Spring cleaning in September?

It began simply. Over Sunday lunch my mum was trying to tell visiting family members just what she’d done the previous day. However, she just couldn’t bring to her mind the words necessary to describe exactly what she had achieved. Sitting beside her I felt deep sympathy because I too have reached an age when perfectly simple words do not bubble up when you most need them. My mum adopted her usual approach, in these circumstances, she pointed out of the window and said “I painted the thing below the kitchen window outside”. The ‘thing’ of course was the windowsill. She had spent a happy hour painting the mucky grey windowsill a blistering white colour. In fact, this cleanness she had appreciated so much she had decided to paint another object white as well. Sitting at the table, I felt quite sorry for my mum when the word ‘windowsill’ wouldn’t come up and wanted to rush in and provide it. But I have learnt that when you start to talk for the person, though you think you’re helping, you’re actually sabotaging them. Longer term they start to cease using this tricky language business and rely on you more and more for translation purposes. However, having struggled to describe the windowsill paint job the other painted object was even trickier. I felt genuine sympathy as I couldn’t remember the name of the thing she had painted either. So, I explained, she had painted white the cement inside the tyre wheel holding up the post with the clothes hanging above it in the garden. I had forgotten the word ‘rotary washing line’. Such is life at present! Just when I begin to feel sorry that life is so confusing and tricky for my mum I discover that life has snuck up behind me and is proving equally problematic for me. This amuses my mum who often tells me triumphantly, “You become like the people you live with, you know!” It doesn’t stop with language quirks. Last week I discovered my mum has started spring cleaning. I should’ve guessed when the week before she started painting the windowsill. But to be honest it was only when she cleaned all the shelves in the sunroom and all the material on a nearby trolley and the windows that I suddenly tweaked that this spring clean was a real thing she had begun. I remonstrated with her that this is the end of September, no time to start a spring clean, but she smiled and said confidently, “Better early than late!” Since then she has gone on to tackle the kitchen cupboards, the large corridor storage cupboard and all the drawers. It is exhausting just watching her busily hauling out, cleaning and rearranging stuff. By the fourth day I was caught up in her wake and I started cleaning the bathroom even removing shower doors to do it properly. It is a contagious thing this spring cleaning. The problem is once you start you suddenly realise how dirty everything has become. In comparison to the sparking clean surface you have wiped, the tiles above it appear yellow and grease stained. Once the walls have been bleached into shiny submission the skirting boards take on a disgusting complexion. And so, it goes on! Having cleaned some tiny aspect of the house with much effort we both have a ridiculous evening show and tell session. She shows me what she has done, pulling open cupboard doors to display ordered shelves neatly stacked and I point out my cleaning achievements to her. I suspect with time this will grow into routine mutual applause at both our efforts. At first, I was annoyed especially when my mum was totally exhausted and stiff with pain after each cleaning frenzy but now I can see why she is enjoying it. There is a deep satisfaction from seeing the visible improvement around one. We catch each other examining our own work already done with a slightly smug air. There is a momentum developing and I hesitate to say it but we seem to be getting slightly better and try to raise our game with each passing day. There is also the deep satisfaction that this spring clean has got to be the earliest we have ever attempted. For once we feel we have a head start on life, after all it is months and months until spring. The other joyous discoveries are that you don’t need to know the name of something to clean it and we are gradually finding things we thought we lost. “It’s time for a spring cleaning of your thoughts, it’s time to stop to just existing it’s time to start living.” Steve Maraboli

Words we need to hear from those who have been shot!

Over a hundred and ten years ago an ex-president of the US was shot in the chest by an assailant. Ten years ago, a young schoolgirl in Pakistan was shot in the head on a bus.  Just six years ago a UK female politician was shot twice in the head and once in the chest and then stabbed fifteen times before dying.  These events may span over a century but the victim’s voices were targeted deliberately in an attempt to silence and stop them.  

It seems fitting that we in response should not, for once, focus on their attackers and their motives but on these three individuals and what they have to say to us.  I feel their words are especially relevant today and worthy of reflection.  Perversely, those who have faced such violence and abuse, while treading a path of integrity, are also those from whom there is much to learn.

In 1912 four years after leaving the White House, Theodore Roosevelt was shot. He was in Milwaukee about to give a speech and had his notes in his thick coat pocket. His assailant used a revolver and the bullet lodged in Roosevelt’s chest wall.  However, its progress had been slowed by his thick coat pocket containing 50 pages of his speech. The amazing thing was that Roosevelt insisted on giving his talk, despite just being shot. In fact, that bullet remained in his body for the rest of his life as removing it was deemed too dangerous by the medical professionals of the day. You can read the entire talk he gave on the 14th of October 1912 as we still have the transcript of his words.  Despite the advice of his assistants Roosevelt tackled, among other things, a very important issue of particular relevance today. He felt that the level of public discourse had become contaminated and demeaned. He claimed vicious slander and abuse were being routinely thrown by political opponents against each other. With his chest aching from his gunshot wound, he pointed out that weak and vicious minds could be easily inflamed to acts of violence by the torrents of abuse in the media. He said,

“I disown and repudiate any man of my party who attacks with such false slander and abuse any opponent of any other party; I now wish to say seriously to all the daily newspapers, to the Republicans, the Democrat and socialist parties, that they cannot month in month out and year in year out make the kind of untruthful, of bitter, assault that they have made and not expect that brutal, violent natures or brutal violent characters, especially when the brutality is accompanied by a not very strong mind; they cannot expect that such natures will be unaffected by it.    

On the 9th of October 2012, the Taliban gunmen boarded a school bus in Pakistan and shot 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai in the head. They picked her out specifically as, from the age of eleven, she had been campaigning about the importance of education for all children.  Subsequently, she went on to address the UN and give an address that is especially relevant, since this year the Taliban has denied education to girls in Afghanistan. During her address, she pointed out,

“Today is the day of every woman, every boy, and every girl who raise their voice for their rights. There are hundreds of human rights activists and social workers who are not only speaking for their rights, but who are struggling to achieve their goals of peace, education and equality. Thousands of people have been killed by the terrorists and millions have been injured. I am just one of them. So, here I stand … here I stand, one girl among many. I speak not for myself, but so those without a voice can be heard. Those who have fought for their rights. Their right to live in peace. The right to be treated with dignity. The right to equality of opportunity. The right to be educated … I am here to speak up for the right of education for every child.”

On 16 June 2016, MP Jo Cox was on her way to meet her constituents at a routine surgery in Birstall, West Yorkshire, when an assailant shot her twice in the head and once in the chest with a modified hunting rifle.  He then stabbed her fifteen times outside a library on Market Street. Jo Cox, the mother of two young children, died of her injuries shortly after being admitted to hospital. Her assailant had cried out "This is for Britain", "keep Britain independent", and "Put Britain first" during the attack. The judge, at the following trial, said he had no doubt Cox had been murdered to advance political, racial, and ideological causes of violent white supremacism and exclusive nationalism most associated with Nazism and its modern forms.

Cox had previously worked for the aid groups Oxfam and Oxfam International and had been head of Oxfam International's humanitarian campaigns in 2007. She helped to publish 'For a Safer Tomorrow', which aimed at preventing the brutal targeting of civilians in war. From 2009 to 2011, Cox was director of the Maternal Mortality Campaign, and the following year, she worked for Save the Children, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood. This was the quality of individual that was taken from us so brutally by ignorance and hate.  In her maiden speech to parliament as an MP she spoke as follows,

“Our communities have been deeply enhanced by immigration, be it of Irish Catholics across the constituency or of Muslims from Gujarat in India or from Pakistan, principally from Kashmir. While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.”

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... the rise of justice ensures the appearance of unity in the world, all who take on the formidable challenges of struggling for it have indeed captured the spirit of the age epitomized in the principle of oneness.

The Universal House of Justice

Reflections on Character fuelled by my P3 art piece

 My Mum is a custodian of epic proportions.  Things from decades even 50 years ago, of worth, are carefully stored.  In her garage, there are even the school exercise books of my children with their early writing, poetry and stories.  My grandfather’s old medals, certificates, and awards for shooting etc are all on shelves safe and sound.  My father’s letters of reference as a young teacher, his qualifications and his many letters are wrapped up with care.   The very first letter he sent to my mum over 70 years ago can still be retrieved and read.  The pages worn thin, with lines from folding and unfolding, show my father’s handwriting and thoughts.  On the wall opposite me is an oil painting by my grandmother which is around a hundred years old.  I’ve known this about my mum for years that she takes care of things and people with tenderness.   In her attic, above the garage, there is even a huge bag of my artwork from school.  It includes work from my primary school years P3 and P4.  Today, for the first time in almost 60 years I got a ladder and braved the spiders and their webs, to get the bag down.

As I took out one of my earliest pieces (see above) from P3 in primary school the art took me back.  Made of material stuck on a sort of canvas, I can actually remember making it.  It is indelibly branded in my memory. I did it in the room used for sewing and knitting.  That must sound odd to a modern audience but there was a time when very young primary students would spend hours mastering all kinds of stitches (both in sewing and knitting).  As our artwork required material we were making our creations in this room.  

The teacher was the wife of the headmaster a man who had suffered from polio as a child and limped badly.  His father had been a captain of a tea clipper (merchant sailing vessel of the 1860s) which shows how old I am! Anyway, Mrs Philips, his wife, mostly taught P1s those innocents to whom school must have seemed a bit of a shock.  In Northern Ireland you start school aged only 4 and if you happen to have a birthday in July you would be a 3-year-old who had just had turned 4 a matter of weeks previously. 

Mrs Philips was terrifying indeed.  She seemed permanently furious with all children.  I am not sure if she was born like that or had morphed into this type of enraged teacher with age but the end result was awful.  This particular picture, of mine I remember so well because while I made it one of her P1s was locked in the sewing box room adjacent to the class and roared and wept the entire period.  Someone whispered that he had wet himself with fear and as punishment had been locked in the storage cupboard.  The sound of his howls and his suffering was heart-breaking and being young myself the horror of it went deep.  Sometime during that endless class, I promised myself I would never become immune to the suffering of others.  As I stuck material with a shaking hand onto my board I pledged that if there was any other choice as an adult I would choose not to inflict pain such as this.  

In later years I could rationalize and tell myself that perhaps Mrs Philips had not always been like this.  Maybe, she had been a good mother and treated her own children well.  Indeed, it was possible she had taught primary school for years and did a tremendous job and this present version of herself was not characteristic of the real person she had been for most of her adult life.  I began to think of people like a graphic line with goodness on the y-axis and time on the x-axis, sometimes down and sometimes up.  Perhaps, Mrs Philips was in the abusive phase only at this point in her life?

Then, at university, I suddenly thought that a simple line is not adequate to reflect a person. Perhaps instead we should use an extra dimension, making an area.  What if a person’s character is proportional to the area under the line.  That would be much harder to determine but be more accurate because if you stayed loving for 40 of your 60 years then you would have a larger area under the curve.  It makes sense, doesn’t it?  If you had been a vicious person for 60 years you could end up with an area of roughly 120 but a loving person for that length of time would have a tremendous score of 600!  But, what if you are a hurtful teacher but a loving mother? 

Obviously, we need another dimension.  What if we added a three-dimensional approach to our diagram? This could represent all the other aspects of our lives, how we treat our parents, grandparents, neighbours, our dog etc.  Instead of an area, we would be looking at a volume where that line is rotated through 360 degrees in space. Here it is shown for a simple line rather than our jagged line but it gives the principle.  Our character is now represented not by a line or an area but by solid volume.

But though this might reflect much more about a person’s character it still fails to take into account all the interactions that happen to each of us as we pass through life.  You can meet an amazing person who inspires you to be better than you ever were before.  So perhaps 3-dimensional shapes that interact with others to substantially change would be closer to reality. Not a totally solid volume but a more malleable shape. 

Then, we have had occasions when religions have come along and changed not only individuals but whole civilizations.  It often seems that at the start of a religion dramatic positive changes happen to a whole populations' spirituality and then with time corruption can set in. Meaningless rituals and corrupt clergy can play too big a role.  Perhaps, then the character can be represented as malleable solids/volumes interacting with each other in a liquid (representing for example religion).  When religion is a dense, deep, inspirational contribution to life the molded volumes/solids all float higher on top.  When, religion becomes corrupt, materialistic, divisive, and fanatical the liquid becomes less dense and lighter without meaning or sense at which point the shapes sink into its depths far from the surface above.

Knowledge is praiseworthy when it is coupled with ethical conduct and virtuous character ...

Bahá'í writings

The Favourite Daughter!

I cannot remember when it was first said to me exactly, but I can remember the location. My dad and I were driving up to a forest walk near Ringsend high in the mountains with our black Labrador Monty in the back. 

He was singing as he drove and then he turned to me, out of the blue, and informed me that I was his favourite daughter! As a very young primary school pupil, this new status felt epic indeed. It was a title that had never been bestowed upon my other siblings so I felt exceptionally honoured. If my siblings resented my new title they never showed any evidence of this. Perhaps the baby of the family is normally treated with undue deference. They do seem to get away with much more than their older siblings. Parents know that this is their last offspring and generally place fewer demands on them than they did on their older children. 

I did not gloat over my siblings as my father’s favourite daughter. Instead, I held the privilege of that station close to my heart. As a child, there are so many things that hurt you, bullying, failures, slights, being ignored or self-doubt but this unexpected title acted as a mighty shelter to a rather supersensitive and easily bruised child.

It took me far too long to work out what my father’s words actually meant. I was his favourite daughter indeed but I was also his only daughter as I have only brothers.  No wonder my brothers did not resent it, they had worked that all out years ago. It makes me smile now when I remember how much my title of “favourite daughter” meant to me.

I am grateful for so many other things my dad taught me. He stressed the importance of honesty, having integrity, being free of prejudice and the importance of being really curious about everything.  I now devour books and love the sea as he did. I still respect so many of the principles he strove for his entire life.  I loved the way he let me wrestle with him on our landing at home and made me, a small child, believe that I could defeat a 15-stone grown man like him.  Okay, he played tricks too but even that I remember with fondness.  When we walked together to school, I wanted him to hold my hand really tightly and to tease me he would deliberately loosen his hold. In later years when I lived abroad, his weekly faxes were the high point of our family life. That distinctive hum of the fax machine and his handwriting appearance brought all of us together as a family to read his words which were full of good humour and insights. I will remain infinitely grateful that he always held my heart tenderly and lovingly. Perhaps knowing you are loved is the mightiest remedy of all.