two years on

Two years ago, to the day, we turned up in a foreign country, in a city that we had never visited before, with a dream sketchy in its details but certain in its aim. A small daughter accompanied us, oblivious to the change that was happening in her young life. 

(The only time I shed a tear was when I closed the light blue door to our beautiful Edinburgh top-floor flat. It had massive bay windows with views of the Castle and Arthur's Seat, sitting snugly in cosy Bruntsfield. Ahhh, Bruntsfield! All Miss Jean Brodie, Alexander McCall Smith, J K Rowling, hipster, organic, second-hand clothes, French bistro, coffee-brewing, cosmopolitan, winding Bruntsfield. Bruntsfield, where students drink beer on the roofs, and travelers sleep under the Links' trees. Rich old ladies buy haute couture ruby red shoes and American visitors try to absorb Scotland through their pores. The Chocolate Tree. Le Mouton Noir. George Watson's pupils in their maroon kilts and blazers criss-cross with George Heriots' dark blues and greens. Spices from Khartoum and incense from the Indian takeaway. The Italian where my wife craved king prawns in sambuca sauce throughout pregnancy, and the Lemon Grass where we ate on a summer evening on the grass.

The wan Scottish sun sent smatterings of light through the skylight into the echoey starewell of our tenement that day, a place where we had carried our newborn up five flights of worn stone stairs only seven brief months before. In my hand I was carrying our baby in her car seat down to my parent's car taking us to the airport. So much was being risked, and there was sadness lined with excitement as we said goodbye to the incredible place where we had been gifted with this new little bundle of life. Comfort and familiarity and support were being thrown to the wind, and I did not know how our small family would sail the rough waters to come.)

From the moment we were met at the airport by a friend of a friend, we knew we were on to a good thing. She took us to our accommodation - the home of friends of hers (friends of a friend of a friend, one might say) - who blindly and trustingly gave us their house for a month whilst they were out of the country. Who knew that friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends, could become, simply, friends?

We learned that the welcoming, open hand of kindness could give a sense of home and settledness quicker than a trip to Tesco or a walk down Princes Street ever could. People even seemed happy at work, as if they were not expecting to have a breakdown imminently, or work a 100 hour week on a regular basis. How bizarre!

Wonderful people abound everywhere. We left wonderful people, and found wonderful people. We have wonderful friends in our life for short periods of time and for long periods of time. And of course, family hangs present and stable as a background to our very existence and posterity. 

And soon we will move on again. We follow the road that is unfolding before us, a little wiser, a little stronger, and always more blessed. 

Our little family has weathered it well, with some ups and downs. We feel privileged that a dream has come - and continues expanding - to fruition. Sometimes the stepping-out is the biggest and most unknowing of actions. But your foot keeps landing on solid ground. The next foot comes up, and lands again, taking you forward in ways you would never have thought.

Thank you for the friendship and fun along the way, from across the seas and around the corner.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence;

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -

I took the ones less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

- Robert Frost

when patch adams dies

All of life is a coming home. Salesmen, secretaries, coal miners, beekeepers, sword swallowers, all of us. All the restless hearts of the world, all trying to find a way home. It's hard to describe what I felt like then. Picture yourself walking for days in the driving snow; you don't even know you're walking in circles. The heaviness of your legs in the drifts, your shouts disappearing into the wind. How small you can feel, and how far away home can be. Home. The dictionary defines it as both a place of origin and a goal or destination. And the storm? The storm was all in my mind. Or as the poet Dante put it: In the middle of the journey of my life, I found myself in a dark wood, for I had lost the right path. Eventually I would find the right path, but in the most unlikely place.

Robin Williams in Patch Adams

The outpouring of well-wishing and soul-baring around the suicide of Robin Williams is at once outrageously sad and refreshingly honest. I am reminded that mental illness is no respecter of success or wealth, faith or culture, personality type or background. Mental illness is undeniably complex, lurking as it does in its shades of greys and neutrals, affected by a multitude of variables...as is cancer and heart disease and our own individual reactions to the common cold viruses. But why are we so affected by this one man's death?  Is it that so many of us can empathize with deep feelings of frustration and hopelessness and self-questioning and a dank, heavy oppression that cannot be banished by logic or positive thinking or fervent prayer? Or is it that we find it shocking that someone whom we associate with a certain picture of happiness - exceedingly intelligent, popular, wealthy, hilarious - still finds no reason strong enough to motivate their existence?  

One of the devastating things for the sufferer of mental illness is the disintegrating effect it has on their personality. It's difficult to face the world - especially when you are known by a lot of people in the world - when your own personhood and image feels fractured and shattered. To be a talented actor who can portray other people with depth and humour and accuracy, yet not to be able to know what your own self looks like without this blanketing and mind-numbing depression, must be unspeakably terrible.

We are collectively sad because we realise that the confident and funny persona presented by Robin Williams was not the whole person; we are disappointed that someone was not as happy and buoyant as they appeared, and yet they could apparently hide it so well. To think that the man who acted a medical student who acted a clown to develop a new relational way of interacting with patients with mental health problems could not 'act his way out' of his own psychological morbidity, is distressing. We like to think that if we have insight into our state of mind that we can therefore overcome it. The sensation of loss of control of one's feelings and loss of integrity of one's personality, is something that can be the driver for a person to make a decisive, controlling, terminal action.

Suicide is not artistic or romantic or a freeing action. It is an action signalling a final sense of defeat of the human spirit. There is much to be said about the neurobiochemistry that is affecting someone's decision-making ability in the depths of depressive illness...but it is nothing less than deeply sad that all of us could potentially come to that point where our own judgement and insight are so severely affected by illness and circumstances that perspective is lost.

Remember that your family and friends and patients and strangers with mental illness may be uncomfortable in their own skin as part of their illness. Many have lost, and some will have forgotten, who they were or who they could have been, when their lives were not overshadowed by depression or anxiety or delusional thinking. 

May you find the right path in the most unlikely place.



Check out the work of the real Patch Adams at the Gesundheit! Institute http://patchadams.org/mission

simple silence

Trying to find words to describe what is happening in Iraq and Gaza is futile; to attempt it, from this sterile distance, feels like a further slap in the face to people who are suffering there.

And we remember Afghanistan and Syria, Mexico and Sudan, Nigeria and Somalia.

I feel horror and senselessness, but somehow I hold onto the hope of peace and healing. May we continue praying and acting, hoping and trying, so that we can maintain the integrity of our humanity.

I offer only silence.

the fear of freedom

Freedom is something I aspire to. It was always an elusive dream, a theoretical time and place where I would feel unencumbered by responsibility, constraints, expectations. I didn't have a concrete plan of how to get there; I just hoped that I would muddle along until I found myself in a wide open space where I could breathe easily and my cares would float away. But like all good things, it's hard to come by, and having cares and responsibilites are not excluded in this life I have chosen.

Summer seems so distant in the middle of winter, and as chill winds rob me of my idyll of wearing a few scraps of material and thongs (flip-flops, before you get too alarmed), I remember searing heat and the cooling sea. I feel like an orbiting planet, sometimes being obscured from the sun, wanting to beat gravity and be planted somewhere for a while, steady and sure. Rooted, yet free. Like the seasons and with the predictability of gravity, life will come and go, much of it outside my control. How do I maximise my use of the parts which I can control?

Pursuing freedom is wrought with fear, because, by definition, it means doing away with certainties. It means living with longings and aims, yet trying to be present and grateful in the present. You don't gain freedom by doing what you have always done where you have always been (unless you purely want to feel free to do that with no expectations of anything else. And good on you if you can do that.) It means sacrificing temporary comfort; 'comfort', to strengthen greatly. It is to feel weak and vulnerable, with the hope of greater fortitude gained in the long term. Yet freedom will not necessarily always correlate with feelings of strength and wholeness. It may demand a lifestyle of second-guessing, checking, self-questioning. 'Am I living in freedom? Have I sacrificed freedom for comfort? And if so, is that what I want?'

Freedom, for me, over the past months, has meant preparing to uproot again. It has meant planning to leave the familiar, putting great effort in to achieving the unfamiliar. By making choices we gain a sense of utility and potency. It is a truly great privilege to be able to make choices; it can also be the curse of our age. I am thankful for the experience I have gained of making decisions - big decisions - and seeing them turn out well. This in itself emphasises the freedom I have. We learn how to be free, and we learn that it is not a miracle which is handed us prettily wrapped. We work at freedom.

And is this freedom-seeking just a journal of personal fulfillment? If so, is that a bad thing? Or can pursuing our own ideals free us to be individuals who are more equipped to be a power for good where we are? I sincerely believe the latter, within the context of us being people who actually want to be forces for good and positive change. We are not, however, intrinsically altruistic beings. We seek our own safety and peace, and our families, and we then try to widen our circle of positive influence. Can we be more influential by maximising our own freedom, freeing us to use our gifts or love or money or time to bless others? I think so.

Don't trust financial certainty.
Test job fulfilment and security.
Trust relationship quality.
Remember that health is fickle.

And if all that means loving what you are doing, where you are now, do it wholeheartedly. This is freedom, in all its beautiful scariness. I think we will affect our world greatly if we live with an appreciation of this.