"When we have no project to finish, no friend to visit, no book to read, no television to watch or no record to play, and when we are left all alone by ourselves we are brought so close to revelation of our basic human aloneness and are so afraid of experiencing an all-pervasive sense of lonlieness that we will do anything to get busy again and continue the game which makes us believe that everything is fine after all"
Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out
Monday, 14 January 2013
Get busy
Friday, 11 January 2013
Schola
"The first task of any school should be to protect its privilege of offering free time - the Latin word schola means free time - to understand ourselves and our world a little better."
Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out
Wednesday, 9 January 2013
Home
Without internet connection I have scheduled a few posts. I found this in my drafts, originally dated March 2011. I don't know why it struck me as worth publishing nearly 2 years ago, but as we settle into our new home and new life, it seems just right for today:
Home is not where you live but where they understand you.
CHRISTIAN MORGENSTERN (1871-1914)
Monday, 7 January 2013
Communication has broken down
Tomorrow we leave the house where we have been staying and looking after the dogs and horses and we return to our new house in a neighbouring village. We only spent four nights there before moving up here, and the children have not slept there at all, so in many ways it feels like moving in for the first time. My daughter said to me that she feels homeless at the moment and in a way we are. Nowhere feels like home, that safe place we know well, that feels warm and famililar and offers both physical and emotional shelter and we are all craving time to settle and make it our new home.
The engineer from BT does not some until next Wednesday, 16th January, and we will have no landline and no internet. There is no mobile reception at the house and so we will find ourselves totally cut-off. It is possible to climb a short distance behind the house and perch on the hillside by a dry-stone wall and pick up a mobile signal. It is possible to walk about 20 metres down the road to a BT wi-fi hot-spot. The pub in the village has free wi-fi, the local town has good mobile reception and a couple of wi-fi spots. And yet I can feel a level of anxiety about being cut-off. I am typing frantically, trying to get this post written and a couple more scheduled as well as looking up electrical safety hazards to being the Physics curriculum with the children and answer and send all necessary e-mails before black-out occurs.
What am I afraid of? Having started blogging again that anyone reading will forget all about me in a week's silence? That friends and family will be so insulted at waiting for a week's reply to an e-mail and will end all relationship with me? That I can't teach Physics without access to the web, that I have no internal or book resources, or that the children will never get this GCSE if I fail to teach this aspect of the course, this precise week?
It is as I face a week without easy internet access that I face my addiction to quick information, easy contact and the perpetual sense of busyness and I start to think that if I want to slow my life down, perhaps switching off phone and computer once in a while would be a place to start.
The engineer from BT does not some until next Wednesday, 16th January, and we will have no landline and no internet. There is no mobile reception at the house and so we will find ourselves totally cut-off. It is possible to climb a short distance behind the house and perch on the hillside by a dry-stone wall and pick up a mobile signal. It is possible to walk about 20 metres down the road to a BT wi-fi hot-spot. The pub in the village has free wi-fi, the local town has good mobile reception and a couple of wi-fi spots. And yet I can feel a level of anxiety about being cut-off. I am typing frantically, trying to get this post written and a couple more scheduled as well as looking up electrical safety hazards to being the Physics curriculum with the children and answer and send all necessary e-mails before black-out occurs.
What am I afraid of? Having started blogging again that anyone reading will forget all about me in a week's silence? That friends and family will be so insulted at waiting for a week's reply to an e-mail and will end all relationship with me? That I can't teach Physics without access to the web, that I have no internal or book resources, or that the children will never get this GCSE if I fail to teach this aspect of the course, this precise week?
It is as I face a week without easy internet access that I face my addiction to quick information, easy contact and the perpetual sense of busyness and I start to think that if I want to slow my life down, perhaps switching off phone and computer once in a while would be a place to start.
Friday, 4 January 2013
Activities
One thing that we have been keen to change as a family is the sense of always rushing from one activity to another, hurrying out of the door five minutes later than I intended to join one of the busiest stretches of the M25 on our way to book group/swimming/climbing ...
Activities always sound so interesting, so educational, so sociable. They tick boxes for me as a home-edding mother, evidence (ammunition?) in those conversations that doubt my educational choices. But we feel run ragged; what the children really love is to be told that we have nothing planned, that their time is their own. They don't really want to be all that busy.
So we plan to slow down.
But I am afraid that they won't have friends or social opportunities. And so the activities are creeping back in, already!
My daughter is going to try the local dance class, as good a place to meet other girls as any, surely. My middle son has his first football practice on Sunday. My eldest plans to join the local amateur dramatics society - I just need to hunt down the youth contact who I have heard such good things of. And then there is church, and Pony Club, and horse-riding. Plus trying to find some "play-dates" and going for a walk with neighbours or extending and invite for tea and cake.
It scares me to not be busy, to not spend a lot of time with people. But it exhausts me. So we'll choose not to: we won't go to Pony Club just yet and we'll not try to fit in swimming too, or invite anyone next week. I'll cope with the nerves and anxiety and I'll make a note in my diary to review it at half-term (only six weeks away) and I'll choose to let my family begin to experience the space we've longed for.
Activities always sound so interesting, so educational, so sociable. They tick boxes for me as a home-edding mother, evidence (ammunition?) in those conversations that doubt my educational choices. But we feel run ragged; what the children really love is to be told that we have nothing planned, that their time is their own. They don't really want to be all that busy.
So we plan to slow down.
But I am afraid that they won't have friends or social opportunities. And so the activities are creeping back in, already!
My daughter is going to try the local dance class, as good a place to meet other girls as any, surely. My middle son has his first football practice on Sunday. My eldest plans to join the local amateur dramatics society - I just need to hunt down the youth contact who I have heard such good things of. And then there is church, and Pony Club, and horse-riding. Plus trying to find some "play-dates" and going for a walk with neighbours or extending and invite for tea and cake.
It scares me to not be busy, to not spend a lot of time with people. But it exhausts me. So we'll choose not to: we won't go to Pony Club just yet and we'll not try to fit in swimming too, or invite anyone next week. I'll cope with the nerves and anxiety and I'll make a note in my diary to review it at half-term (only six weeks away) and I'll choose to let my family begin to experience the space we've longed for.
Wednesday, 2 January 2013
12x12
I love new year resolutions. The turn of the year presents the opportunity for me to reflect on how I want to be different and to make attempts to become what I want to be. There is a danger of the resolution becoming the law, exerting a pressure to be fulfilled that becomes an end in itself and no longer produces the helpful encouragement to change I would like; They need to be viewed as prompts to remember how I want to live. I am a sucker for patterns and themes and so have chosen 12 this year, either to be done once or twelve times a month:
1) to host local neighbours to eat at the house once per month (dinner, lunch, poetry tea, just a cuppa and a slice of cake ...)
2) to run 12 times per month
3) to bake 12 items per month
4) to choose not to use the tumble drier 12 times per month
5) to take my son out for a coffee and a chat about his latest writing project once per month
6) to practice navigation skills once per month
7) to take the children on a day-out once per month
8) to complete one painting project per month
9) to sort out one area of my personal admin once per month
10) to finish one book per month
11) to do one thing towards developing my workas a Breastfeeding Counsellor once per month
12) to blog 12 times per month
Together they are a mixture that encourages me to live the way I want to live: none feel over-ambitious and yet there is a challenge there to stop dreaming about how I want to be and to be that way, consistently, month in, month out for a year and see where that takes me.
1) to host local neighbours to eat at the house once per month (dinner, lunch, poetry tea, just a cuppa and a slice of cake ...)
2) to run 12 times per month
3) to bake 12 items per month
4) to choose not to use the tumble drier 12 times per month
5) to take my son out for a coffee and a chat about his latest writing project once per month
6) to practice navigation skills once per month
7) to take the children on a day-out once per month
8) to complete one painting project per month
9) to sort out one area of my personal admin once per month
10) to finish one book per month
11) to do one thing towards developing my workas a Breastfeeding Counsellor once per month
12) to blog 12 times per month
Monday, 31 December 2012
A New Voice
So much has happened since I last wrote: I have changed my name, re-"married" and moved 265 miles from South-West London to North Yorkshire. It feels right to come back to blogging: happier and more confident, away from the home-ed community that has just started to blossom in Surrey and taking the first nervous steps of a new life.
My partner and I have bought a Grade II listed cottage in the tiny village of Low Row in the Yorkshire Dales National Park and all our windows look out across the beautiful fields of Swaledale. We are grappling with how to heat a large, stone-built house with bottled gas and wood-burning stoves and are planning how to balance work and life, travel to London to teach our students and catch up with friends, build contacts and business here in the North and wondering how school employment and global teaching might fit our life-style.
So many sentences in our family start with the words, "When we are in Yorkshire..." It is tempting to think that life will be different, that we will be different and that all that makes us unhappy will have been left behind. I know that is not true. I know that I have brought myself, my short-tempered, easily-overwhelmed, introvert and over-scheduled self, with me. But I also know that in surroundings like these it is easier to make different choices, to live more slowly, to take more time, to offer to put the kettle on when a neighbour calls. I want to have more home-made cake, more long walks with the children, more time reading by the log-burner. I want to enjoy the beautiful house I have, the idyllic location and the amazing people I share my life with. When we are in Yorkshire I choose to live a different way, a slower way and a happier way.
Happy New Year!
My partner and I have bought a Grade II listed cottage in the tiny village of Low Row in the Yorkshire Dales National Park and all our windows look out across the beautiful fields of Swaledale. We are grappling with how to heat a large, stone-built house with bottled gas and wood-burning stoves and are planning how to balance work and life, travel to London to teach our students and catch up with friends, build contacts and business here in the North and wondering how school employment and global teaching might fit our life-style.
So many sentences in our family start with the words, "When we are in Yorkshire..." It is tempting to think that life will be different, that we will be different and that all that makes us unhappy will have been left behind. I know that is not true. I know that I have brought myself, my short-tempered, easily-overwhelmed, introvert and over-scheduled self, with me. But I also know that in surroundings like these it is easier to make different choices, to live more slowly, to take more time, to offer to put the kettle on when a neighbour calls. I want to have more home-made cake, more long walks with the children, more time reading by the log-burner. I want to enjoy the beautiful house I have, the idyllic location and the amazing people I share my life with. When we are in Yorkshire I choose to live a different way, a slower way and a happier way.
Happy New Year!
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