Part of our job is education

About three months ago I fell off my bike and hit my head. It was a beautiful balmy Friday evening on bike-friendly Rae Street. I left the house at the time that I was actually meant to meet my friend, putting me 20 minutes in the red. I was accelerating hard, thinking, I bet I can make it from Fitzroy to Brunswick East in 15 minutes, then I’ll only be 15 minutes late, which is socially acceptable! Shortly afterwards I lost my balance and rocketed through the air, landing first on my ribs and winding myself. I thought, I’m falling hard. This seems like the worst fall I’ve had. I really don’t know what’s going to happen. At the end my bike fell onto my head. It all seemed to unfold in slow motion. I can even remember the shocked faces of bystanders watching me tumble, which must surely be an invented memory.

Everyone was out on the street because it was such a beautiful night, and because Rae Street is so pleasant. Kind people gathered around, shielding me from oncoming traffic, untangling my hair from my bike. The neighbours Phil and Jean invited me into their house but I couldn’t move, so sat there on the curb. ‘Did you hit your head?’ a man asked. ‘Yeah, my bike hit my head but not very hard.’ His gorgeous little kid was right in front of my face, staring at me. Then the kid’s face started going blurry and I felt myself losing consciousness.

Could this be dying? I wondered. Seeing as there were no obvious wounds I had no idea why I’d be dying. Maybe internal bleeding? So this is how it can happen, I thought, shocked. A dumb, mundane mistake and your whole life, that felt so big and important to you at the time, is easily obliterated. And you can’t reverse it. For some reason the death scene from the movie Margaret came into my head. The dying actor is CJ Cregg from the West Wing so you feel like you know her, making her death especially unbelievable and tragic.

I got up on my haunches in an attempt to regain a grip on the world, and it helped. My vision gradually came back but I still felt like I was swimming in the world; my head was soupy and everything excessively bright. I wasn’t sure how this was all going to turn out. There was this sour, metallic taste in my mouth. I thought maybe it was blood from internal bleeding but the neighbour, Phil said it was probably just concussion – he played rugby so he knew. Phil and Jean helped me into their house and offered to drive me to emergency. At first I refused but then agreed, figuring that the human race is definitely screwed if you can’t accept favours at times like this (I was to need – and actively seek – many such favours over the following few months).

‘The injured person needs to sit in the front seat,’ said Jean. ‘That’s the one thing I remember from school.’ We drove a kilometre to St Vinnies emergency. My friend was with me by that stage. In the waiting room, he tried to cheer me up by explaining the plot of the movie playing overhead. I pretended to be entertained but actually couldn’t follow what he was saying. Neither of us had eaten dinner so my friend bought me some hot chocolate and chips from the vending machine, and we shared them. I googled concussion on my phone.

The triage nurse, when we finally got to see her, was reading a magazine, chewing gum and looking bored.

‘Were you wearing a helmet?’ she asked.

‘No.’

She looked annoyed. ‘You should always wear your helmet,’ she said. ‘If you were wearing a helmet, you wouldn’t be here.’

‘That doesn’t help me much now,’ I said mildly.

‘Well part of our job is education,’ she said with a sense of importance.

‘Is it really the right time for education?’ I asked, bewildered.

After about ten minutes they took me into the emergency room, where the nurses, young girls, asked lots of questions, like what year it was, and how old I was, and of course, whether I had been wearing a helmet. They looked at each other, worried. ‘I don’t know, she seems a bit confused. I think we might need to collar her.’ I remember thinking they seemed really sweet in their worry. Then I was collared and forced to lie down while I waited for them to X-ray my spine.

A male nurse, about my age, asked me about the accident, did some tests and felt my head for damage. ‘Hmm…there doesn’t seem to be any blood, but can’t really see much with all that hair.’ His arms were lean, muscly and tattooed. He said he was a cyclist too. ‘Please don’t lecture me about not wearing a helmet!’ I pleaded. ‘I don’t really think that’s my job!’ he said. Then he left me for a moment, giving my feet this little pat before he left the room.

While we waited, my friend, sitting at the side of the bed, looked at Linus bikes on his smartphone. He showed me an image. ‘I know this is kind of a weird time,’ he said, ‘but what do you think about this one?’

Three tales

Wouldn’t have wasted my time

It was a party with a bunch of my old school friends and related folk. As well as being completely babe-a-licious, many of these girls are sharply sexy dressers. I started comparing myself to them. This cotton flower dress you’re wearing, the one that you thought was sweet…it’s actually dowdy. I wondered what they might be thinking about me. Why is she still wearing that daggy peasant shit? She could do more with* –

But I then had this vision of myself growing old: wrinkles, spots, a stoop. I imagined approaching the end of my life, looking back on this little moment, and realising how unnecessary it was. That those were pretty much my last days of being classed as a young person and supposedly in my physical prime, but I couldn’t just enjoy it – all I could think about was my small imperfections in comparison to others. That if I’d understood then how quickly beauty fades, and death comes round, I wouldn’t have wasted my time.

Not so perfect after all, are you?

We were at this excellent Laksa restaurant. This couple came in; they looked like architects or town planners. Him: a cosmopolitan Tibetan guy with a classy shirt and suit pants and his hair in a pony tail. Her: cool and classy, with little ballet slippers on. They seemed the perfect urbane couple. You could imagine their apartment; minimalist, with really nice silverware and a few classy decorations. A very calm place.

They sat down. I was checking them out. Then realised they weren’t really talking. They were just staring at each other. I don’t know whether they were just naturally subdued like that, or they were having relationship issues. But I was pretty certain they were unhappy. It looked like a very uncomfortable dinner. I then realised that I got some kind of satisfaction out of their dysfunction. I was thinking, ‘Not so perfect after all, are you?’

That’s ironic, isn’t it?

Today on Australia Day, my friend and I both injured ourselves on Metro Trains. We had our bikes and took them up the back to the reserved seats, as there weren’t many elderly and disabled people around. They were those flip seats, the ones you have to press down before you sit on them.

An older man came over, hobbling with a cane, wearing a classy hat, and carrying a Melbourne University diary. We realised that my bike was in the way, so moved it to the other side of the carriage with my friends’ bikes.

He looked a bit frail so I held the seat down for him while he sat down. It was slightly awkward, and I’m not sure whether it was a bit patronising, but the seats are hard to get down. He said something to us like, ‘Worked it out now have you?’ I couldn’t discern his tone.

My friend got up to get some sunscreen from her bag, but I said she could have some of mine. Forgetting that the seats flip up when you get up, she tried to sit down again and landed arse-end on the floor. Not hurt at all, she started laughing.

Then the train moved the older man’s bag forward, and he reached to get it. I went to help him but he told me he was OK. I sat back down on my seat, rushing at my effort not to patronise him.

My seat had flipped up so of course I had exactly the same accident as my friend, except I actually banged my shoulder and hip really hard, so it took me a few minutes to see the funny side. Once I got over my pain, the older guy started chuckling too. ‘That’s ironic, isn’t it?’ he said.

Interesting that those seats are supposed to be for the elderly and disabled and yet us able bodied can’t even use them without hurting ourselves. Maybe we are just extraordinarily clumsy! The seats are actually a bit stiff to push down though, which can’t be easy if you’re frail.

It was not necessarily ‘interesting sad’ to her

I was born at the worst possible time,’ an older person said to me recently. It would have made a good beginning to a story, I thought, fascinating over a darkness I’ve had the luxury of not experiencing. It turned out she was born during the depression, and grew up during the Great War. She lost a fiance to the war, and ended up remarrying, to someone she described as ‘a good man’, with whom she had a long and happy family life. But it still seemed painful to talk about this early loss; it wasn’t necessarily ‘interesting sad’ to her.

Life offers up examples of this ‘cruel hand of fate’ stuff every day, but for some reason it was only when I heard this war story that I got a sense of the disbelief and resentment you would feel if political circumstances, which often seem so distant, swept in like a hurricane to destroy your life plans. I wonder if governments would be more reluctant to go to war if they had to hear all these tragic individual stories. Should such life-affecting political decisions ideally involve a pure, disinterested analysis of deaths vs. lives saved*, or is this too coldly abstract?

On a slightly different note, I’ve also been thinking lately,  it’s not like lives have an internal logic or satisfying resolution, although we may seek to construe them that way. They’re more like a novel that arbitrarily cuts off because it’s got a fixed number of pages, ending in the same way each time. Your partner and friends are becoming senile, ill, or dying; your own physical health is deteriorating; you might have to live in a home.  Is it a myth that old people are more accepting, that because of many years of experience and reflection, they’ve often ‘come to terms’ with past or present sadness?

It could be a lonely and difficult time, although maybe there are also other, happier realities to ageing. Maybe t’s just like adapting to any form of continually experienced life unpleasantness: you just try to seize the more beautiful moments when they come, and really relish them.

*Not that they do in practice, of course. The real reasons for warmongering, I’m led to believe, are usually far murkier.

Proselytising kids

I don’t see any real difference between teaching kids about Jesus and proselytising them. At my state-run primary school, we had SUPA club (Scripture Union Primary Association). Its stated aim is to see school children ‘transformed through the nurturing of their faith as followers of Jesus Christ.’  In other words, conversion. We got to gather round, clap our hands, and sing songs such as ‘He loves me like a rock.’ From memory, the women running it were pretty relaxed – I don’t remember them saying anything noxious like ‘hate all gays’ or ‘be pure’. We were given a free ‘Good News’ bible – multi-coloured with a rainbow on the front.

I read that Bible from cover-to-cover, more because it was a free book than because I was particularly interested in Christianity. As a piece of literature, I probably enjoyed the Old Testament more than the New Testament. The Oldie contained lots of supernatural happenings and juicy revenge stories, whereas the New Testament was a different person telling the same, turgid, moralising fable over and over again, without offering a fresh interpretation. But ultimately, reading the Bible had a detrimental effect on my faith.

Mum was Catholic, so I was a Catholic by default. She dragged us along to church every Sunday, and sent us to Scripture classes every Monday after school, run in this old, draughty church. Through scripture classes, I did my first Holy Communion, wearing a pale flowered dress – deeply embarrassing, because all my friends were wearing white bridal-style dresses. ‘What’s wrong with being different?’ Mum would ask, feigning indifference to the adolescent condition.

Sister Mary, the nun ran our scripture classes, was old-school. After reading my SUPA club bible, I had plenty of questions for her, like ‘If my Dad doesn’t believe in God, is he going to go to hell?’ (Dad would never have a bar of religion). She wouldn’t answer, implying that the truth was unpleasant. And, ‘If God is meant to be so merciful, why did he do the plague of locusts?’ To this, she said, ‘Just have faith,’ which of course had the opposite effect on me. One time I was praying, and pretty tired, so slouched forward and let my clasped hands rest on the desk during prayer. Sister Mary caught my eye disapprovingly and pointedly mimed sitting up straight with clasped hands precisely heaven-facing.

So from my reading of the Oldie, and Sister Mary’s unforgiving interpretation of it, God came across as a stern, thunder-bolt toting, wowser, and Jesus, while nice, seemed a bit insipid, not necessarily the kind of person you’d want to hang out with. Ultimately, despite its proselytising intent, SUPA club, through its gift of the bible, equipped me with the ammunition I needed to make an informed choice to turn away from Christianity. Heaven was a comfortable idea, but also one of dubious merit, if they were turning dads away.

Death, ageing and a review of Somewhere Towards The End

Up until your late twenties, you’ve never known anything but being young, it’s almost part of your identity. Intellectually, you know things will change eventually, but it’s hard to imagine it. Then you get a grey hair or two, some back problems, and those little wrinkles around your eyes – chicken feed, really, but it’s a sign of things to come. When you complain about it, people say, ‘that’s ridiculous, you’re still so young,’ almost like it’s a virtue, which is comforting, but eventually they’re going to stop saying that, because it won’t be true anymore.

One of my main fears about ageing (this is a bit embarrassing) is loss of physical attractiveness. How much of our happiness stems from looking good? A little bit, I think. It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective – if you’re less physically attractive, it might be more difficult to find a mate and perpetuate the proverbial gene pool… The other fear, nicely summed up in the annoying dictum ‘carpe diem’, is that you’ll run out of time to do the things you want to do. But this seems a bit gimme-ish – do we really need to do everything, fit everything in? Most significantly, though, when you discover that first grey hair, it’s a reminder of mortality.

Since I was a child, I’ve been quite scared of death; the inevitability of eternal loss of consciousness, and the unknowability of that final state. Thoughts of the afterlife once helped (I was force-fed Catholicism), but it’s really a self-delusion, an artificial panacea to the idea of mortality, which is a difficult, uncomfortable idea to get your head around.

The world is only experienced subjectively. So practically speaking, death is the end of the world – there’s probably still a world, but you won’t be in it, and you’ll have absolutely no awareness of it. Indifference to post-death events, even those happening to those you care about, is one possible manifestation of this belief. Maybe people feel differently if they have children; again, there might be an evolutionary basis for this apparent altruism.

I picked up Diana Athill’s Somewhere Towards The End over the Easter weekend. She offers rare insights into topics sometimes treated as taboo, like: What does it feel when your beauty ebbs away? What happens to people’s sex drive when they get older? How does it feel to be forced to care for someone? How does an atheist cope with the thought of death? How do we come to terms with our regrets?

Athill’s take on the deterioration of beauty is that the vanity (if that’s what it is) doesn’t go away just because you get a bit wrinkly. Old people need to look good too, mainly for their own satisfaction – in this respect, she thinks modern day cosmetics are a great help. She describes the process of losing her sex drive. By the end, she was ready for it – ‘there was no reprieve, nor did I want one’- and she even saw some benefits. In Athill’s view (this is probably controversial), biologically, women are more consumed by sex, because they can’t walk away from the results (kids). Thus the ebbing away of sex drive endows women with an enhanced sense of individuality. In her case, she feels that this more firmly established her atheism.

Athill defends atheism as a belief system which, perhaps even more than religion, has the beauty of mystery: ‘Perhaps it is intellectually uninteresting to believe that the nature of the universe is far, far beyond grasping, not only by oneself as an individual but by oneself as a member of the species, but emotionally, or poetically, it seems to me vastly more exciting and more beautiful than any amount of ingenuity in making up fairy stories.’ To Athill, atheism has integrity too, including when it comes to the prospect of death: ‘not exactly comforting, but acceptable because true…and it also remains when I contemplate my own extinction.’ Despite her refutation of religiosity, she does believe a single human life has cosmic signficance, because because every individual makes some kind of contribution or leaves a trace on the world, however minor.

Somewhere Towards The End meanders and digresses, and my attention occasionally wandered. However, the gentle rhythm of her prose, and her intimate, gently contemplative tone, make you feel like you’re in a relaxed, fascinating conversation with a friend, whereby digressions are par for the course. Athill’s famous for her memoirs, and this one, to me, exemplifies a particular type of really good writing; honest, fearless, and bare of affectation.