The Flight - Running Away into Purgatory
As I waited for the taxi I sat in my chair by the table and became totally still. There was a quarter of an hour to go before the taxi arrived and after a disturbed night, again with little sleep, I longed to have a short nap - though this might mean I miss the taxi down on the street. I sank into a sort of a meditative state, in which I focused all of my attention on the screaming pain across my shoulders and upper trunk. Was this angina? As I sank deeply into the sensation of the pain, putting my attention into it, with the rest of the world drifting away out of attention, inside the pain it was clear that it was the muscles of my shoulders and in the flesh itself, and not beneath my ribs.
Then I went to stand outside to wait on the Road, checking the switches off , locking the door, going down the steps. The taxi was there almost immediately.
Chatting to the driver all the way to the airport there was still that doubt. Would I survive this process? Even as the car accelerated and decelerated, even as I adjusted my muscles to sideways motion at the roundabouts, my tired body protested, and I tried to concentrate on a conversation with the driver. The day is bright but the wind is blustery and I anticipate a bumpy plane journey. The sub text in my mind is/was, would he notice how tense I was, how I wanted to get out and scream, but could not. I had no choice. I held myself together.
At the airport - a series of tasks in steps, at each stage concentrating on the tasks - and holding myself together though I felt I was suppressing the jittery jumpy feelings, the desire to shudder and tremble, suppressing outward display of my deeply unsteady feelings as I talked to check in personnel, as I emptied the pockets of coins and objects to passed through search procedures and then walked into the departure lounge.
And then just over an hour to wait before boarding and take off. An hours waiting in purgatory. To move, to do things was a relief. To do anything...but in the departure lounge there was nothing to do but to live with extreme tension and the jitters on fire across my shoulders and a deep deep desire to fall asleep - which, had I done, laid along some chairs, would have ended with a wake and convulsions, calling attention to my extreme nervous state and an end to my flight.
I sat still. I had no choice. I was in a cooler. All the while during my journey I was in a cooler and would continue to be so until I could rest in a room with some privacy. Would people notice my jittery agitation? I must not alarm them. I would have liked to have massaged the muscles along my shoulders and do to a limited extent but "making too much of a meal of it" would make me appear odd. So I wait - I "freeze" in fact.
This train of thought had occurred to me earlier. When you point a gun at someone and tell them to "freeze", you are saying more than "don't move" - you are saying don't move in conditions, for them, that will be of fear. Fear motivates running away, movement, and if you don't move if you have to stay still ( also in conditions where you don't want to be noticed by moving around) that's what happens - the body feels the stress of fear but doesn't move. It freezes. If you are in a cooler you adrenal stress responses are all aroused but you cannot use them. You are frozen. This airport lounge is a freezer and I long for movement - to go into the gate area, to board the plane, but wonder how much longer I can hold this nervous tension.
But then what else can I do? My reason is steady, my thinking clear. What other choice do I really have? Sitting and waiting I revisit the situation that has brought me here: to go back is to go nowhere. There will be no support, at best there will be a psychiatric hospital ward accessed after much more nervous tension and crises that would be unseemly and I would be taken back over 20 years into a psychiatric ward.
And I have said goodbye to all that. It would gain me nothing. But going to Ireland will get me a place to stay - it is taking control of my own destiny despite the agony, through the agony. Backwards there is only fruitless agony - a retreat to nowhere, a retreat to permanent descent. I have no choice, I must go
To live is to suffer. I suffer but I am alive. The issue of what I am afraid of barely enters the equation. If the plane takes off and I have a heart attack then, so be it.
Boarding time. I find my way to my seat, hemmed in between a middle aged woman by the window seat and an man a bit older than myself by the aisle. The cabin crew give the instructions for emergencies.
The plane snakes along a network of pathways to the take off position, stops.....starts, slowly acclerates, rapidly accelerates, the nose pitches upwards and then it is lurching, rolling roaring into the sky - the ground visibly falling away and heading steeply towards the clouds. I watch my breathing I struggle with the uneasiness of my breath. I hold my finger on my pulse to feel the regularity of my heart rate as the plane continues climbing.
Then I start to endure the journey. There is nothing to do but more waiting - as it's a cheap airline I could buy a snack, say another cheese and pickle sandwhich, but that would mean indigestion probably. The same screaming tension but what else can I do but sit - reason tells me that to "go beserk is no option". The stress and tension in my shoulders goes on and on.
And on and on....
And on and on.....
Without making it too overt I reach into my shirt and massage my shoulders and under my shoulder blades. But I must avoid upsetting the travellers sitting on either side by squirming about too much. I notice that the air hostess is as jumpy as I am - she shows all the signs of being totally stressed and in jitters herself - as she passes along the aisle I make a sympathetic remark and out gushes a torrent of a story, confirming my impression.....she's only just starting her shift she says....and it will go on for several hours yet....in a circular trip over Britain and the Irish Sea and she has barely had time to rest and unwind from the last marathon....
I am still very tired and a thought that had occurred as early as the departure lounge has now gripped me firmly and I have decided to action it - I will find a hotel in Cork to stay if I can. I cannot get beyond Cork tonight.....
Eventually the pilot announced that the plane will be starting to make its decent to Cork airport and another wait later it comes out below the clouds, banking across fields, lower and lower - eventually dashing to a lurching bump and swishing along a runway among greenery, now under the grey skies.
Here, I think, I will change the tense in which I am writing. I wrote in the present tense to give a sense of the immediacy, the "what happens next?" feeling that the present tense can convey and therefore hold more tens - ion. In fact I am now writing this in my safety and retreat, the place to which I was feeling....so I will abandon the sense of the agony, inherent in the uncertainty of immediate experience. I will change the emotional key in my writing...even though the tension and the agony was not quite over it was marginally more bearable from this point.
In fact it would have done me good in one sense to have stood up, shot my arms up and whooped a shout of triumph - but of course I could do that either as it wouldn't do me good with all the other people in the plane and might have started a process that would have ended in the Cork psychiatric services. So I continued to hold my feelings. But the bumpiness of the landing and the release afterwards in the way one feels like laughing after a period of tension is released and it had also released a relieved conversation with the woman beside me, with whom I hadn't spoken all the trip. In about 3 minutes I learned that she is here on her first trip to Ireland to visit her son, while I told her that I was here to have a rest and that my comments to the hostess about stress partly came from my own stressed state. She is sympathetic.
We disembark and eventually the bags come around the carousel. Outside the checkpoint I find a telephone to ring John to tell him I will arrive tomorrow but am looking for a bed for the night. I walk to the information point, get a list of hotels and B&B, ring the first one to catch my eye, ring and discover that there is a place and tell them to expect me. I walk outside terminal building and catch a taxi, give the address and I am on my way. It is all very very simple - once I have mastered the Eircomm telephones with my eurocoins, fighting back my tiredness.
The taxi driver, who might have been an elederly priest from the way he was dressed n black and white and the picture of the Madonna on the dashboard, drove me away. Eventually we found the street and the hotel. It is on a hill and the hotel and the owner came to greet me and show me to a room. I was now very tired as I hauled my bag up the stairs. I gave my host a briefing - coming to Ireland to rest, possible angina etc. in a chatty kind of way and not making a big thing about it. I also mentioned being a vegetarian and she said that that would be all right at breakfast time. She showed me to a small and cold room and spoke words that I did not really take in about how cosy it was here - the radiator would come on at 6.00pm and the sun would warm the room really cosily. I was now very tired and certainly in no fit state to make an assessment and go out looking for somewhere else so I accepted it.
It was now about 3.00pm. The bed was icy. I lay between the sheets with my clothes, minus my jacket and jumpers, and the cold felt delicious under my raw tense shoulders. I had thought that I would not be able to sleep because of the continued tension - in another of those nights of tiredness and tension nervous holding each other in a check. But the cold of the bed seaped into the tension in my shoulders - soul on ice was my thought and I drifted into sleep.
Though my sleep was a little fitful and I got up to look at my room I did sleep and did not get up until just before 6.00pm. I paid my bill and the hostess owed me a small amount of change till later. She recommended a vegetarian restaurant and I set off - but was too tired to want to walk all the way and stopped instead at a Thai restaurant had a vegetarian satay and returned, buying a bottle of water. The hill up to the hotel was a struggle - the cold damp air seemed to float on the top of my lungs and sting. I struggled up the stairs and returned to bed. The next morning I woke at about 6.00, again after a fitful night but this was still the best sleep that I had had in days. I was much more confident. Things were getting better. But not for veryone. Through the wall someone coughed chestily and the combination of damp and cold made me feel that had I tried to stay I too would have developed a chest cough. I had briefly risen in the night and noticed that the radiator was going cold at about 3.00 in the morning.
To occupy myself before breakfast I wrote a list on the back of one of the information sheets that had been given me at the airport with lists of hotels and boarding houses. Once I set myself to looking the list got longer and longer. From memory it went something like this:
No plug in sink.
No soap in sink.
Radiator supposed to come on at 6.00 but not on till I asked for it at 6.25pm. Not on all through the night. Off by 3.00am.
Room cold - n.b. chesty cough in room next door.
Windows dirty and impossible to close the curtains properly because they are impeded by the location of the TV and the table carrying it. They certainly cannot be much of a warmth source as the sun only shines through them for about 3 hours in October in late afternoon.
No towels - or maybe you're supposed to ask for them too. (When I was about to leave I saw a pile at the bottom of the stairs).
No tea making facilities in the room - outside one floor down on the landing.
Will the vegetarian option at breakfast turn out to be what isn't animal based? (Later confirmed).
Television - multi channel, including French
Bed cover - dowdy but mattress quite excellent. (In fact, it has a sign on it that indicates that it was designed by, and purchased from, an orthopeadist).
Picture in room - black and white - very catholic - 2 florid vases in moody erotic swirls.
Pictures on the stairs and landings (e.g. by the tea table) - excellent dreamy fantasies full of suppressed Freudian style longings. Pictures betrayed by the old brown patterned wallpaper.
Lots of electrical cables on the landing opposite my room and a heavy iron pipe in the stairwell betwen the floors..
Floor - sloping (by the angle of the water level in the mineral water bottle standing on the wardrobe it was possible to see which way.
I gave this list to a hotel helper just before I left - afterwards I wondered if I should have done that. Perhaps it wasn't fair - I didn;t know full circumstances. It was a bit of a cheek. Or was it?
Without stopping for breakfast I walked out to drag my wheely case to the railway station and caught a train, via Mallow, to Killarney, stopping an hour in Killarney.
Coming out of the Killarney station I saw Tim, the same taxi driver as had driven me down to Killarney to R...before. We conversed about the unusual weather for Kerry - early snow, in October, on some of the mountains. It has been one of the wettest Octobers for decades. Also the environment, the US elections, the oil supply and global politics.
It is raining when I arrived and rained for the next two days and then intermittently, on and off.
Settling in
I cannot remember my first few days here clearly - except that it involved slowly adjusting to the place and to J. (and P). I was not in a completely calm state when I arrived and very early didn't want to eat something that J had cooked with re-used rice. John was incredibly accommodating and patient with me - responding to the embarrassment by changing the subject to the geology of the mountains across the bay. Then we talked about our organisation - and his concern that the organisation and process be got right. It is an incredibly diverse organisation - despite all the members being concerned about the economics of sustainability.
I scribbled these pencil notes on the back of a piece of paper. My comments were influenced by John's accommodation of me:
Feasta - suggested general principles
Exploring transitions (towards sustainability)
Accommodating differences and learning from them - including when to give people space.
Starting from mixed perspectives, purposes, knowledges, experience.
Accepting chaos and seeing it as the first stage of creative learning - chaordic processes.
Learning from resolving mix ups arising in differences (different starting points)
Theoretical and practical, psychological and medical are all part of the process.
Very short term to very long term (as short as the tension in a breath) as long as geological time (e.g. oil reserves, landscape topology implications)
Feasta usually means slower, getting you further with less mishaps - a total process cannot happen all at once.
The potential of inspiration is lost if pushed too soon or out of time - people get bored with an idea pushed too hard before its time while others lose heart.
Resists ego needs to show off.
Allows for apparent distractions - which may be necessary detours.
Indirectness - tacking, zig zagging or curving towards goals.
Letting go - letting others modify/adapt our grand ideas.
Conflict wastes energy - firmness os good enough, not rigidity.
Accommodating differences will often require a measure of distance.
Maturing our personalities as part of the process.
© BRIAN DAVEY