Some days I wake in an uncertain light. Oh, the light without is as normal but not the light within. It flickers on an off like a dodgy bulb, predicting eventual out-ness for ever. I rise quickly, wondering in my half sleep if the dodgy light is only here with me beneath the covers. Unfortunately not. Going through the ordinary process of washing, dressing, opening curtains and pulling back the covers to give the innocent bed a good airing, the uncertainty stays close. I cannot explain it, never could and now, with my ageing knowledge, I never will because it always, without exception, leads me down the path of self-beration. Or, is it self-beratement? Or self-berateness? None, or all of those?

Whatever I choose to name it, it is entirely itself. My inner judge who has been sleeping for a while now is really a slumbering beast with teeth and claws and is a tremendously accurate portrait painter. Before the first snarl I know what it is going to say and how it will say it. Accusations of failure, neglect, foolishness and downright sin are all in its mouth, just busting to breathe out poison darts on a swoosh of stale air. I no longer engage. The fact that these judgements are always the same without a trace of compassion or effective guidance have numbed me to their supposed power. In short, I have learned that it is not the beast that scares me at all, but only my own apparent determination to allow the beast room at all inside my head.

The tactics I have employed are most effective. If I, the carer of this inner beast keep caring for it, feeding it with attention and other nourishments, it will never leave me. Why would it? It is cosy in there, safe and most importantly, unchallenged by other kings and principles, beliefs and choices. It reigns, or reigned, supreme. Right, Mate, I tell it. I need to do some work on this, on you and on me. So I begin at the beginning, in childhood. I don’t trawl back through memories to find anything in particular for the memory is a fickle friend as the above makes clear. Instead I study, under guidance from an online course, how to love myself better. Actually, how to love myself at all, given that most of us don’t love ourselves anyway, me included. If I take the hand of my imagination and we go together into the fun of childhood, the play and the games, the innocence and the laughter, we find plenty of it. Remembering only the hard times is very unfair of me and not the whole truth by a long shot, but I am not alone in making this choice. Invariably when someone is asked about their childhood, they will recall the hard times, the tough mother, the absent father, the bullying at school, the spots, the fat, the teasing, the shame of being alive at all. Why? Well, I cannot answer that beyond saying that our default as humans is usually to see the worst, remember the worst, speak it out as if it was all we ever experienced.

Back home, rain threatens. In Africa, where people and animals die of thirst every day, rain promises. Same rain, different view of it. Simples. if I can take a day like yesterday feeling out of sorts, scratched and snarled at and just move gently through it, then it passes. If I can tell myself that I am a true survivor, a strong and beautiful woman who has lived her life to the full from the year dot, then the beast gets bored and goes back to sleep. If I can consider how to spend my time on such a day, outside my thoughts, reading, perhaps, sewing, asking questions of others who may well be very much in need of such attention, then the beast is ignored and neglected. Eventually, with practice and allowing no thoughts of self-criticism to arise, not even one, during such a day, the beast will leave the building. I know this, because I am practising just that.

And the days will be as they will be. I never know what a day will bring, but, by golly, I am ready, like a sharp witted warrior, and the ones that set out to bring me down are no match for me at all.

Today it is humid. I won’t say we can barely move but it’s close, in both senses of the word. 40 degrees and humidity is way above that, leaving our bodies slimy and lethargic, our minds on ice and aircon. Outside, the animals must work with this for they have no option. Rain, much needed and in copious amounts, threatens, lands us a few fat drops and then rolls away laughing. We fill the water bowls, big deep terracotta things close to the house for we know that the water hole is shrinking. It leaves cracked dry mud at its edges and offers little in terms of relief for all the giraffe, zebra, buck,nyala, wildebeest, warthogs and birds who need it to be full and rain-clean. Thunder grumbles, lightening flashes, but it is just a game to them. They are not down here and wasting away for the lack of what they hold in their power – the knife crack that will split the clouds, forcing them to dump their precious cargo on this hot sandy desert. Even the buffalo grass is holding firm, refusing to push shoots above the surface. The only grass that is visible has risen beside the outside tap that leaks. These wispy green shoots look surprised. I imagine them wondering where all their mates have gone and feeling just a tad foolish for having been so keen to get above ground. The blue mountains have spent the day in a blur as if coated in smoke. I see nothing of the laval deposits, nor the faces of, now let me see…….at least 12 creatures from real to mythical and clearly cut from the now solid rock. I have a hippo mother and her calf, a rock biter, an ape baring his teeth and a rather wonky-chops horse who appears to be melting, to name but a few. They are all hidden this day.

It thinks me of relationships, those ships that bounce across the same ocean, yet each travels alone. One, like the keen grasses, bursts out too soon through excitement or anticipation. Sure, this person may regret their action once faced with, well, nobody else, but it is his very nature that brought him into the sunlight and, who knows, his might be the better choice.

Although the smoke hides the mountains from me, it doesn’t mean they aren’t there. I have watched and studied their faces for weeks now. Someone else might tell me they are just mountains. They have no animal faces carved into their solid rock shoulders. These are merely fictions of mine, something to be fondly allowed. What they really mean is that they cannot see what I see. The beyond of things. When someone is completely living in the worldly world, they rarely see the beyond of things, and people who do are drunk or deluded or children.

I swim in the pool, feeling the fat drops of rain fall on my shoulders. At 40 degrees, this is a blessing, not a curse. But, it is only a few and I can hear the clouds cackling like old witches who had the power to fell fortresses back in the day and now can only, at best, halt the cloud dump, which is inevitable and will come one day soon. The swim is a relief and a pleasure. Zebra trot across to eat the early grasses…….oops! Warthogs do the same but the rest of the bush is sand and hot and empty of cover and carpet. For now. Until the rains finally come.

Right now, the retriever pup is being dunked in the pool. His super warm coat is a disadvantage in this hot country and yet he is bouncy, well and full of puppy nonsense. His human parents teach him to find the steps in the pool for easy exit, should he ever fall in by mistake. The acacia is greening up daily, the giraffes visiting ever more frequently and Spring is moving in. So weird to have left Autumn behind and to move into Spring. I watch socking great wasp queens looking for nesting sites, bugs of all colours clattering across the decking, some safe, some lethal. Lizards leave droppings everywhere and geckos who seem quite joco about living under the eaves of the thatch drop the same from above. Tiny pellets land on me at odd times, but I can see nothing when I look up.

Doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

I think, if asked right now, what is my favourite book, I would answer Alice in Wonderland. I say ‘right now’ because I read about 15 books a month and they range like mountains in their diversity, over continents and across the world, ignoring oceans and other stops in the proceedings. I read books on Nature, History, Spirituality, Science (well, easy science and including Geology, Astrology, Mountainology and other ologies) Novels, Poetry, Essays and whatever else catches my eye at any one time. That time depends on mood, openess of heart, time and weather. In the colder days, cold writings pull me in. The Eye of the Reindeer being one that springs to mind. In desert times, when I am too hot for toffees, I might pick up something about a woman in the Amazonian jungle fighting mosquitos and other things that bite or swell, like a river, for instance or the chest of a malefactor.

But, when someone asks that question about my favourite book, and I am obliged to answer, I will say Alice. She walked with me through childhood. I had the long hair, the curiosity, the wilfulness and the desire for escape into adventure. Even my mum said so as she rolled her eyes and shook her head. Oh Alice! she breathed, even if that wasn’t my name, but I knew what she meant. Inside I smiled, even though she may not have intended a compliment.

To be curious is to be a child, so they say, but the greatest thinkers counter that, urging us to remain curious throughout our lives. When we put away childish things we might be excused for chucking curiosity out too, but we make a mistake in doing so. I agree that we should probably stop sucking our thumbs in public, or eating soup with our fingers, but, in the chucking, the very core of what makes us human goes too. Suddenly we have to be sensible, and that word has distorted itself. It originates in a late Middle English ‘perceptible by the senses’, its origin from Old French or from the Latin ‘sensibilis.’ Either which way it refers to what we sense, not what someone else senses on our behalf, such as ‘sensible’ shoes or behaviour or choices. In other words, not my choice at all.

Watching a child or puppy or kitten or small thing learn something new, with a little fear and a lot of bravado always fills our mouths with Aaaws and our hearts with a skoosh of watery warmth. Is that nostalgia for what we left behind so long ago? Why did we leave it, and where? Have we, in our sensible shoes and with our sensible choices got just a bit lost in the forest? I get that we are required to live politely inside our worlds. Anarchy is scary and nobody wants that amount of unrest, not least because there is quite enough of it on the inside of our own front door, but our choices are never hung on the horns of dilemma. It is never either this, or that, either black or white, either crazy or sensible. No way.

There is a place in between This and That, where the BFG and Winnie the Pooh and Alice, Dr Zeuss and children all live in perfect harmony. This place is not for anyone who has understood sensible to be ‘it’, that turning into an adult, minus all childlike fantasy, hope, fun, play and curiosity is what we all inevitably morph into; that life becomes a circular saw on repeat. I know it threatens when we are overly influenced by worldly pressures and opinions, I know this well because I fell for it too. But, and this is the wisdom of old age, I now know that my falling wasn’t new. Generations have done it, turning into stuffy and distant dads and over-chirpy controlling mums, both of whom concealed and protected their self medication in the face of emptiness like a ‘precious’. Those of us who lie sleepless and disappointed, full of wonder but not the Alice kind.

Well, the good news is that nothing is ever lost. We might have agreed, momentarily, on the sensible shoes, but we have not lost the curiosity knack, any more than we have forgotten how to ride a bike. All we have to do is turn, ever so slightly towards what we know really matters; the play of our children, the sudden sunset that begs us to watch right up to the end; the time when cats reset a computer just by walking across the keyboard. Or, that moment when someone says ‘Coffee?’ when we have a long list for Tescos and are running late. Those times where Curiosity beckons. Where we could just find laughter and sharing and suddenness and light and all those things you never find in a Tesco queue.

Even though Curiouser is not a dictionary word, in fact, precisely because it is not, I call it to the witness stand. We need wild things in the witness stand, even if the sensible and judgemental world would have a conniption at the very thought. At least the wild things can swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth without thinking a single thought.

And be believed.

When engaged in the process of training a puppy or a child the level of exhaustion and frustration are much the same, as are the joyous delights and the easy times which are usually when the aforesaids are asleep. Over the days the adult human begins to question their own sanity. I remember it well, but it is way too late for any such questions. Lured, as we all are, by the sweet cuddly images of peaceful obedience, we forget one vital thing. This baby, this puppy, they are not toys and this is not a Disney movie we can pause when the doorbell rings. These invaders arrived complete with an individual personality and it will show itself no matter how many times we read the manual, which, by the way, is never site specific. In my day, this manual was penned by Spock, now relegated to the ‘weirdo’ section of child raising books. Discipline and parental control, ie ‘My way or the highway’ was rightfully in question among we young mothers, all of us having been bashed into shape by the age of 3 months, too terrified of all authority figures to say anything in a loud voice or, even in a whisper, unless, that is the whisper was deferential.

Now it is all turned on its head, this training thing. Now we are advised to distract when our child (or puppy) is chewing up the sofa. We don’t shout or smack or in any way give in to our own raised temperatures. Calm at all times are we, consistent, patient, for hours and days and weeks, months and years. Just that reads as exhausting, and not at all possible for we have work to do, lives that already include other children, other people, other lists of demands, all requiring us to react immediately. But babies and puppies have no concept of that old person trouble. Focussed entirely on their own needs they will make certain to escalate the noise level until they become the only one who needs you right now. Trouble is that ‘right now’ can take over a whole day and half the night until the adult human can barely stand, never mind go again being consistent, patient, positive and happy to sit on the floor, now that the sofa has been considerably reduced.

Everyone has their own ideas about raising small noisy creatures and not one of them holds back on telling you theirs; how it was when they went through this nightmare period and how much better it would be for you, distraught by now and sofa-less, if you changed to their way of thinking. After all, it worked, didn’t it? But you cannot take this in, not whilst in the thick of clearing up endless ‘accidents’ despite all that attention given from 0400 onwards; not while your sleep pattern is no longer a pattern but distilled into one squiggly line, one that keeps stopping and starting until it runs out of ink altogether. Then comes the day you pull your trousers on inside out and never notice until some kind person had a word in your shell-like. Your mealtimes are non existent, unfulfilling junk grabbed on the run, your hair needs washing, you don’t change the bed for weeks (no point, you are never in it for long) and you snap at the lollipop lady. What is happening to me? You might wail as I did for years. Puppies, children, work, sleep deprivation, demands, arguments about the right and the wrong way to train this whirling dervish, mopping, always mopping, and being upwardly cheerful at all times?

I recall a day dream I had during the years of raising a dervish or 5, plus wiggling piles of puppies and kittens. If I could pop the whole lot into the freezer, safe in the knowledge that they would thaw safely when I pulled them out, for a whole glorious week, I could recover my senses. It was a pretty dream and so peaceful. I remember voicing this dream once to a health visitor and her face fell. It’s just a dream, I said, thinking she might faint in my kitchen thus giving me yet another body to look after, and she left rather hurriedly not finishing her coffee. I watched her receding back just knowing that I, along with Spock, was firmly relegated to the ‘weirdo’ section of her mental library.

The new puppy in Africa is raising his game. The exhaustion within the home is palpable. I am tempted to join the ranks of those who know better, whose experiential learning is surely of great value, but I keep quiet. They will raise this dervish their own way and it will be a good and grand way. They have the up -to-date training manual, after all and it is 30 pages long, burgeoning with do’s and don’t’s. It is also not site specific, nor does it take into account location, restrictions, work pace and 4 suspicious cats, cats the pup longs to play with. It will all be fine, I soothe, once this tricky bit is over, this tricky bit that will last for a long time.

We all want our children and our dogs to be well behaved. We all want to encourage their own personalities to grow unrestricted. We want to teach them how to control themselves, to bark when barking is acceptable and to stay quiet when appropriate. We want to teach good manners, respect for others whilst encouraging independence and self-worth. The balance we aspire to seems daunting, and we are often daunted when we look at what we hope to achieve. The key is, I now know, to enjoy the journey. I’m not sure I managed that all of the time but when I look at my dervishes now, remembering the dogs long gone, the cats too, I am so glad I took on the task of raising these marvellous invaders for what they taught me about real life has kept me in chuckles for decades. As it will, one day, for the ones in the thick of it right now.

And there will be a sale on sofas, come the New Year.

There is a moment when thinking is flipped like a sand timer, on its head. A moment when all I think I see and all I think I know unthinks itself. In a state of confusion the old absolute makes a dash for the door. I call after it DON’T GO! but it pays me no heed. The new light thrown on this old belief has dissolved it. I didn’t ask for this new light but, then, whoever does ask for new light when that which was already is curled comfortably up in the library alongside all the other absolutes of my life?

Once the door has shut on the old I turn, reluctantly, towards the new. Now I will have to work and the thought makes me tired. I never had to think much around the old guy curled up in a library chair. Now I have a bouncing babe to dress and feed and think about, and at my time of life! It’s a veritable insult and quite lacking in respect for my retirement plans. I know of many, now dead, who staunchly maintained their library of beliefs. Although it might have been infuriating to me, I could only hand over the invitation for an alternative look at something old. I often as not withdrew my hand for these old retainers retained with iron fists, their vast collection of experiential wisdoms serving them as well now as they ever did throughout a long life. I could, in more gracious moments, see the value they put upon what and how they knew any given truth. I could sometimes, in a state of higher grace, see myself as they did. Uninformed. Young, too young to really know what I was talking about. I could take that head-on-one-side patronising half smile and climb back over their boundary wall with only a slight turbulence in my heart. Sometimes. Although I do confess to you now that this was a rare event. How could they be so stuck? Why is it that, after 20 years of my father being dead, did his ruling still rule? Was my mother a child who could not think for herself? Just because he refused to let her sew whilst she watched TV with him, did that mean she was duty bound to maintain that rule? Did I have to sit there, my hands laid still in my lap and feigning interest whilst watching Countdown? Seriously??

It was her rule of thumb. Her security. It told me much about their shared life. Perhaps she, like me, had married someone she needed at the time. A father figure, one with a well-established set of ‘truths’, and, perhaps she picked them all up and made them her own because to think for herself could have been dangerous. Many women have fallen into this old trap, me included. It is easy to do and comfortable, safe. But, unlike her, I am curious as Alice in Wonderland and always seeking a new way to do an old thing. Sometimes I bin the old thing altogether. It’s falling apart anyway, for all the patching I may have done to date. It no longer has a place in my set of truths and its voice is just a squeak, and an irritating one at that Even when I can smell danger ahead, I quest on because the world is always on the change and I do not want to be left behind. Uncomfortable it may be but what I am learning is a revelation. If I don’t hold on too tight to my own experiential trusses, will the building fall? Well, yes, it might. But, then again, it might not.

This letting go of control is my egg timer flip. All my life I was taught to adhere without more than the odd lightweight question, such as Shall I Prune These Roses?, to the establishment truths. In the parental home, my school, college or job, my marriage and my family life. Sometimes this wistfuls me a bit. Had I been brave enough to sew defiantly whilst watching Countdown as a young woman, might I have known the real security of independent thinking and autonomy? Learning this flip thing as a sexagenarian is all very well but what difference will it make now to my life?

I cannot be sure of my answer to that, but what I do know is that this new state of flux is exciting. All day long old truths head for the door but I no longer call them back. Thank you I say, and Hurry up. My house looks bigger without them, more space for dancing, more light. It doesn’t matter that I am a late learner. I am bright and strong and healthy and I say I Don’t Know a lot to the questions asked by my grandchildren, my children, anyone in fact. And I don’t. Know. How can I know, when the world is always on the change? Instead I ask them – How Would You Do It?

There should be a museum of Curious Old Ways with a nominal entrance fee. On rainy days, young families could visit the exhibits and laugh together at the quaintly out of date methods I trusted and employed for decades. They might picnic in the grounds and return, after lunch, for more hilarity. It could be a real hit with the new generations. Old thinking always generates laughter in the young. It doesn’t mean we didn’t bring anything of value to the table of life because we did, back then, when our set of truths was a newborn babe. But now they are not all relevant, nor useful as they once were, and they need either modification or release. it’s a good thing.

That library of old guys. I think I’ll move them on. I want the new light, the new books full of new truths. And all that room for dancing.

Writing this title tells me that Sudden has turned into a noun. I like that. How versatile it must be if you are a word to be able to traverse the grammatical genres. I employ nouns as verbs and adjectives as trampolines from which anything lighter than a giraffe can effortlessly bounce off into a sentence, landing just wherever it pleases.

Talking of giraffes…….yesterday evening I was sat sitting on the stoep, glancing from time to time at the longing shadows and feeling the sun soften into a caress (having attempted excoriation since 9 am), when something made me look up. And up. And up. A huge male giraffe was heading my way. His head bumped the sky and he towered over the acacia, now greening up fast. Behind him came slightly smaller huge giraffesses and a scuttling baby, still taller than most of the thorn trees. I gasped as quietly as possible and pressed the video button on my phone. I followed their slow and gracious walk as they loped along, watching them pause to strip the most thorny of the thorn trees. Those thorns are 6 inch nails and sharp as needles but not to their leather-lined mouths, I surmised. I saw the baby spread his forelegs in order to pick something tasty up from the ground; saw zebras drink from the water butt just a few feet away from me and smiled as two slightly less huge male giraffes, probably brothers, joshed with each other in a tease of neck bashing.

At one point a car appeared, returning to the house just across the bush from us, and stopped dead. I heard car doors open and shut quietly, low voices vibrating in excitement. The giraffes, spooked, began to wander away but, by now, the baby had taken himself off to the far side of the dirt track and was, in effect, trapped. I urged the people to move themselves and their car quick quick, but only inside my head. Eventually, on realising that their stopping had upset the whole thing, they moved away and relief flooded my heart as the ‘little one’ grabbed his chance and rose into what would count as a gallop in Giraffe. I followed their departure around the house and off off off into the depths of the bush with a great big thank you in my mouth, followed closely, I’m rather ashamed to say and on a different trajectory, with a curse for the uneducated tourists.

I don’t pretend to know exactly how to be mindful. Apparently there are loads of ways of getting it wrong. For example, just noticing a new flower en route to the M8 does not count. Well, it could, if you held the spirit of that flower through a line of aggressive drivers and the rain obliterating any chance of a decent view ahead; held that flower in all its sudden beauty, allowing it to infiltrate into your very being, mindfully, of course, until you float into the antsy grudge-infested and hungover bunch of colleagues awaiting you with that beatific flower smile, unwavering, on your face. Never mind that you stormed out of Wits End late after a ferocious altercation with that infuriating teenager who is actually planning to go to school in that stained shirt with that amount of goo plastered over his head and that patronising smirk on his face; nor that the woman you work beside just texted SICK and has left you with double the workload, nor that your varicose veins are playing up, nor, even, that you forgot your sandwich for lunch which will now go through a process of revenge, curling up at the edges whilst the carefully constructed and healthy interior will liquify, stink and finally end its life in the kitchen bin, accompanied by a thousand bluebottles. The flower smile stays on, if you are mindfully able to hold that flower within, if you are really able to let go of a deep need to control everyone and everything.

It asks a lot does this mindfulness. However, I am growing to like it a lot. A huge amount of our days come at us like a spray of bullets, and it doesn’t stop all day long. If we don’t control our responses to that relentless attack, we become a victim of circumstance. In the quiet of the night we may consider this, feeling unable to defeat the enemies who attack us. I know this place so very well. However, the most marvellous news is that it is never too late to de-victimise ourselves. Our minds are strong enough to change it all. Not overnight, but with guidance and with consistent mindfulness study.

That teenager will learn eventually that stained tops are not cool, that smirks just look arrogant and that solid hair looks ridiculous after football in the rain. The double workload may or may not be completed. I am only human after all, and my work hours are fixed. My colleague did not set out to dump me in the poo. She’s just sick. My colleagues can keep their baggage to themselves but I can be compassionate and ask friendly questions so that they feel heard. Chances are I’m the only one in their lives who listens without fixing. This, in no way means I take on their stuff. It simply means that I see their suffering and acknowledge it, even if I reckon that their suffering is nothing compared to my own and I feel like smacking them.

I’m sure I am muddling mindfulness with other modalities but I don’t think it matters because the bottom line is the same. Let go, let it be, let them be, let me be etc. Let everyone (including those in my care) live their own lives. Let them find out for themselves. I just need to focus my do-gooding light on myself. There will be plenty of work to do after all. For starters I can teach myself to let go and that is just about the biggest of all asks. Meantime I won’t be going out in a stained top, nor with quick setting plaster slathered over my coiffure, nor do I have a sneer turning my mouth into a rumple of caterpillars – not since that flower en route to the M8.

I might forget my lunch though.