global situation is unstable and unsustainable. Society is balanced on a precarious stack of orange boxes that can only come tumbling down. I’m far from expert enough to say what will “get” us first: the collapse of the economic system, and with it the over-stretched supply lines that feed us; or ecological crisis, once we’ve pillaged and poisoned our planet to the point that life - or at least our current lifestyles and populations - can no longer be supported. I suspect both, hand-in-hand, two sides of the same coin. Either will result in immense chaos and many dead.

But what really amazes me - and this is where this blog comes in - is my ability to live with this situation. I fear the future, but not enough, it seems. I can completely put this fear aside, and manage to lose myself in the petty stresses of the everyday present - washing up to do, clothes to fold, sleep to lack. I can even allow myself to hanker after a mains charger for the mp3 player or some other such unnecessary, planet-guzzling gizmo.

It is this incredible contradiction that often fuels the small but fizzy part of my brain that ‘needs to write’ - as if, but marshalling my inner conflicts into the discipline of the written word, they will somehow become more manageable. So here goes. With any luck, this will be more about the muddling that the fear. Perhaps a better title would be “(my) life, and how to worry about it” … but a problem shared, after all…