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

Our channels of communication have silted up with debris

My ears went pop and suddenly I could no longer hear, particularly from my left ear. Annoying, irritating but it has happened to most of us at some point. The usual remedy is to put your finger in your ear and give it a good shake. Or put one finger over the front of the ear and press hard to open that blocked inner channel. Pinching your nose while closing your mouth and giving a quick blow through your nose usually works. But for me despite all efforts, this strange deafness continued. 

My ear was obviously full of wax I surmised. And advice online from the Mayo Clinic warned against cotton buds in the ear. Who knew you could pierce the eardrum so easily with such soft things? On the fourth day, I consulted a pharmacist and was given drops for my ear to be inserted every four hours. I did that for two days with no positive outcome. Given the growing deafness in my left ear, I found myself adopting coping strategies. I walked on the left side of friends so that they are on my good side and I can hear them. I began to shout when I talked as if a raised volume in my own speech would help during conversations. 

I found myself strangely perplexed as to where the source of background sounds was coming from. Who knew that it was the stereo signal of two ears that helps you pinpoint where exactly that rumble originates? Without it, I look around bewildered awaiting visual signals to give me clues. Then, there is the noise in the deaf ear. That, I never expected. Instead of silence, at night in bed, the ear had a high-pitched hum with odd crackles randomly thrown in. As if my brain and ear have decided to stop normal communication channels and act like angry adolescents.  With either sullen silences or mumbling incoherence. Conveying no sense but a constant wall of annoyance and sudden unexpected hums of a range of frequencies.  

Finally, in despair, it had been a week, I queued to see a doctor. I sat in a waiting room with no official appointment but was shown in by the receptionist as the waiting room was completely empty. I sat 30 minutes in an empty waiting room hoping the doctor would finish with his client in his consulting room and fit me in as the receptionist had hoped.  After 40 minutes he was still with that same client and there was a surge of new patients into the waiting room. I realised with my heart sinking that my window of opportunity had closed. All these new people had pre-booked appointments while I had none. All of them, despite my 40-minute wait, were ahead of me. I left as deaf as I arrived and no further forward. I would have to endure the situation a little longer. Sleep was much, much harder with this noisy deaf ear. 

In these pandemic days seeing doctors in the UK is like finding the golden fleece. It requires extraordinary endeavours and persistence. Dear help those with serious conditions like cancer who have been left in limbo for too long. Lessons certainly need to be learned about how healthcare must be maintained and nurtured in good times so that in dire times it hits the ground running. Not underfunded and disembowelled from either incompetence from within or targets/changes from above. Too often, nowadays, it seems those put into positions are not there because of abilities but simply because of a lack of choice or who they happen to know. If the pilot of your plane got that position because he was someone’s cousin not because he was the best pilot you’d be outraged. You want the surgeon who operates on you or your loved ones to be of the best quality and a safe pair of hands with experience. Not someone promoted due to lack of other surgeons applying. Even before the pandemic two relatives of mine left their jobs as GPs because they were permitted to only spend on average ten minutes in appointments with each patient (one of the shortest times in the EU). We have to be so careful that we do not lose our best due to bad practice.

A recent study by the British Medical Association (published in May of this year) indicated that thousands of exhausted doctors in the UK are considering leaving the NHS in the coming year, citing excessive levels of stress and burnout due to the demands of the pandemic. The number of mature experienced doctors who are deciding to take early retirement has doubled in the last 12 months.  Professor Martin Marshall, Chair of the Royal College of GPs has indicated the chronic shortage of GPs in the NHS. Worryingly despite this present shortfall family doctors in England are quitting at a rate of three a day.  

As I live in Malta there is a different setup available here.  Each pharmacy usually has an in-house doctor available to see for a reasonable payment.  You do have to book in advance during these Covid days, whereas before you were able to just walk in and see a doctor.  Needless to say, after my experience of waiting in the surgery I made an appointment with the doctor.  He saw me the next day and prescribed ear drops and told me I would have to use them for three days and then come back.  Having already used drops to no avail I was unimpressed. And after three days, during which I became even more deaf I was back in his surgery.  This time the doctor took out a huge syringe that you would use on the rear end of a horse and blasted my ear with warm water while I held a metal kidney-shaped dish beneath my ear.  After three hard blasts, my ear popped open while the most disgusting stuff imaginable poured out into the dish.  The doctor showed me triumphantly the debris he had removed and it was impressive.  No wonder I had been unable to hear!  

I cannot begin to tell you of the relief I felt.  I could hear!  The world opened up to me again and a dreadful oppression of the spirit lifted.  How I sympathise with the hard of hearing now.  Every interaction becomes a source of concern, can one guess what the person is saying?  And even more worrying after three days you just pretend to listen, as if a person is speaking a foreign language you don’t know.  Gradually you withdraw from conversations and sit silent but uncomprehending adrift in a world of the deaf. It feels so good to be hearing again.  Why is it we only appreciate things when we lose them?  I like this quote on hearing loss as it strikes a chord.

“I hadn't really noticed that I had a hearing problem. I just thought most people had given up on speaking clearly.”

Hal Linden

There is I am sure a spiritual metaphor for this experience.  Sometimes we cannot hear the truth because our channels of communication have silted up with debris.  We can accept this new reality and just lower our expectations or we can take action and seek to cleanse the senses of all that has impeded them giving wings to our spirits and hope!

“First in a human being's way of life must be purity, then freshness, cleanliness, and independence of spirit.”

‘Abdu’l-Bahá, 

Toothless in the United States

This summer, the day before I was due to fly to Boston from the UK, my front tooth came out! We’d been cleaning out kitchen cupboards of foodstuffs and a packet of dried mango needed to go. Unable to dump it, but unwilling to carry it all the way to The US, I turned to the only other viable alternative. I sat watching TV late that evening and downed the entire packet. It was only when I was at the last handful that I felt that there was a piece of stone or glass in my mouth. Spitting out the foreign object onto my palm I was perplexed about the shape and colour. This was neither a stone nor a piece of glass. In fact, it looked more like a part of me. More like a front tooth. Rising with a sense of dread from the sofa I approached the mirror above the fireplace and smiled. The reflection felt like a smack in the face.

There is something about losing one’s front teeth that feels grief-like. They say that dreams about teeth falling out are usually about grief or loss. Well, I can say it may be a metaphor for grief but losing one’s teeth also actually causes a bit of grief.

I spent a useless few hours phoning dentists to get an emergency appointment. You then discover the reality that what constitutes an emergency for you just does not hack it for the NHS dentist! My main problem it seemed was that I was not in excruciating pain. The tooth I had lost was a root filling and as such devoid of sensitivity. Had I been writhing in agony I’m sure an appointment would’ve opened. So, there was nothing for it but to fly to the US toothless. It would mean weeks of looking frightening. I tried to smile with my mouth closed and usually managed. However, in an IKEA store in Boston, while holding my four-week-old grandson an American lady approached me and cooed and exclaimed of the tiny baby in my arms, “how beautiful a baby, how tiny his feet and hands”. I agreed and in my total pride as a new grandmother beamed my appreciation of her kind words. She recoiled from me in horror and over her shoulder in a huge mirrored cupboard I understood why.

There is something demeaning about being toothless. The character in the Victor Hugo's 1862 novel Les Misérables, Fantine, has her two front teeth pulled to sell them for money. In the movie of the novel, the heroine, played by Anne Hathaway, has her back teeth removed instead. The moviemakers knew instinctively that their audience would have lost a degree of sympathy and empathy with the heroine had she been so maimed.

The proof of this is the more recent serial version of the same novel which decided to be brutally honest about the scene and show the heroine having her two front teeth pulled out. The horror of this episode so shocked fans that there was outrage online with devotees furious and angry beyond belief that their heroine was now no longer what she once was.  It had obviously ruined the whole series for them.

Being toothless is not all negative. It taught me a degree of detachment. My son had to have a tooth filled in Boston, while I was there, and the $500 bill made me determined to avoid any dentist help in the US. Toothless I came and toothless I would go.

It was a remarkably useful prop when getting my two older grandsons to brush their teeth each night. I would watch them brush their teeth until they finished and then open my mouth wide and ask “do you want this to happen to you?”. At which point they quickly re-applied their toothbrushes with gusto. Strangely, none of my three grandchildren flinched at my toothless state. They hugged me as much as ever and it was salutary to see that disfigurement is not such a big deal for the young. As long as you play, read to them, take them to the parks and chat and laugh with them they overlook all sorts of oddities.

I enjoyed time with loved ones in Boston.   I also had the fortune to meet up with an old friend of mine who lives two hours north of Boston. She came down by train to see me for a few hours and warned me that she felt she had aged greatly in the 10 years since we’ve seen each other and might be hard to recognise at the train station. I sent her an email and told her not to worry as she could easily spot me as I was missing a front tooth!  It did give me a hillbilly appearance which by the second week began to even make me laugh. Especially when brushing my hair and putting on make-up in the morning. It felt like barring the barn door long after the horse has bolted.

When I returned home I managed to find a dentist to construct a replacement on a post drilled into the root of my old tooth. Thankfully cheaper than an implant! As the dentist held up a card to work out the colour of the replacement tooth she said: “yes, I think it needs to be slightly blue like the other teeth” to her young assistant. Depressing news indeed! Whatever, the gap has gone and I can now smile without frightening nearby strangers.  

I’ve learned a lot from the whole experience. When you pass 60 parts of you have a tendency to fall off or alternatively, weird things decide to grow on you. Physically that can be shocking but there are also mental cracks that appear. Names escape one, reasons for entering a room evaporate. Simple words that are not at all complicated evaporate from the mind. But love remains and it eases all ills, physical and mental. Loved ones work their magic, massaging healthy hope back into old bones and making new wholesome memories to hold onto. There are worse things than being toothless and my replacement may be a shade of blue but I am not feeling blue just very grateful for everything.

"If we are not happy and joyous at this season, for what other season shall we wait and for what other time shall we look?" 

Bahá’í Writings

Collars and Cuffs, Confucius and Change

The world is ever more connected. In my family, there is a collection of the ladies journal from 1850 that originally belonged to my great grandmother. In these journals, there is regular advice on how to crochet collars and sleeves or make extraordinary hats and also some news. Much of the news is actually about the intricacies of court. Tales of royal events and all the nobility who also attended. Where they went and on occasion what they wore. Then, there is also actual news about events, murders, trials, court proceedings and accidents. In one memorable issue, there were details of a dreadful industrial accident in which many workers were killed and it was announced a charity had been proposed to help the widows and children of those who lost their lives. The following issue had a vigorous riposte to this suggestion. The writer said that the accident had not happened in his county and he saw no reason to be in involved in looking after strangers on the other side of the country. (Still in the UK!) Reading this I was suddenly struck by how far humanity has travelled in one century. 

Now when disasters happen anywhere in the world our hearts contract, we feel despair at other's pain and suffering. We can no longer comfortably draw the line around our own community and care for only them. Why? Because the heart that is open to love knows no boundaries. The child dying here or abroad feels like a harpoon to the open heart. Being able to only care about our own children and loved ones feels like a curtailed mean spirited love indeed. What do we convey to our children with our indifference to the suffering of others outside the family circle?

Another reflection of a perverted mindset is when I care only for my religious group and feel an odd vicious pleasure when those of a different persuasion suffer. Some hug their righteousness to their breasts and spit their hatred and loathing of the ‘others’. They interpret the suffering of others as God's justice. What an odd coldhearted and perverse mindset surely unworthy of the light of day.

In today's interconnected world we are shown the social conditions and suffering of people from all over the world. Our consciences are heavy indeed with the pain and loss of life that constantly plague the human race. We cannot blame it on God's justice. Inequality, discrimination and exploitation have torn society apart. Humanity is in turmoil and confusion and we all know we need real progress, not regression.

We are one human race and our well-being is linked with everyone on this planet. If our economic advancement is at the cost of sacrificing another nation, it will not end well. The selfish attitude that pursues economic gain without regard to the natural environment will not end well. The growing gap between the rich and the poor does not befit the nobility of either and will not end well.

The focus on self-interest, winning at all costs, whoever is damaged in the process, combined with a strange lethargy of conscience will not end well. 

Honesty, integrity, trustworthiness and generosity these qualities of spirit ensure things end well. The upliftment of society begins with each of us and in today's world, our consciences must be awakened at all costs. Only when we feel with a vibrant loving heart will we begin to take action for the good of society.  When we think globally and have long term worthy plans for humanity and act locally in our communities with short-term actions that are constantly reflected upon and adjusted, then progress can be built not just dreamed of.

"If you can practice these five things with all the people … courtesy, generosity, honesty, persistence, and kindness. If you are courteous, you will not be disrespected; if you are generous, you will gain everything. If you are honest, people will rely on you. If you are persistent you will get results.”

writing of Confucius

(551 BC – 479 BC)

May your pain be short and your pleasure long!

I have always been bad with pain.  The tiniest cut, from an early age, brought forth howls of despair. Usually, this would be followed by requests for bandages, the bigger the better.  At times my mother was placing bandages on wounds that were so small she could not even see them.  As I grew older, I became aware that I had a remarkably low pain threshold.  Watching other children in school fall and bleed only to get up and run off amazed me.  As I progressed through adolescence my mother would remark, “What on earth are you going do when you have to give birth?”  It was one of those questions that an adolescence feels a parent asks just to manipulate you.  Akin, to her other favourite, “You must learn to cook and clean now because one day you will have your own house!”  To this I always smugly replied, “Don’t worry, I’ll always have servants!”  This must have been particularly abrasive to my sweet mother who carried trays of breakfast to all of us in bed every morning, while Don Williams filled the house with his songs.  I only have to hear one of his songs to find myself hungering for tea and toast on a tray.

Being a coward about pain I asked everyone about what giving birth was really like.  One said it was the most amazing experience of her life.  Another babbled on about this small baby and how beautiful it was.  A third said ominously that one soon forgets the pain.  My mother said, in her day, you were expected to give birth in silence, a slight whimpering was tolerated but not for long.  You were expected to approach birthing in a ladylike way.  She looked at me with a forlorn expression before repeating, “I really don’t know how you will ever get through it!”  When I was pregnant people became much more honest.  One friend told me it was like having a knife plunged into your innards and twisted.  This was altogether too frighteningly honest I felt.

True to form, I was racing to hospital with every little twinge convinced the birth was imminent.  Surely, such excruciating squeezes meant the baby was on their way.   Medical staff said, in ominous tones, I would know it when the real contractions began.  Then, when the murderous contractions actually kicked in I understood exactly what they meant.  I distinctly remember not being ladylike about the whole business.  When asked about pain relief, I retorted “give me everything you’ve got and if that doesn’t work get a big club and knock me out”. At one point, I remember clearly instructing the medical staff to cut off my head and haul the baby out that way.   

My sister-in-law had an even more painful birth but within a matter of hours was saying she would be happy to have another baby soon.  It was as if her memory had selectively eradicated all the pain and suffering.  Today when reading a book, it suddenly all made sense.  It is by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner, entitled Thinking Fast and Slow.  It helps you understand why we make the choices we do in life.  In one section they carry out an experiment on a group of subjects.  The experiment was simple; each person would have their hand immersed in cold water 14 degrees for 60 seconds and at the end would be given a warm towel.  The second experiment lasted 90 seconds, the first 60 seconds was identical to the first and then for the last 30 seconds warm water would be bringing the temperature up by one degree.  The third experiment subjects were told would be a repeat of either the short or long experiment.  They were allowed to choose which.  A surprising 80% chose the 90 second immersion.  Despite this being obviously longer that the first.  What was going on?  According to Kahneman,

“The subjects who preferred the long episode were not masochists and did not deliberately choose to expose themselves to the worst experience; they simple made a mistake.  They chose to repeat the episode of which they had the less aversive memory.  Their decision was governed by a simple rule of intuitive choice: pick the option you like the most, or dislike the least.”

We are strongly influenced by the peak and the end.  That feeling of warming water was such a relief after the pain of the cold it managed to over-ride our rational brain.  Obviously, endings when dramatic/traumatic enough reach parts of our brain that have little to do with rational fact but are emotionally powerful.  Our intuition has lead us to make a mistake.  So too, the pain of giving birth when followed by the joy of a baby is simply edited out.

I used to find when teaching a class you could give a truly awful 40-minute lesson, boring, stilted with little content and follow it with a five-minute exciting game to end.  The classes would invariably close with kids laughing delightedly and a feeling that the lesson had been brilliant.  They had been fooled by the end.  It had dominated their experience and effectively wiped out the previous dire 40 minutes.  This influence also indicates why coping with dementia or a pain filled death etc. creates such an overriding despair in relatives.  A whole lifetime is forgotten and the agony of the last months or years over rides everything.  It almost manages to wipe out every joyous memory of a loved one. 

Our intuition is a powerful tool but also a flawed one, on occasion.  Or, as Kahneman puts it,

“It seems an inconsistency is built into the design of our minds.” 

Our memory has evolved to register the most intense moment (pain or pleasure the peak) and the feelings at the end of the episode.  This neglect of the duration will not serve our desire for pain to be short and pleasure to last.  In other words our instinctive preferences may be seriously flawed.  He ends with this warning.

“This is a bad case of duration neglect.  You are giving the good and the bad part of your experience equal weight, although the good part lasted ten times as long as the other.”

My wish for you - May your pain be ever short and your pleasure exceedingly long!