Author: kathleenjowitt

In 2015, is there something you’d like to try harder at because you believe it would make all the difference?

Conversely, what is something you could stop trying so hard at that might actually help you manifest what you’d like?

I have been promising myself piano lessons all year. At first they were waiting until the piano was tuned. Then they were waiting until there was some spare cash. Then they were waiting for the silversmithing class to be finished, because I can’t cope with more than one extracurricular activity at the moment.

Now they’re waiting for me to get my act together and find a teacher. I am avoiding this noticeably – even apart from being knackered and not getting much done anyway – I think because of needing to be good at it straight away, which of course I won’t be.

I don’t think trying harder is the answer, though. In fact, the thought of trying harder makes me want to cry, and that’s hardly productive. I need to stop being knackered (Christmas holidays should help with that, although I am dashing around more than I’d meant to) and then unravel, gently, the stuff around needing to be good at it.

What are you really proud that you made happen in 2014, despite the gremlins? And what will you do anyway in 2015?

In 2014 I finished (for certain values of ‘finished’; read on) my first novel, Speak Its Name. I also resumed writing my first novel, The Slowest Elopement. The latter has been going, on and off, since I was twelve, maybe younger. The former is a relative newcomer; I started writing it in 2007. You will understand why finishing either of them feels like an achievement.

I sent Speak Its Name off to about five agents (consecutively, not all at once); none of them were interested, but doing this at all was bloody scary, and having done it has deprived the gremlins of at least one of their arguments, namely, that I’m too chicken.

Of course, having done very little with Speak Its Name for a few months now, I am haunted by a conviction that, even after two thorough edits, it needs to be about 15,000 words shorter (which I can do something about), written entirely from one particular character’s point of view (tricky, but doable) and that it will never get taken up unless I remove the religion and the politics (impossible).

This, therefore, is a thing that I will do anyway in 2015. At least, I’ll attempt the first two. I will then think about self-publishing.

I will also complete The Slowest Elopement, which contains no religion, and no politics, but might get me disowned.

Piece of cake. Gremlins like cake.

The idea of rooting down into your own personal beliefs and center of truth is an ongoing process, and many things can serve as anchors or roots as you move through life.

What rooted or anchored you in 2014?

And where do you want to put down roots in 2015?
On the physical level, this year was very much a year of transplanting, of sailing between havens, of transitioning. A year of pulling up roots and lifting anchors – and putting them down again, elsewhere.

It isn’t a what that kept me watered or afloat in all this, it’s a who. It is my dear partner Tony, who at the beginning of the year was exploring Cambridge and sounding out these potential harbours; who for most of the autumn has been propping me up and provisioning me.

Going down inside myself, looking for the anchors and roots that are my own values, I find:

The thing that the Incarnation means for me, that this world is good, that the Divine can be found in everything.

The value of art, that art is worth making, and worth buying, and worth celebrating, and worth selling, and worth paying for.

And there’s something there about trust in work, in the value of what one’s doing, no matter how infuriating or mundane it seems.

2015: I want to build on the rootedness and stability that I’ve achieved thus far. I want to realise how grounded I really am, how much I already have. I want to appreciate that.

I am in Cambridge now. I am beginning to put down roots here: have found a church, with a choir; am beginning to learn my way around.

Here I am. I just need to remember that.

Step one: set the timer for 5 minutes and write down as many answers as you can think of to the question: ‘When and how was I brave in 2014?’ Note: remember the private, intimate and small ways in which you were brave as well as the big public ways.

– came out to a group of evangelical Christians
– submitted a novel to an agent (several agents, in fact)
– moved back in with my partner after six months enforced separation
– went for and moved into the flat we fell in love with
– gave up alcohol
– told people about my mental health, or lack of it
– submitted other writing for consideration elsewhere
– applied for a job above my current level, and was interviewed for it
– spent a weekend with people from a long way back, whom I feared I’d no longer have anything in common with
– went to the post office
– decided that I’d got to where I needed to be

Step two: Choose one of more of those moments of bravery and write a letter yourself back at the beginning of 2014, letting you know how brave you are going to be that year.

Dear Kathleen,

You know that this is going to be a big year, even if all that happens is the move, because that’s big enough to occupy all your attention for at least the first half of it. As it happens, there is a lot more.

You will put some roots down, and begin to grow. You will knock at all sorts of doors and, although none of them have opened, yet, you will have the courage to keep knocking, or, at least, to know that you will knock again.

You will behave for one glorious, awful, terrifying, moment, with almost complete integrity, and you will, for once, make no apology for who you are.

You will smile at them all afterwards, knowing that they know.

You know it’s going to be big. You don’t realise how big it’s going to be, or, once you’ve gone through it, how inevitable it will have seemed.

Much love,

Kathleen

Step three: Write yourself a short reminder to tuck into your wallet or post above your desk of just how brave you can and will be in 2015.

2015 is an excellent fun year; it is the first year of being grown up. And by ‘grown up’ I mean ‘isn’t waiting for anything else to happen’ and ‘doesn’t give a damn what anybody else thinks anyway’. Go bravely on.

Write a letter from you to you… filled with forgiveness, love, and a big bear hug.

Dear Kathleen,

You are in the middle of all sorts of things that don’t belong in now. You have guilt and shame from fifteen years ago; you have bittersweet hopeless wistfulness from last year; you have worry and false selflessness from next February. They have all chosen this week to float up to the surface. You are allowed to have all of them, and, frustrating as it is to have them in your head, it makes sense that they are here now. You are allowed to find it frustrating. You are allowed to want to cry.

Everyone you think you have hurt seems to have forgiven you; forgiven you long before you worked out how badly you’d hurt them, too. I forgive you; I am the last one. You may let go of it all.

You are getting better all the time.

You are very tired. You can go to bed now, and tomorrow is yours, with all the things to do or not.

This is as long as I can bear to make this note, and that’s allowed, too.

Much love,

Kathleen

What tiny rituals: signal that your day is starting; help you ease into a creative project; give you closure from an intensive task; or mark other significant milestones in your day? What new rituals would you like to create in the new year?

I love rituals. When I think about going over to the Society of Friends, the lack of ritual (and, more to the point, the insistence on not having them) is one of the things that makes me think that I am not a natural Quaker. I find ritual works well for me as a sort of trellis; when I’m droopy and wilting the sheer structure of the thing holds me up, and when I’m healthy and blooming it’s still there in the background.

Big ritual. The whole liturgical year is one huge ritual; it spirals around from purple to white to green to purple to white to green with some red bits here and there, and it is reliable and predictable when I’m being nothing of the sort.

I’ve been experimenting this year with building more ritual into my life. I go to lunchtime communion on Wednesdays and lunchtime Pilates on Fridays. I have a prayerbook app on my phone and I read morning and evening prayer on the train to and from work. I use the ‘Angels of the Hours’ widget on gratefulness.org. I post something daily for the #100happydays meme on Twitter. A recent development is the ‘lie-on-the-floor-under-the-daylight-lamp-and-listen-to-an-album-om-the-iPod’ ritual.

And of course I don’t manage to do all of these in any given week. This is the point. I can drop out of them, but they are still there when I drop back in again. For me, it’s not about getting into such a rhythm of a thing that I can’t not do it; it’s about doing it as often as I can. Each one is good in itself, but the doing of it shores it up, so that even if I come back to it when I am down, there is enough left in it to reconnect me.

I need to be reminded, though. I mentioned a couple of days ago about wanting a chiming clock. This is why.

Kat talks in the prompt post about the coffee ritual. Mine is tea. I like, and drink, coffee, and it does form part of an occasional writing ritual (I sit down with a blank screen and a cup of coffee and an expensive chocolate, and see what’s on the screen when I get to the end of the coffee) but it isn’t the first thing I reach for in the morning. That would be tea.

Look back at the last year and consider: how did generosity open your heart? How can you cultivate generosity in the coming year?

I remember a couple of years ago I decided that my word for the year was going to be love. I decided that I was going to love, no matter what happened, no matter how much it hurt.

As it turned out, I was swimming in the stuff, and I hadn’t even noticed until I started doing it myself. My conscious decision to love showed me all the love that was already in my life. It was brilliant. Literally. It shone. Metaphorically.

If I apply the same principle to generosity, it looks something like this: let me be generous, and I will find what is already there.

Another principle that I have been trying to live by is this: I have everything I need.

There is a scene in Apollo 13 where the engineers at Houston have to work out a way to convert a square filter to fit a round hole, restricted of course to the objects and materials that the astronauts have at their disposal, stranded in their little box like a teatray in the sky. I can trust that all the resources that I need to deal with any particular situation are already available to me; I only have to find them. It would be nice if I always had a round filter going spare, but, if it comes to it, I can improvise. I have everything I need.

What about when I’m tired? What about when I am out of energy, or time, or will? What about when I feel as if I have nothing to give? No gold, frankincense or myrrh; no lamb; no heart.

How can I let it flow back to me?

Thoughtless giving is not helpful. Thoughtless help isn’t help. Giving to someone without first finding out what they need has only a tiny chance of actually being what they need; it overrides their autonomy, and that’s almost certainly not helpful. I need the sort of generosity that diminishes neither me nor the one who receives.

Can I at least meet everything generously? The thought that is glowing the most is generosity of spirit, and that’s not really about giving anything – at least, it’s not about giving anything that I can lose. I think this comes back to what I was saying the other day, about meeting people where they are. To give people back their selves.

That’s a start. And I have what I need. It’s already there.

As you enter into the new year, what would you like to do/make/have/be more often? How will you bear witness and celebrate the tiny milestones? How will you respond on the occasions when your intentions do not come to pass?

Milestones. This year past has been full of them, and big ones at that. Tony’s graduation; my new job; my novel; moving house. If I’m honest, it’s all been pretty exhausting. It is, however, over. For the first time in years we both have a decent job, and neither of us is having to worry about money.

It’s so easy to pick a goal and, as one approaches it, as it suddenly looks like it’s going to happen, to persuade oneself that this wasn’t really what one meant, that actually one was going for that next mountain, never mind how high this one is. I want to begin this year with the assumption that I’m already where I need to be.

This year coming has one big milestone, which is my 30th birthday, and I’m resolved to devote the rest of the year to – well, to the rest of the year. I want to be in this year, not some ghost of the past that wants me to worry about something that’s long over and gone. I want to make the most of it. I want to start living as if I’ve nothing to wait for. I want to have a huge amount of fun, and I want to pay attention to everything that comes through.

I am planning plenty of rest into 2015. We are going to have our first foreign holiday since our honeymoon, yes, but I also want to make sure that I have at least two separate weeks where I book nothing in at all. I’d also like to get a retreat in there somewhere.

I want to be very present in 2015.

How do I do this? A chiming clock.

My office is opposite a church, and this church has a clock that strikes the quarters. I have made it a practice, every time I hear the chime, to stop. Just for a second, but it’s enough, to reconnect to the stillness within.

I’d like that at home, too. So that will be my Christmas present to myself, if nobody else gets me one. A clock that chimes.

Copy/pasted from elseweb, here are my less tangible wishes for 2015:

It is Advent, and so new year for me. I have wishes for the whole year to come…

Fun
Colour
Ease
Spaciously (this was a typo but I liked it. I will do everything spaciously!)
Trust
Joy
Clarity
Clear-seeing
Presence
Love
Courage
Freedom
Sacred

Retreat. Holiday, actual foreign abroad holiday. Weeks of nothing. Another New Opportunity. Further adventures in mermaid twinning. One whopper of a birthday party. If I make a mistake, I make it a good one. I greet everything joyfully and with curiosity.

How have you created and/or sustained connections in your life this year?

As so often with Reverb prompts, this makes me flinch, and then realise that I didn’t need to. Sometimes I feel that I am a complete disaster when it comes to connections. Every autumn I drop off the radar.

I have to expend so much energy keeping myself together that I can’t keep a conversation going with anyone else, particularly when it’s something that the rest of the world seems to consider easy. A phone call. A birthday card. I just can’t, and I feel so pathetic for not being able to. Even now, with my head almost back in the right place, the thought of having to buy, write and send Christmas cards is filling me with a vague sensation of dread.

But –

– this year I have reconnected with two people from secondary school, fifteen years after I last saw them. Now we follow each other on Twitter.

– the internet is, in fact, excellent for keeping up with people. Generally speaking I’m better with the written word than the spoken word, and the ability to build in a delay is incredibly helpful.

– finally getting around to setting up a blog reader has helped, too – I follow an eclectic mix of people, on an equally eclectic mix of blogging platforms, and remembering to look at them all was becoming an arduous task.

– I am still in touch with my colleagues from Guildford, the ones I was so worried about losing, this time last year.

– the London Waterloo-Portsmouth line has been, and will be, seeing a lot of me through December, as I catch up with family and friends.

– this year we re-instituted the tradition of meeting at Warblington to remember Héloïse.

– I don’t lose people. Not permanently. They come back to me, and I go back to them. I’m not perfect, and they understand that.

How to keep this going, next year? And how to keep it going when all my social systems shut themselves down? Last year I was concentrating so hard on getting through the great move, on making the most of my last months in Surrey, that I did it all in a state of accidental mindfulness and it was fine. I worked very hard on my connections then, because I thought I was about to lose them all. I’d like to recapture that, but without the stress that induced it all.

I remember something I saw written across a wall in a hostel in Spain: SER SINCERO Y COHERENTE ME HACE UNA PERSONA AUTENTICA. That, I think, comes very close to being the answer.

Please post your favourite picture of yourself from 2014, self-portrait or otherwise!

One night in late June I drank an espresso martini and stayed the night with a friend who has very pale curtains in her spare room. I’d been waking up with the dawn all spring. I managed about two hours of sleep that night, but before I finally dropped off I worked out exactly what to do with my green and black dress that I’d made in 2006 or 2007, which I loved but which no longer fitted.

There had been a conversation, earlier in the evening, which included the oft-heard line, ‘Do I need to buy a hat?’ The answer, it turns out, was ‘No’ – but only on the metaphorical level. It served to remind me of a hat that I’d been hankering after for a long time – because it would go so beautifully with the dress, if only I could rescue it. And because it was completely outrageous. And because it was made by my dear friend Arnie, whom I have known since the first day of secondary school, when we met in a very cold and windy lunch break and decided that we would be each other’s friends.

I spent more on this hat than I’ve ever spent on a hat in my life. It may have been more than I’ve spent on any garment. I was angsting a little bit about this. ‘I’m spending all my money on hats. Not even hats. A hat.’

‘The singular is important,’ Tony said. ‘It proves that this is a significant hat.’

And this is true. It is not just a hat. It is art. I have been thinking a lot this year about art, and about how it deserves to be paid for. I need to value other people’s art, and my own.

I bought the hat. I bought some black velvet and replaced the bodice on the dress. I made a set of jewellery to go with them. I got new glasses this year, too; it took me a while to get used to the (comparatively) huge frames, which made me feel like Woody Allen for the first few weeks, but I love them now.

This is how it turned out:

This photo was taken at Nicky’s wedding, which was an excellent day. I did wear the same ensemble to Arnie’s own wedding, but because I got changed behind a car door in between the toasts and putting up a tent (long story) I never got around to getting a good photo. Or to putting my nail varnish on, if it comes to that. Anyway, I love the September evening light in this particular shot. It was a very happy summer.