Stephanie Booth's online ramblings
Just sit
And feel
Is it nothing?
It feels like nothing
But isn’t nothing.
It’s a tightness in the chest
A sinking of the heart
Tears that gather in the throat
Eyes that stare straight ahead
Just sit
And feel
Close those eyes
Breathe inside
Is there anything there?
All is silent
And still
Nobody else
Just me.
Il fait gris sur le balcon ce matin. Les pétunias essaient de sortir du désert où ils avaient été abandonnés, fleurs roses mais feuilles brunes. Les cloches de l’église au loin sonnent une porte ouverte entre deux mondes. Une chanson flotte dans l’air, ou dans ma tête, elle tourne en boucle et elle est belle. Ma voix se mêle au reste du choeur, et j’attends le jour où à nouveau, pour de vrai, je serai une petite goutte de son perdue au milieu de l’harmonie.
Dehors, aucun autre bruit à part les cloches. Pas ce que les gens imaginent quand ils pensent à la ville. C’est un dimanche matin en Suisse, rien ne bouge, sauf les feuilles du cerisier et les branches du sureau, saisis par le courant d’air qui traverse le jardin. Un oiseau appelle, un autre répond, les chats ne bronchent pas, enlisés dans leur sieste confortable de matous choyés.
Les cloches se sont tues. Il ne reste que le bourdonnement intérieur de mes oreilles, fréquences non identifiées qui tentent de remplir le silence. Avez-vous déjà remarqué comme le silence extérieur fait ressortir le bruit intérieur? Des fois ça s’agite avec fracas, ça prend ses aises dans l’immense espace à disposition, on voudrait quelque chose pour l’arrêter… Et des fois, tout ce silence permet d’entendre un chuchotement timide, d’habitude noyé, quelques mots qui changent une vie ou une journée.
I am a stone. At the bottom of the ocean. I do not breathe, I do not move. I just lie there and wait. Wait for nothing to happen. I feel nothing, I think nothing, I am nothing. Just a dead weight, a could-have-been mountain.
Sometimes a strong current comes and rolls me along. And there I remain again, still and silent at the bottom of the ocean. A nest in the sand bears my weight through the years. I am there. I am, but that is all I am.
Heavy with my own weight, I have sunk as low as I could. Never changing, never wanting. Seasons pass me by in the silence of nothingness.
Around me life thrives and dies. I do not even have eyes to watch it fly by. There, but not there. An insignificant outsider to all that lives.
I am a stone, dead weight on the ocean floor, a sinking heart fallen off a drifting ship.
Sleep isn’t coming tonight. Or rather, it’s coming and going. I’m not a bad sleeper, generally. I fall asleep easily, sleep though the night (give or take one bathroom break), wake up when my alarm rings or when my “usual time” comes by.
Lately things have been a bit more complicated, though not dramatically so. I’ve been having a harder time falling asleep, and my old Quintus has been waking me up regularly (he’s restless at night). I don’t fall back asleep as easily as I’d expect.
I don’t think this is a permanent change. It’s a phase. And sometimes, when you’re wide awake at 2.30am, you just have to do with it. So, after two whole episodes of Sleep With Me (to the end, quite unusual… falling in and out of sleep), sleep-inducing meditation music, a snack (I was hungry), a bit of reading… I thought I might write.
I actually had an idea for something I wanted to write. But it’s gone. Ideas are like that.
Last night, just as I was drifting off, I came up with a few lines for a poem. I hesitated. I could let myself fall asleep and probably lose the lines, or dictate them into my phone for safekeeping. I chose the latter. It woke me up. I haven’t yet gone back to the lines to see if they were any good… I hope they were!
Today I am sore all over from a long and somewhat arduous trek in the mountains. I was expecting to fall asleep “like a baby” (I know the expression is wrong, but it’s still there). But I haven’t. Aside from my body hurting (yes I did take a long hot bath to try and soothe my overworked muscles), there’s quite a lot going on in my head these days. Not bad things! But things. And things in one’s head are not very helpful when it comes to falling asleep.
Now that I’ve settled down to write them out, they’re mysteriously gone (those that I would have been willing to write, of course). Funny how things are.
Aujourd’hui j’ai fait quelque chose de presque incroyable: j’ai passé la frontière. Un petit rendez-vous de dentiste pour une dent qui m’avais fait un mauvais coup il y a quelque temps. Genre, je mords dessus, et je décide dans la foulée que je ne vais pas refaire ça de sitôt. Il y avait une carie. Comme quoi, j’ai beau être “douillette”, comme on dit, j’ai quand même un assez bon radar.
Mais passons sur le dentiste et la carie. Je ne suis pas une grande “touriste d’achats”, mais quand je vais en France, je profite pour acheter 2-3 petits trucs. Donc, je passe à Carrefour. Et moi, ne vous déplaise, je suis des self-scanning et autres self-checkout (ceci n’est pas une invitation au débat, déjà moult fois fait et refait). A défaut de self-scanning (où l’on se balade dans le magasin son petit scanner à la main), je me rebats sur le self-checkout (la borne où l’on scanne patiemment tous ses articles les uns après les autres).
Donc, en France, ou plus précisément à Carrefour, ça se passe comme ça:
Clairement, ils ont tenté d’économiser sur le budget UX (expérience utilisateur). D’ailleurs, pour un grand magasin, il n’y a que 3-4 de ces bornes (dont une en panne).
Pour mes amis français, en Suisse (à la Migros en tous cas):
Voilà, c’était la petite humeur ronchonnante du jour!
Ecrit le 4 mai. Quintus est toujours là aujourd’hui et ne va pas trop mal, je vous rassure.
Tout doucement
Sans un bruit
Le vieux chat
Est devenu si léger
Qu’il s’est envolé.
Dans le cœur
De sa maîtresse
Un grand trou
En forme de chat
Lourd, si lourd
Qu’elle est clouée au sol.
Il y a un oiseau dans mon cerveau. C’est un tout petit oiseau. Ses plumes sont bleu et or. Il a un long bec recourbé rouge vif.
Il volette sans cesse, ses ailes battant plus de mille fois par minute, cherchant de-ci de-là mais se heurtant inexorablement à la limite de ma boîte crânienne.
Ce n’est pas un colibri, même s’il y ressemble, car il ne fait pas sa part.
Mon oiseau tourne et vrille, il butine mes pensées et mes envies sans jamais me laisser de répit. Ses ailes soulèvent la poussière dans tous les recoins, son long bec parfois se faufile dans les crevasses de mon histoire.
Parfois j’aimerais qu’il s’arrête, mais je ne sais pas trop ce que je ferais de son petit cadavre dans mon cerveau.
Dehors il y a l’océan. L’océan de ma vie. Des profondeurs insondables, des monstres marins, des algues interminables. Et des vagues, du vent, des embruns. Des baleines et du krill.
Dans la forêt du monde les sapins piquent le ciel et les sentiers se perdent entre les troncs. L’odeur forte du sol me fait tourner la tête, me remplit, m’enlève jusqu’aux nuages.
Là-haut, je croise des cigognes qui ont mis le cap sur leur ailleurs, et un aigle qui tournoie entre le soleil et le ciel. Je ferme les yeux, éblouie, et je tombe, comme une plume qui danse et vient se poser sur les flots.
Bien au chaud dans mon petit cocon, je me sens libre comme jamais. Les autres et leurs besoins se sont évaporés, les miens petit à petit montrent quelques feuilles.
Dans ce monde arrêté, moi aussi je peux m’arrêter. Enfin. La chape d’attentes s’est envolée. Le besoin désespéré de rester dans le train, aussi.
J’essaie de ne pas trop penser à l’injustice contre laquelle je ne peux rien, à la douleur qui traverse tant d’autres et qui m’épargne jusqu’ici. J’écoute ma respiration, j’essaie de tout oublier.
Liberté mon privilège, que j’essaie de goûter avant que la culpabilité ne t’emporte.
For pretty much all my life, I have struggled with how I react to people being wrong. “Wrong” meaning, here, “wrong according to my beliefs/knowledge“. The frontier between beliefs and knowledge is murky, and we would all fancy our beliefs to be knowledge, but in some cases we can more or less agree on what is belief and what is knowledge.
I have a really hard time with people who are wrong. Wrong, of course, as described above. I have my beliefs and values, and do my best to accept that not everybody shares them. I don’t believe in any god, some people do. That’s fine, as long as beliefs are not construed as facts or knowledge.
When debating, I have very little tolerance for the “well, it’s my point of view/opinion” argument – systematically offered as a justification for something that was initially presented as fact. You can have opinions and beliefs, but if you present them as facts in a debate, prepare for them to be challenged. But as I said above, the frontier is sometimes murky, particularly as seen “from the inside”, and that is where trouble lies.
Take vaccines. I’m taking that example because it’s easy. I believe things about them. I consider those beliefs pretty rational as they are, to the best of my efforts, based in science. So I know they are safe, I know they work, I know they do not generally offer 100% protection, I know there can be a tiny risk of bad reaction, I know they have helped eradicate some illnesses and control others so they do not rip through society like Covid-19, I have a decent understanding of how a vaccine is built, how and why it works. So, of course, I think that people who believe different things about vaccines, like that they are harmful or even dangerous, are wrong. The problem is that in their “web of belief” (read the book, it’s wonderful), their beliefs are perfectly rational and therefore, knowledge.
We could say that each side of the argument here sees their belief as knowledge, and the other’s as belief.
Faced with somebody who believes something that contradicts something I know, my initial impulse is to explain to them that they are wrong. Because who doesn’t want to be right? I bet you can see how that strategy doesn’t really work out well.
So, over time, I have learned to bite my tongue, accept that what people believe (including myself, though I hate the idea) is never going to be completely objectively rational, and remember that nobody (first of all me) likes being told they are wrong. The tongue-biting is more or less successful, depending on the topic in question, my mental state, and who is facing me.
The current pandemic has given me a golden opportunity to work on not only my tongue-biting, but acceptance of differing viewpoints. Accepting that people see things differently doesn’t mean I believe every point of view is equivalent. Quite the contrary. It’s more about accepting that people will believe what they believe, that they aren’t rational (me neither, though I try my best to be), and that it is normal and OK.
I do my best to share accurate information. I’m not perfect or blameless, but I try to exercise critical judgment and be a reliable source of information for those who choose to dip into my brain, though facebook, this blog, or conversation. I also try to correct erroneous information, and that is where things get slippery. It goes from setting the record straight when people share obvious hoaxes or urban legends (generally by instant messenger), providing critical sources when others share scientifically wobbly information (hydroxychloroquine) or scare themselves needlessly (what use masks really serve, disinfecting groceries). And I’ve had to learn to back off. To keep the peace, to preserve relationships that I otherwise value, and also to preserve my sanity and inner peace.
One milestone was when I realised it was useless trying to tell people who were convinced a certain French scientist had found the miracle cure for Covid-19 that the scientific evidence for it was flaky at best, dishonest at worst. People are scared and will believe what helps them. We tend to want to ignore the emotional dimension of our beliefs, but it’s there, and much more powerful than our rational brain (as anybody who has ever tried to reason through emotions knows).
Some people are more comfortable dealing with uncertainty than others. Some people understand logical fallacies and cognitive bias better than others, and are more or less able to apply that knowledge to the construction of their beliefs (critical distance). But we all have emotions and they colour what we are likely to accept as fact or not, whether we like it or not.
So I tried to drop hydroxychloroquine. That meant I had to accept that (according to my knowledge) false information was going to do the rounds, in my social circle, that people were going to have false hopes, and spread misinformation, and I wasn’t going to do anything about it. Not an easy thing to let go of. I feel like I’m skirting responsibility. My therapist would certainly tell me that fixing other people’s beliefs is not my responsibility…
I’ve been doing the same thing for some time now with people who believe vaccines aren’t safe or efficient. I know facts don’t change people’s minds. Worse, debate reinforces beliefs. I know! But I don’t really believe it, and keep on wanting to try. So I bite my tongue, remember that for the person facing me their belief is perfectly rational, remind myself that telling them they are wrong or debating them will not change their belief, and try and get on with my life. But for vaccines in particular, I seethe, because these beliefs have an impact on actually lives and public health. And I have to say I dread them moment when we will finally have a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, and people will refuse to use it. It’s going to be a tough exercice in emotion management for me.
Anyway, I’ve reached a point now where I try to provide the information I feel is the best for those who want it, and I’m getting better at feeling OK that somebody I value or appreciate believes something I think is plain wrong – without trying to change their mind about it. I’m getting better at identifying the point where a discussion stops being an exchange of ideas in the search of truth or satisfaction of genuine curiosity, and starts being a standoff between two people with firm beliefs, each trying to shove theirs upon the other.