Childhood: take two

Now that the snow has all melted (even though up where I am in Scotland it lasted all of two days in earnest) and my pressing university submission deadlines have passed by, I have a minute or two to reflect on childish indulgences and pleasures.

My love for snow - even if it's just a teensy little shower that doesn't settle - is absolutely childish. The sight of those flakes falling from the sky sends me right back to the early '90s when I would spend hours playing in the snow, making snowmen and throwing snowballs at my little brother. As a responsible adult (just) in my final year of university preparing to enter gainful employment beyond the world of part-time cafe work, I spend much of my time avoiding childish indulgence - unless it involves large quantities of fizzy cola laces shared amongst friends.

Why, though? I understand the importance of acting responsibly, if I didn't I probably wouldn't still be at university or successfully living independently, but having childish moments is probably just as important. Running around in the snow, playing old GameBoy games, watching bad TV with friends while eating junk food, these are all things that make responsible life fun and interesting. Without them, who are we? Boring, average people who do nothing but go to work?

Carpe diem. Fifteen minutes of childish indulgence a day never hurt anyone.

Remember, remember

The  following is an article that I wrote for the BBC when I was 17 following my participation in the government-sponsored Holocaust Education Trust. The original publication, along with a video clip from the trip is available here.

In April 2008, I visited the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland with the Holocaust Education Trust. The experience prompted me to ask three questions. Why did I go? Why did I feel it was important to go? And how did I feel when I was there?

I've always been interested in the events of The Holocaust – the only part of history I find remotely interesting – from an ethical point of view and also a personal one. My great-uncle survived the camps, originally Dachau and then later Auschwitz-Birkenau. As I was too young to talk to him while he was alive about his experiences, I felt it was important for me to see the place of his suffering as a way to understand what he went through, and hopefully, why.

I also have a lot of Jewish family who went through various camps, and I believed that the trip would help me connect with their suffering in a more real sense than simply looking at pictures.
If I could walk on the same blood-soaked earth it would make their suffering – alongside that of millions of others – an actual event and not merely a history lesson.

It was important to go because, as the Holocaust Educational Trust believes, seeing is not like reading. Actually walking into gas chambers and through the infamous gates, reading "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work will set you free), gives you an emotional insight into how the prisoners felt as they trod the same earth, and a sense of the true scale of suffering and death that mere facts and figures can't give you. Initially, as I walked through the gates, I had to stop and walk out again to prove to myself that I could. It brought tears to my eyes when I realised that I had the freedom to leave, when so many didn't have that choice.

Looking at the proof of the crimes committed by the Nazis was also extremely emotional – seeing tonnes of human hair and children's clothes was overwhelming and after leaving the block, I broke down in tears. Seeing really wasn't like reading. At Birkenau (also known as Auschwitz II), I felt many of the same emotions, but was also struck by the sheer scale of it. From the watchtower I could see countless remains of wooden huts, each of which housed up to 1,000 people. The sight of all those brick chimneys standing up through the wooden ruins is something that will haunt me.

The visit has left a huge impression on me – for days later I cried about what I saw – and I know that when I work with students to help them learn from the past, I will be able to give a personal insight into how it felt to see what they saw, and walk where they died.

April 2008

The gates at Auschwitz

Birkenau camp as it is today

Fire! Or is it only a hot-water bottle?

A mere four days after my post "Expectations" here I am again, musing away, thanks to a (you guessed it) New Year's resolution to blog at least once a fortnight.

Today my musing is on the nature of love. What is it? How do you recognise it? Having recently left a long-term relationship with a wonderful person, this is something that I've been struggling with for a while. As a concept, love seems to be fluid.

The ancient Greeks had five different words for love - philia, eros, agape, storge, and xenia - so it's not just me who thinks that there are many different ways of loving people, and that it can be tricky distinguishing between them. Figuring out that you love someone (in any way) is, for me at least, a difficult business. This pretty much sums up what I think romantic love should be:

"What I want is a feeling so strong that it takes over all my senses - no matter what the consequences are. A love with a grip so tight it grabs hold of every part of me, even my soul." - Fake by Matoh Sanami

This may sound a bit intense for some people, but surely love is supposed to be intense? The only problem with this is, everything else can seem a little mediocre. Perhaps I over-think things sometimes, but if there's no fire, is it really love? Comfort, companionship, and support are wonderful things, but they're also things that are found in a good friend. Surely in a romantic relationship, there should be something more?

It may prove an impossible quest, but - for now at least - I'm going to pursue the fire.

Expectations

Apologies for the slight hiatus over the past few months! I've been busy working, studying, visiting family, travelling and getting deep into research mode for my dissertation. Understandably, blogging sort of fell down the list of my priorities!

Lately I've been thinking about expectations and the effect that they can have on how we go about our lives on a daily basis. They affect all aspects of life and all of our relationships, from professional to personal, and especially familial, and the expectations that we percieve or hold ourselves can skew our perception of the world. 

How often do the expectations we hold about others and those that they hold about us actually align with reality?

False or unrealistic expectations can often lead to disappointment and confusion about why they weren't achieved. Without appearing to sound as if we should all lower our expectations of both ourselves and other people - because we shouldn't, especially when it's people we know well and care about - perhaps we should become a little more realistic in what we think can, and should, be achieved. Instead of expecting everyone to automatically become tolerant of others because the majority thinks that is a good idea, maybe we should start expecting that our systems of education and discouragement of discrimination be made more effective and that our representatives act accordingly to remedy any deficiencies in those systems.

Beginnings

So after two and a half weeks of looking at this little post-it on my desk telling me to "Blog... 'beginnings'?" every day, I have finally sat down to do as I'm told (even if it was me doing the telling).

As a student I have become a master of the art of procrastination, and believe me, it is an art. You start the day with this nice neat list of tasks that need doing, like going food shopping and studying, and somehow you end up doing the shopping, reading a book, watching a film and meeting your friends for coffee but not the studying, even though it's the most important thing on the list.

The feelings of guilt that we generate by procrastinating an important task often actually seem to reinforce our desire to procrastinate, and so a cycle of guilt starts following us around until we actually cave in and do something about whatever it is we're not doing.

The culprit, at least in my case, is my impulsiveness to do something fun like watch a film, go for a walk or make something extra delcious to eat. Since prioritisation doesn't seem to work very well in the face of an especially strong desire to procrastinate, I think the time has come to attempt to master our impulsiveness - to harness it to immediate effect for those tasks that seem less interesting or aren't as fun as the things we would prefer to spend our time doing. Of course, that's usually easier said than done.

It might be a never-ending battle, but at least once you finally begin the end moves into your line of sight and starts to get a little closer all the time. You just need to make your move.