WD40 for the soul

                                                          

Yes, I am harping on the comment which was most likely made with good intentions. Sorry about it, but it is too good to pass.  Apparently, my soul is in danger of corrosion as I look backward too much. I do not want this to happen, my soul to corrode, I mean, so I started to think about how I could protect myself from it. I started to look for WD40 to save my soul. Turning to google for suggestions it gave me some religious answers, but I do not think that the Anonymous leaving the comment, meant I should turn in this direction. I am myself not inclined to go there. So, I am a bit at a loss. Not looking backwards was given to me as a clue, another clue was The Intern, a film with De Niro.

Hmm…Looking backwards is something I do not want to stop as I am just writing a story of my first love and I am enjoying the process. I am also doing some self-analysis as I go and I, self-centred me, always liked the process. This time it is even quite enlightening, so I will not stop. At least not for a while. This does not stop me to look forward. I am prepared to pay more attention to the future especially that my trip to Poland is around the corner, if I am lucky that is. Polish and Irish have a lot in common, it seems, so maybe I will experience the luck of the Polish? I am planning to go! I want to go! There are also some things to look forward to like renovating the bathrooms. For that one needs to be a little masochistic so I hesitate, especially after my troublesome experience with the kitchen renovations.

Improving my bridge is another good, looking forward thing especially for a learner type of people I belong to. There is a possibility of some achievements there. This is another of my values I cannot shake off. Even if I try, it is still somewhere dormant in me, so I resign to be an aspiring bridge achiever.

For my soul to flourish I need love and friendship. This is a tricky area as it needs others to play fair with you. With life experience, I lost my rose colour glasses and see things more clearly or, should I say, less naively. But the disappointments do not hurt so much as they used to and my first more accurate impressions protect me a little better than they used to.  I have not given up on new friendships, but I do not expect that much depth or commitment as I did in the past. Even if it is not ideal, I still look forward to semi-friendships and I find them. So, what do you say, Anonymous, is there anything else I could do for my soul here?

Creativity is also good for the soul and I create a bit. I write my posts. I take out the love objects from my heart vitrine, I look and them, think about them, recall my memories and write about them. I knit a sweater for myself and intend to finish this tapestry I started some years ago. From time to time I create a special meal.

My idea of bliss - friends, conversation, little wine and good food

                                                

I pay a lot of attention to beauty, another healthy food for the soul, pure WD40. I go to exhibitions, art galleries whenever I can. I would do much more of it if I lived in Europe, but when I am there I will catch up, maybe skipping Vienna 😉. I flaneur as well. Maybe I should read poetry? Never liked it much, but I know this would be good for me. New gentle resolution?

Pleasure… I definitely have to have pleasure in my life. Here is one sore point for me and I am not sure how to solve it. Anonymous, could you help? I really like intellectual discussions and I have problems with finding partners who would be interested in the same things as me. I have been often accused of complicating things and this is exactly what I am missing, discussions with a person who would not mind some complications to talk or write about. I remember somebody saying “why would one like to simplify things when one can so beautifully complicate them”. Was it Hasek in The Good Soldier Svejk? Do you remember, Lech?

There are many little things that give me pleasure, little prosecco, a flower, cleaning up some mess in my home, giving to others, sharing meals with friends, reading, writing, listening to Polish radio and its political news. This is a doubtful pleasure, maybe just the opposite to a pleasure, but I seem to miss it a lot when I do not have internet. Let’s call it my favourite vice. My soul needs that.

I do not think, Anonymous, that you should worry about my soul any more. I refer to you few times here, but this is only an issue of form of this post. You may say, I used your comment to my purposes. Your comment triggered of some thoughts and it was a good opportunity for me to do a self-check. I am satisfied with the results.  So, thank you.

Friendship

                                                                   

I am reading a great book; A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara.  Not and easy book to read but a book that is moving steadily to the top of the list of the best books I have read so far. It has been again recommended by the husband of my best friend Basia. Knausgaard’s My Struggle was another one of his recommendations and that book for a while turned into a fascination for me.  I still have two last parts of My Struggle to read. It will come eventually.

                                                                             

For now, my full attention is with A Little Life. Apparently, the book and its author were one of the attractions of this year’s Writers Festival in Sydney. The book was short listed for the Man Booker Prize.  The next year I would like to pay more attention to this literary event. But maybe I will be in Poland then, it is a May event? Both are exciting alternatives so I will not lose whatever I’ll choose. 

The story is about four young men who meet when still in college and then move to New York. Their friendship continues for many years. It is another bildungsroman, like My Struggle. The boys grow into men and all of them are very successful professionally, exceptionally successful, really. They share a very loving and giving friendships. I am not sure if such idyllic relationships exist in real life and last not for such a long time as theirs. The author calls her novel a mix of fairytale and contemporary naturalistic prose. Even if we think that such a friendship is unrealistic and we file it into a fairytale category, it still expresses a human longing for this ideal friendship and trust. We need it to deal with a loneliness of human condition. Wow, I may have gone too far in my homemade philosophizing.

As I am almost half through the book the foursome is shaken already, but the book leaves a feeling that in a case of a real need the men would put all their resources together and rally to rescue if one of them was in trouble. Security coming out of such friendship is overwhelming. The situation may not be realistic but we dream of experiencing something that beautiful. It always has been my dream. Even if it is not likely that I will experience such an unconditional and deep friendship, it is good to have such aspirations and ideals even if it may never happen. The idea is very appealing.

Most valuable and longest lasting friendships usually start early in life. In childhood, or at school or at uni. Friendships starting in younger years often belong to the special category of friends “for life”.  According to a saying in addition to friendships "for life" there are also friendships “for a reason” and “for a season”. I had a number of such friendships and it was always very difficult to accept the fact that some of them had to end. I would think for a long time about why a friendship has finished, was I at fault, could it be resurrected… I found a statement in the book “He has never done it before, and so he had no real understanding of how slow, and sad, and difficult it was to end a friendship.” I have done it before, and it has happened to me before, but each time it was slow, sad and difficult. These days, I do not struggle that much to revive friendships that ran their cause and have completed, but I still am sad when a friendship has to finish and I wish it had been different.  

Picture of a showgirl

We move through life in a hurry. So much work, so much fun, so many problems, so many duties… We live among people and we see them, talk to them, but often we do not see much behind façades often created for self-protection. I just discovered some layers behind the image of an old lady I visit in a nursing home. I wrote some time ago about my difficulties to become an active volunteer and the red tape around it. It finished well and now I visit a place regularly which the local council found for me. I meet one particular lady, let’s call her Daphne. Maybe my visits do some good to my new friend, but I definitely add something valuable to my life by knowing her.

                     

When I met her first, Daphne was not very keen on having any visitors. In fact she tried to brush me off. She expected to get a patronizing treatment and she wanted to protect herself from it. We both were lucky. It is not my way to great people with “and how are we today, dear?” That was perhaps a redeeming point in my favour. I related to her as I do to any other person. I am not good around small children and people who reached childish mental stage. Thanks God, Daphne is not such a person. I am not sure if she has dementia and if she does what is a level of it. We come from different backgrounds so I am not yet able to gauge if her stories are realistic of a figment of her imagination. Could it be both? I must say that at times I loose myself in her stories. She has a need to offload her thoughts so she talks fast and I at times listen but do not comprehend all of what is being said. It upsets her and it upsets me. Luckily this does not happen too often.

For a while she was telling me that her son visits her very often, calls her and takes her out. Suspicious me thought that it was only wishful thinking. Like in Chekhov's Three Sisters unrealistic dreaming of going to Moscow. It was not! I was very happy to meet her son during one of my visits. Maybe I was even being assessed by the family? To me it was a good sign and I was relieved to realize my thinking was wrong.

So, our mutual trust is being built. During my last visit, unexpectedly,  she showed me a picture from her youth. When you look at Daphne you know that she was a beautiful woman in her youth as she is beautiful now in her fragile eighties. She dresses nicely and puts a lipstick on before my visits. Maybe this is the reason why she asked me always to call her before I visit her. So I do not catch her unprepared? Hmm… Anyway, regular visits were not what she wanted and I call each time before I go to her.

The picture she showed me was of a showgirl! Top hat, cane in her slender hand, great legs, very skimpy costume and a serious facial expression. It was not a flirtatious girl, just a beautiful young lady a bit scared before her forthcoming performance. It was going to be a song and dance. Maybe I should not call her a showgirl as she was a solo performer. She told me that she performed with a band (visible on the picture) and she called the men behind her “boys”. They were protective of her, I believe. Building my story about Daphne I see her as a talented girl who got permission of her mother to sing and dance in a theater. She called it a "serious theater in the city". Obviously she was not a Kings Cross performer. I know too little about Sydney artistic life of the post Second World War era to put the pieces together and fill in the missing gaps. It may come, though, with our future talks, but Daphne is reluctant to disclose too much. I respect that and even if I write about her I respect and protect her privacy. I feel privileged that she shared with me some of her memories. It took few months before she opened her drawer with the picture. It must be an important memory to her. 

I could not find a picture of a serious showgirl. Daphne must have been unique.

                                                              

Daphne’s room is neat and tidy, very few well chosen possessions taken from a big home she had to leave behind. Already on my first visit I noticed a small paining of a cancan dancer performing her high kick. Pantaloons in full view. Vivid colours, lots of bright orange and cobalt blues. Already then I thought that this painting does not fit my expectations. There have been already few surprises while meeting Daphne, some discoveries and still many mysteries, but whoever you were and are Daphne, I feel honoured to know you.

On Friedship

Friendship is one of my very core values. Since I was a small girl I thought that friendship was the best a girl could experience. My mother was a romantic at heart and supplied me with books that glorified friendship between girls. I was the only child for 10 years. Then my brother appeared in my life and the life of the family. By that time I did not need a small noisy thing at home. It upset my world that was full of ideas I found in books. And I read the books my romantic mother supplied me with. The main influence was Ann of Green Gables and a book about a princess from Georgia. The second book was a translation from Russian. It was a very old book, referred to as a pre-war edition. Definitely a pre-communistic literature representing very capitalistic ideas. The book must have been forbidden in Russia. The story was about a princess who lost her mother, the unruly girl was placed by her loving father in a boarding school. His decision, however,  was influenced by a skimming and wicked woman. The school was a very exclusive boarding school in Saint Petersburg. The princess felt lonely but she found true friendship among her schoolmates. 

                                                                         

Maybe I will be able to get this book when next time in Poland, a Polish translation though

                                                       

These were friendships for life, till death do us part sort of thing. I responded to this idea vehemently and this is how friendship became my top value that still is the most important of them all. It represented love, honesty, unconditional support, trust and many other beautiful things. Actually, I consider myself most of all a friend. This is my label – I am a friend. It is a relatively new realization even if friendship has been always present and sought for through most of my life. There were times I thought I was a wife, a partner, a manager. Now I know, I am most of all a friend. I do have my own Diana, the best friend of Ann Shirley from the Green Gables. Our friendship does not go as far as the grammar school but it goes to the first day at uni.  It has been long enough to call her my friend for life. She is now the most trusted person in my life and I am very happy and grateful for that.

When I think about real friendship, I really have a friendship with a woman in mind. That is how it was in those books. Boys did feature, unless they were to become at some stage romantic partners. Like Gilbert Blythe. However, there are so many “howevers” in life, I have some male friends that are also true, valued friends.

What friendship means to me? It is trust, permanency, support, understanding, fondness and many other warm and fuzzies. When I was a young woman two of my very close friends died before they turned 30. They were my first loses of friends. It was very painful but there was no betrayal or rejection behind the end of those friendships. I wonder how far they would go. Would they finish prematurely? Would they last till this day?

When some of my friendships finish, I hurt a lot and can not understand it. Friendships do not finish. That is how it was in those books. Friendships are forever. I still want to think that and believe in it. There is a saying that I found at times comforting: Friends are for a reason, for a season or for life. Yes, I have had seasonal friends in my life as well, but those friends who are not “for life” are they real friends or are they my lapse of judgment?

This Picasso painting represents women friendship to me

                                     

Serendipity - Fortunate Happenstance

                                        

I am a left brain type of a person, quite rational, loving logic, type A. Enough for confessions or excuses for what is to follow. I just want to gain credibility as I am going to write about things that are difficult to explain logically, a bit woo woo. Events that are not causally related but are connected meaningfully are called Synchronicity. Synchronicity seems to be more mystical than serendipity.

Having time to observe events of my life and paying attention to links between some of them, I notice, sometimes almost miraculous connection among events. Serendipity happens. Even its stronger form Synchronicity happens.

A recent very happy event brought this subject and I feel that I want to tell the story.

Some years ago, I think it has been 6 or 7 years ago, I studied coaching and as a part of the course I was supposed to be a client of 12 coaching sessions. One of the options was to be coached by a fellow student. I took this option and found a person I liked the profile of and so I met Victoria. Victoria is a Brazilian girl who lived in Germany. I lived at that time in Gdansk and we both had some problems we wanted to solve with a help of a coach. Victoria was my coach and the sessions with her brought a lot of clarity on what I wanted and needed to be doing next to solve my problems. After a while I became Victoria’s coach and so our friendship was formed. Life went on; we graduated from our coaching academy, got our diplomas and moved on. Victoria to Shanghai of all places a Brazilian girl may want to live in and I back home to Sydney, as if home for a Pole was naturally in Australia.

In Shanghai Victoria met a man. She was looking for coaching assignments and experience. She met her career goals and the man turned out to be the One. This is a beautiful story with a happy end. What I find unusual is that when I first contacted Victoria, she lived in Frankfurt, I lived in Gdansk. We worked together but did not expect to ever meet. It was a cyber space part episode of life. Now, some years later I am invited to her wedding in Sydney where we both live. The world is definitely shrinking. I consider that at least a serendipity.