Category Archives: On My Mind

On My Mind

Making Music

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I don’t pick up my guitar very often, and certainly not as often as I would in my fantasy image of myself (in which I also fearlessly climb hard things outdoors, have more reliable hair, and tend a successful vegetable garden), but I go through phases where I really enjoy playing. I enjoy the feeling of the strings under my fingers, I enjoy the size of the instrument between my arms, and I enjoy being able to make something beautiful.

I can tell it’s been a while since I’ve played when my fingers are sore and the strings rub in places not calloused by climbing. And I can tell that my hands remember how to play when I realize I’m playing without thinking. I’ve had a guitar for over 20 years, though nothing about how I can make it sound would suggest that.

An aspect of making music that never ceases to amaze me is how quickly the time goes. When I’m in the mood to play, I sit there until my fingers are too tired to continue, or until my neck is sore from bending over the strings to look at the chord charts on the phone in my lap. I spent my high school years performing in chorus concerts and musicals, and the times when I play guitar have become the times when I sing aloud, voice wavering in ranges that used to come easily. I’m always surprised when I check my watch – an hour already gone?

Talking about treasured items with friends many years ago, one looked at the guitar case sitting in my childhood bedroom and said, “That’s a good example – you’d never go anywhere without your guitar.” But even then, I knew that I would. I took lessons in high school and dismayed my teacher with my avoidance of practice, and I’m sure I didn’t take my guitar with me to university. I may have wanted to be that chill person who sat back and played (see above fantasy self), but I never was, and never actually tried to be. (There’s want and there’s want.) I’m fairly confident my guitar stayed at my parents’ place even when I shared an apartment in my last year of university, but it definitely moved with me to my first apartment after university. And then I moved to Malaysia with two suitcases and no guitar as a carry-on – again, I wasn’t that cool.

But the world spun around a little, and after a subsequent year in Singapore with two suitcases (still no guitar), I decided I wanted it again. I took that long-neglected guitar to New York, and then to Singapore, and then to Germany. It certainly has travelled, and having it makes me feel settled. Taking it out to play puts me in a place that I used to know well, and there aren’t so many places like that in my life anymore.

I’ve never taught anyone to play guitar, but I’ve shown people how to hold it, how to strum the strings, how to form simple chords. It’s easy, I always say, give it a try. And that’s another thing I love about playing guitar – it is easy to play, though, like anything, the room for complexity and beauty is not to be underestimated. I am by no means good or even decent at playing guitar, but I can read music, strum some chords, and sing along and that works for me. I don’t have to start from the beginning when I pick it up after a long while; I just have to take a few big steps back and slow down, which is not a bad thing for me. Just like at the climbing hall, I don’t mind the reminder of how far I have yet to go.

Playing guitar has not been the place where I frequently spend my spare time, but it’s always been there as something I enjoy. I am glad that I learned to read music, to understand chords, and to take care of my hands from a young age. I’m not an artist, but I know there’s something really special about creation, and it gives me a warm feeling. It’s something to get lost in and there are times when all I want to be is lost. I’ve never played often and I’ve never played well, but I’ve always been willing to start from wherever it is that I am.

And with that, it’s time to play.

Yunnan, China – November 2018
On My Mind

The Old House

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Whenever I dream of “home” I dream of the old house, specifically the kitchen, which was always my favourite room.

I remember the walls yellow and later orange-red, the cherry wood table and matching chairs stained with a blue accent that I knew was beautiful long before I was old enough to develop taste in furniture. I wonder if there are still math problems visible on the soft wood when the sun shines just right. I wonder if they can still be felt when you rub your finger along a seemingly smooth surface. It was always bright in the kitchen, even when it was dark outside, and I remember the upheaval of removing one pantry to build a desk and replacing the floor that children and toys had long treated too harshly.

The kitchen was the geographic centre of the old house, the first room you saw from the front door, and the first room you entered after bursting through the mudroom door in playclothes, smelling of sun and sweat or peeling off layers of snowpants and gloves. We did our homework at the kitchen table, ate dinner as a family, played board games, sat around to share the worst news and the best news. Almost every photo that we have from a birthday or holiday was taken in the kitchen. Every gathering with friends and extended family started and ended in the kitchen.

We always had a radio there and we listened to talk radio in the morning and music in the afternoon. Sometimes the bird was out on the island when we got home from school, and late in the evenings, the dog turned the island into a race track. The kitchen was the part of the house we lived in, and it’s the room I picture when I think about growing up.

I don’t remember much from my dream last night, but I was back in the old house, back in the old kitchen. I haven’t been inside since I moved to Malaysia nine years ago, shortly after which my parents sold the house and moved across town. I drove by once and soon I’ll drive by again to show it to someone who has only seen it through Street View on Google Maps. The photo there is of a house where I still lived, the car in the driveway not yet my brother’s. I wonder what it looks like now. I wonder what parts of it are best-loved now.

The kitchen is the room I always want to see when I visit a home for the first time. That’s the room I want to be in, the room where I feel most invited and most comfortable. Guests are shown first to other spaces, but kitchen parties are always the best parties. Time in someone’s kitchen is intimate, cozy, personal, and I think there’s some love there, too. It’s in the kitchen where we work alongside one another, where we see what’s not so tidy, where we take raw ingredients and make them into something magical.

It’s no surprise that the kitchen in my parents’ “new” house is the room I’ve spent the most time, the room I like best. It’s the first room you see from the side door, which is the only door they use, and it’s the room that contains the daily traces of people – reading materials left on the counter, coffee cups out ready for use, recipes tucked under the fruit bowl.

Last night I dreamed of the old house, which is always the case when I dream of “home”. My dream started and ended in the kitchen, and as always, it took me right back.

Vienna, Austria – January 2020
On My Mind

A Little Bit Outside

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Every so often there are moment that remind us of the groups we are fully, intrinsically, unquestionably part of . . . and the groups we are not. The groups where, for one reason or another, we stand a little bit on the outside. This is not necessarily a negative thing; we cannot be an invested member in all of our groups, simply because there’s not enough of us to go around. Furthermore, we might not want to be so deeply involved, perhaps because this would present us with obligations that we are not interested in or prepared to shoulder. It can be painfully difficult to come to terms with the groups that we want to be part of that do not want us, but that is not of interest in this post. Rather, this post is about recent circumstances in which group membership was unspoken but thrown into focus.

Language and Culture

Before I moved overseas, I helped out with the international student exchange program at my school. This opened my eyes to the question of integration: How do I help young people integrate into a group that is relatively homogeneous . . . and very different from what they are used to? This question changed in form when I had the opportunity to work in a very diverse environment in which integration was a question caught between language and culture. (Danau Tanu’s phenomenal Growing Up in Transit deserves mention here for its impact on the way I think about schools and language.)

In my somewhat nomadic adulthood, I find that language plays a more important role in my interactions and friendships than I would have guessed. For example, there is a difference in the shared understanding that I immediately sense with those who come from the same linguistic background as I do. I almost always know who is American (accents aside) based on the words that they choose in certain situations, or the way that they explain past experiences. Having worked with so many Brits, Canadians, Australians, and Kiwis over the years has tuned me into the differences in our cultural contexts, and therefore also informed the words that I use when talking to certain people. My favourite example here is “college”. This has a meaning in the US that does not match the meaning used by English speakers, and sharing the context is important. Telling a story about a high school experience needs a different explanation when I’m speaking with people who had a similar educational experience to mine. I am immediately “in” with those people, and forever “a little bit outside” of others.

A few weeks ago, my partner and I had dinner with friends and talk turned to just that – our school experiences. Not only did I have to ask clarification questions about what was clearly a shared understanding among the others, but I also had to provide background context before much of what I said could make sense. I laughed along with them as we talked, fully aware that the picture in my head of their world was likely as inaccurate as their picture of mine. The pleasure is in finding common ground despite the differences, and seeing my own experiences through new eyes.

Things like this happen so often. There are many instances in which my partner and I interpret actions or events differently, to say nothing of the differences in our language. Because I am the one who has moved, it is my responsibility to adapt to where I am rather than expecting to find what I chose to leave elsewhere. I find that I am sometimes caught unexpectedly unaware simply because I didn’t know that there could be another idea, interpretation, or action. I am simply “not from here” and haven’t run into this particular circumstance yet. A little bit outside, as it were.

I’m not sure when one begins to feel at home in a culture, though I have had years of experiences being surprised at what I found when I returned to North America. Sometimes I know how to live the way people in Germany live and I do it automatically, and sometimes it’s like seeing yourself in a mirror and forgetting that you got a haircut. It’s familiar but not quite right.

Social Groups

And now for a completely different example, one in which no one is talking about the groups that everyone knows are at the centre of the conversation.

In order to make plans for the summer holidays, I sent a message to a group of people who I had previously talked with about plans. The daily lives of these individuals are intertwined and I am the one clearly on the outside, a result of the choice made to live somewhere else. It is not a secret that this group interacts without me, that I fit in only at the seldom moments when I’m around. If I ever had different expectations, I lost them a long time ago. And I’m no more present for this group than they are for me; we interact infrequently, as has been the habit since before I knew it was a habit, and otherwise, it’s pretty silent.

For that reason, it didn’t entirely come as a surprise when my message went unanswered. I had anticipated precisely what I did not like, which is becoming a topic of conversation that I was not privy to. Being outside of this group means that I am not privy to very much, but it was obvious what was happening when I received no replies to a message that, among people who are part of each other’s lives, would have received replies. That the group responded (by not responding) en masse suggests that a discussion had occurred, a course of action deliberately taken.

This is a situation in which a group was clearly more than just one group, and being outside the group meant not being in the group at all. It’s interesting because this fact was always simmering under the surface and now it is fully out in the open, precisely by not being open. One of the things I learned when first working to integrate groups of students was that friendships thrive on shared experiences; it is difficult to feel connected to people when our shared experiences are few and far between, and especially when, looking back, what was ostensibly shared was only shared at the acquiescence of the group, and not those standing a little bit outside.

Reflections

Our daily lives are enmeshed in relationships, both those we’ve chosen and those we have been forced into, for a range of reasons. Building and maintaining relationships is a process with which we are all familiar, and it governs the way we structure our world. I love teaching the human relationships topic in psychology because it’s about the everyday experiences of all of us, immediately relatable and immediately captivating.

Maybe it’s because of teaching psychology that I am fascinated by the inner workings of my own relationships, and try to be conscious of the role I (and others) play in each of them. I think the important lesson here is that relationships are complex and there are more stories to explain them than the ones I can tell; just because I’ve interpreted a situation a certain way doesn’t mean someone else has. Humility plays an important role here, too. We must be humble enough to listen to other viewpoints, as well as confident enough to express when we disagree. We must be vulnerable enough to let others in, and strong enough to stand on our own. It’s a delicate balance, being human, and that is what we doubtless share, regardless of who is on the inside and who stands a little bit outside.

Bad Herrenalb, Germany – February 2023