Sunday Brunch

Shitty Solitude Although it’s all relative

There is a boy missing in the mountains not far from here. George, English, 18 years old. He called 112 last Sunday. Mountain rescue have been looking for him ever since but all they found was a bag. He wasn’t far from a refuge when he called. But he never made it there. Weather conditions have forced the rescue workers to stop looking, for now.

I can’t get this boy out of my mind. Is it because he is the same age and my friend’s kid. Is it because it so close by. I see the mountains here from the garden.

I have never had a loved one gone missing like this. To not know where your child is or what happened to them, I can’t even begin to fathom it.

There is this thing called fate. We fling it around a little carelessly. No worse fate than this…

I don’t have children so I will never know what it is like to loose one. I know people who do know, friends and relatives who have had to stand at the graves of their children. A three year old boy who drowned. A thirty year old man who died from sepsis. A woman in her forties who ended her life. Anything from illness to accidents to suicide are around me in the lives of the people I love.

I don’t like comparing fates.

So when a friend sent me a text by Shepherd Hoodwin on relative and absolute gratitude I found some passages in there that irked me.

Have we become so conditioned in seeing everything like a heroes journey? Has our life become a narrative that needs redemption arcs and overcoming whatever obstacle against all odds?

My life is not a trilogy, although I have lived enough to fill up the pages of at least three memoir books.

People in the face of adversity are tasked with offering others inspiration:

“We might also compare our situation to others who have it worse and are rising to the occasion. Again, this doesn’t invalidate our own pains and frustrations, but it might inspire us.”

Fuck you. I mean it. This is not a frivolous fuck.

If you care about me and ever catch yourself thinking “at least I don’t have cancer”, please extend me the courtesy of never speaking to me again.

I also don’t need your pity, I don’t even need you to understand but I do demand your respect in not using me as some benchmark for comparative or relative gratitude.

It’s also not my job to inspire you.

I know people in much more dire circumstances than me. I see them “rise to the occasion”. People who keep going. Who keep loving. Who keep seeing beauty beyond despair. I am grateful for knowing them. Grateful for witnessing what human beings are capable of. But I wouldn’t care less about them if they topple over. Because they have more than earned the right to collapse. They also don’t owe their grace under fire to anyone but themselves. It’s not their job to inspire me. I am grateful for their existence but their fate doesn’t make me more or less grateful for where I am and how I am.

I understand the value of putting things into perspective. But as I said to my friend:

It could always be better it could always be worse. There is no point in comparing. Relative gratitude doesn’t work for me.

My friend could relate: “I find ‘relative’ difficult. What is the 0 point? There are people who have it worse than I do, and also people who have it better. Does that change anything about my perception, about the experience of my own suffering or joy?”

Don’t be absurd…

Gratitude like forgiveness and acceptance is a pillar of many healing modalities. It’s pretty big in religion too. I experience gratitude, of course. But it is not an assignment. It is not a “method” that helps me fix things like depression, grief, mortal fear.

One of my favourite Drew Barrymore interview moments is when actor Hugh Grant is asked if he keeps a gratitude journal: “Don’t be absurd”.

When gratitude becomes the hallmark of toxic positivity I would rather count my “hates”, hurts and losses than my blessings.

The shepherd text fails to offer me something I can work with in the concept of “relative gratitude”. The entire first half frames gratitude a little as a discipline, an obligatory correction of perception, almost a duty. There is an implicit suggestion:

If you don’t feel grateful, you’re failing.

I am also looking at this thinking:

What is the difference between using gratitude to cancel out your “right” to be sad, lost, pissed off and seeing it as a way to balance something out.

And then I don’t mean relative gratitude, looking at yourself and your situation in relation to the possible worse plight of another person.

I am thinking of seeing it for example in the way grief can soften over time, when it’s carried by what remains and what could still come (a little flutter of a future promise): Looking at what is still there and not just seeing who or what you have lost.

Grief and gratitude can share the same space without the need for any comparison.

I am much more interested in absolute gratitude:

“Absolute gratitude is just being grateful, period, immersed in what is and feeling the grandeur of it, allowing the energy of the universe to course through us, which can lead to bliss.

One reason we feel good in nature is that absolute gratitude is the natural state of most things most of the time. In a healthy forest, one can feel the trees enjoying the rustling of the wind, reaching up to the light, taking it in, and transmitting that higher energy into the earth.

There is a free flow of life force that is naturally grateful for what is and in harmony with the whole. That is a state that long-time meditators sometimes reach.”

NEXT

I have some more recommendations to make. As I lack structure in general I am continuing my recommended reading completely intuitively.

Darby Hudson

https://substack.com/@darbyhudson?r=zpm90&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=profile

Sherman Alexie

https://substack.com/@darbyhudson?r=zpm90&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=profile

IL Williams

https://substack.com/@ilwilliams?r=zpm90&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=profile

Hanif Kureishi

https://substack.com/@hanifkureishi?r=zpm90&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=profile

Next week I will probably share the eco warriors, nature lovers, garden guerrillas, happy homesteaders, foragers and farmers. But who knows what next week will bring…

SHITTY SOLITUDE

I have to resign to the fact that I will be alone for weeks, maybe months to come. I have written many notes these last weeks on how it is becoming increasingly harder to handle the loneliness. I write about longing for company. For physical presence and touch. I write about practical loneliness of not having help at hand. Meaning some things can’t be done. Or at least not properly and at best only partially. It sucks.

I see it as a curse of modern times. Every single person I know has crammed their life so full that I need to ask for help or a social call six months in advance.

If you have the patience to scroll through my activity feed you will find an article I reshared on being a villager. How community doesn’t pop up when you need it. It asks you to be a villager and invest too.

The only community I ever have spent time with here in Romania is that of the free reformed church who I worked and lived alongside with. And regardless of the respect I have for their work here in education and social welfare, I was never part of it. Faith is the foundation I didn’t share. At least not in the exact form they practice.

I have never connected with any expat communities or networks although I am sure they exist here and there in little bubbles.

I have never experienced any local sense of community here and I have been told it doesn’t exist: communism broke that down a long time ago.

I don’t think it’s entirely true. I do see some of my friends here in their community. Something they invested in, probably their entire life. Intergenerational too: inherited contacts are part of the community foundation too.

So is that the answer to community? It takes a lifetime to build? Does it mean we have to stay where we were born?

PUPPY UPDATE

Next Friday Ruby, Rex and Aurora are headed to the Netherlands. At the last minute Auroras adoptive family asked to have Rex too. They couldn’t bear the idea of him being the only one left behind. The father of the family and I both ended up in tears discussing this last Thursday. It came completely out of the blue.

The last two months have been insanely intense. Taking six puppies in, moving house, finding fosters and adoptions while looking at my life in limbo thinking WTF?!

But we have made it. With the help of friends, family and Substack friends we have made it. All six puppies have homes. I am grateful for all the help and support I have received here.

In that sense Substack has offered me community. And it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that our common denominator would be what matters to me most in my daily life: my dogs and my cat.

Yes I am keeping Moggie. And yes it will make it a challenge to move house again with three dogs and a cat. But I can’t move Jess forward to another home. I can’t let Moggie go. She has touched me and is tethered to my soul. They are my pack.

This is all I have for this week. I am simply too tired to think of and share anything else.

Love Lee x