Dear Friend,
Yesterday was the penultimate time I’ll ever be the teacher coaching kids through their performing arts exam. Today will be my last.
I feel a familiar sadness about it. A tightening in my throat.
I also know it’s the right thing for me and for the future kids who will have someone else, not me, go through that process with them.
All of those kids. especially the ones who refused to conform, they’ve helped immeasurably by bashing the crap out of me. Making me pay attention to someone else other than the kingdom of my skull, to borrow a phrase from David Foster Wallace.
A good friend of Chiara’s arrived to stay from Italy. His flight was delayed. We’d tickets to see Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Lodger’ accompanied by a live score on solo viola at a cinema in town.
Orlando, our guest’s, delayed flight mean’t we’d need to leave a key for him. Our neighbour’s on one side, the one’s with the kittens, are still in Spain. It’s terraced housing here so in reality it’s basically one great big square donut of a house, divided into lots of seemingly separate homes. Separate but connected. Funny how the clues are right there in front of us all the time. The unity beneath separation.
I knock on our other next door neighbours only to find they’d actually done it, and moved to Portugal. We have new neighbours who are also lovely warm and who I immediately know I can trust.
They take the keys, me giving possibly way too much detail about who is coming to stay and why the keys, the cinema show, apologising for any noise I make singing and playing music, an invitation for drinks when I get back from Manchester. They learn about that too. Then two minutes later, Orlando arrives and I pop next door again and retrieve the keys and we all peg it to the tube.
When we got back, Orlando gives me David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” as a gift and I realise why I like Franco Amati’s writing so much. The compassion and the humanity stripped down so it’s not hidden but right there so you can feel and see and sense the living world. Buzzing with light, when you lift the dead grey blanket of cloudy automatic, judgemental blah blah thinking. The false self’s monologue.
Judge.
Mental.
Hold on, is that another semantic clue?
We get home past midnight, my last day coaching kids through their performing arts exams.
It’s a relief. Not much of a responsibility in the scheme of things we can take responsibility for, but important. Time for me to hand over to someone who really wants to be there.
Art.
Our culture seems to want to bleed it dry, turn it into a commodity.
When kids get into making art and develop ways to communicate about it, the torch gets passed on. Maybe that’s why we talk about stars? Lots of bright shining points of light in the darkness. It’s a star that makes life possible. Shining on every star made living one of us.
Small acts of generosity. Gifts we actually give to ourselves. Kids have taught me to show up fully in the moment and pay attention. If you don’t, they run rings around you. From their point of view, when we’re stuck in the lone kingdom of our skulls, it must be like having a slow moving sleep walker in the room. Trapped in abstraction.
I wonder if the system wasn’t so alien and difficult, would I have made the decision to move on? Probably. When it’s time, you can’t ignore it.
Our systems are faulty and messy and need our attention.
It’s worth the effort of showing up. Being humane.
I’ll do that today, as best I can on five hours of sleep.
You can never really know how small humane acts of kindness are touching other people’s and our own lives.
They are the quiet and certain change our world needs.
Underneath it all.
We have so much more in common than divides us.
Just beneath the surface.
We find one another.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey