Extremes

This week Ten Thousand Questions (the mysterious interview blog with all questions and no answers) has been asking about Extremes…

1. What's one of the riskiest or most reckless things you have done?
   I honestly can’t say. I never really considered myself the reckless risk-taking type… Of course there have been things I’ve looked back on afterwards and asked myself “what was I thinking”… But on the whole I’m probably more prone to being overcautious than reckless. (Which is not problem-free either!) 
   
2. What is something you do where success is measured by tiny details or depends on very delicate, small movements?
   Just now: playing Words with Friends – especially from the cellphone!
   
3. What was your longest period of time traveling away from home?
   I think that must actually be my one-month stay in England at age 16 going on 17! But then I was staying in one place most of the time… As for holidays of the continuously-on-the-move kind, I don’t think I’ve been on any lasting longer than 3 weeks. And most of those were family holidays back in my teens. Most holiday trips in my grown-up life have been shorter… 1-2 weeks.
   
4. What was the biggest food item that you ever helped cook and/or eat?
   Again, nothing extreme comes to mind. In the past when I was involved in church camps etc, the arrangement was often that we took took turns helping out groupwise in the kitchen … I was always more of a Mary than a Martha in that context though* - the kitchen was never really my domain. (I do cook for myself, and occasionally a friend or two or three – but arranging large dinner parties was never my thing; and I feel lost and mostly in the way in other people’s kitchens.)
   
5. What was the largest event you ever attended, or the biggest crowd that you were a part of?
   I suppose the largest event/crowd I was ever part of must have been when Billy Graham visited Sweden – Stockholm - back in 1978. (35 years ago!) Three friends and I attended one evening in a crowd of (ca) 10,000 people. However, what I actually remember best from the occasion is that we forgot where we had parked the car and had to spend ages looking for it in the huge parking lot afterwards!!!

Christ in the House of Martha and Mary by Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. (Wikipedia)

*As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, "Lord, don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!" "Martha, Martha," the Lord answered, "you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her." (Luke 10:38-42)

Secrets

Among the blogs on my dashboard reading list there is the mysterious Ten Thousand Questions, which keeps asking daily questions without collecting any answers (or at least never publishing any). This week they’ve been asking annoying ones to suggest my life is full of deep dark secrets:

What are a few of your biggest secrets? Are they things that nobody knows, or things that everybody knows but no one talks about? Do you keep more secrets now, or did you keep more secrets when you were much younger? What's changed over time in your situation, or in your attitude about keeping things secret? Do you worry about people thinking less of you if they found out your secrets? Are you concerned that some of your secrets could impact your job or your relationships? What big, guilty secret did your family share when you were growing up?  Do you still carry shame associated with your family's secrets? Are you the person that everyone tells their secrets to, or are you always the last to find out?

I very rarely write down answers to the TTQ questions – only give them a few seconds of brain time. This week, my brain kept giving the spontaneous frustrated response: “WHAT secrets?!” 

Still, I wonder if these questions might possibly have made their way into a dream I woke up from this morning… For some obscure reason, I was subjected to some kind of theraphy with a most annoying therapist who kept asking questions out of context – not that I can recall now what the context was supposed to be, nor what kind of annoying questions it was I was asked – you know how it is with dreams! Anyway not much remained when I woke up but the frustration: “but… but… but…” (The dream also reminding of a clever attorney questioning a witness in a court of law; or some conversation from Alice in Wonderland.)

Another factor behind the dream may have been some frustrating talks of different (and yet in some ways similar) kind lately with pharmacy and health care staff, trying to sort out a complication with a certain prescription. (No secrets involved, just too complicated to explain here as I hardly understand it myself in my own language.) It’s probably sorted now (I’ll see next week when I try going to the pharmacy again). But it involved a lot of Wonderland-twisted nonsense arguing.

Anyway, the week’s package of prying questions from TTQ reminded me of a little book I bought some thirty years ago, hardly more than a pamphlet, entitled Secrets, by Paul Tournier (a Swiss Christian physician and author, 1898-1986).

Wise words from this little book:

Freedom is what makes the individual. Keeping a secret is an early assertion of freedom; telling it to someone that one chooses is going to be a later assertion of freedom, of even greater value. He who cannot keep a secret is not free. But he who can never reveal it is not free either.

While I’m not the kind of person who talks with anyone about everything, I also don’t think I carry a lot of big dark secrets that no one must ever know. (But then if I did, it’s hardly likely I’d suddenly blurt that out all over the internet, is it? Which leaves you none the wiser.)

As for the last of the TTQ questions: “Are you the person that everyone tells their secrets to, or are you always the last to find out?” - I’d say that ironically, I think it’s been a bit of both. Some people tell me things because they know I’ve little interest in idle gossip. On the other hand, sometimes I’m the last to find out, for the same reason!

---

PS. The two photos are from a gardening expo last year. (I guess my mind wandered to “secret gardens”…)

Old Friends and Ten Thousand Questions

Months ago on someone’s blogroll I came across a link to Ten Thousand Questions, a blogsite which asks a question a day, without wanting answers or links. (Just a tip, in case you ever find yourself in the mood for introspection, and/or suffering from blogger’s block!)

This week, they had questions on the theme of “Old Friends”, which set me on a walk down Memory Lane. One I found particularly interesting, and I thought I’d share it here, along with my thoughts:

 

Which of your friends wins the prize for introducing you to the largest number of your other friends?

For me there is no easy answer to this, but it set me thinking… How one thing (or friendship) may lead to another, and far from always “in a straight line”…

When I was about five years old, I moved with my parents from the town where I was born, to a nearby village. Across the street from our first house lived a girl one year younger than me. Let’s call her A. We weren’t in the same class at school and we weren’t each other’s closest friends; but friends. In our early teens, she was the one to first ask me to come along with her to a church youth group; which I did, and for me that led, both directly and indirectly, to lots of new friendships and experiences in the years to come.

In roundabout ways, it was also through that context that I first met B - even though she lived in a different town, and back then I actually  knew her sisters better than her.

But when at the age of 20 I moved away from home to study, it was B who became the one to introduce me to my next circle of (church) friends in that town (which was neither her home town nor mine).

B and I lived only one year in the same town before she moved away (incidentally, to my birth town, and so we continued to keep in touch).

One or two years later, within the same circle of friends that B first introduced me to, I got to know C. 

And it was with C that I first went on a summer course/camp at a Bible school in  the south-east of Sweden, where I met D (and actually also one or two others who later on became close friends as well).

D and her husband happened to live in the town where my parents grew up, and which I knew from many visits to both sets of grandparents. In the next few years I also visited D and her family there a few times.

And at the age of 30, I moved to that town myself – i.e. the same place where I still live. I moved into a flat in the same building where D and family were also living; and some of their friends also became my first friends in this town.

Which friend deserves the most credit for introducing me to the largest number of other friends, I really can’t say. It gets even more complicated if one starts to try to sort out who counts as old friend… Everyone who was once upon a time a close friend, even if we are no longer keeping in touch? Or only the ones I’m still seeing /talking to /writing to /hearing of now and then?

A and I lost touch decades ago. She married early, and I moved away; and in the last twenty years I haven’t been back to my birth town at all (i.e. not since my parents also moved away from there). With B, C and D, I’m still keeping more or less updated, either by direct contact or through mutual friends (or both).

But thinking back like this… It strikes me that if not for A, I might never have known any of the other people in a long chain of friendships stretching through 40+ years (and actually even across the earth).

…

(PS. As they often put it in newspaper articles: In reality, A, B, C and D have other names… not even beginning with those initials…)

Sunday Musings

To walk or to fly, that is the question…

If last weekend I felt that things were moving, now I feel a bit stuck again. Our presumptive buyers (of the House including some of our Stuff) turned out not to be able to offer anywhere near as much as we were hoping for; which means we’re back to… well, not square one, but a few more moves – and months – left before we’ll be ready to put the house up for sale the traditional way (and empty).

No doubt you’ll be hearing more of it…

Meanwhile, this week I’ve been out there again twice, first with an estate agent and then again on my own, by bus, yesterday. I thought I’d look for building drawings from the extension and renovation of the house that my parents did back in ‘92. Didn’t find those, but as usual I found some other stuff instead. Like the drawings of the house they sold in ‘92, and more stamps, and an old pocket watch, and a file full of newspaper cuttings about Sherlock Holmes…

I wish I had access to Sherlock’s brains for figuring out to whom the watch (not working) once belonged, because the monogram on the back does not seem to fit with any initials on the family tree!

Linking this post to Straight Out Of the Camera Sunday.