Nothing human is alien to me

Or how a new acquaintance conjures distant memories

Photo by Noorulabdeen Ahmad on Unsplash

There seems to be a pattern in the frequency of posts, as if I fall a week behind every four months. I started on the first Saturday in January, skipped to the second Saturday in April, and now, four months later, I skipped to the third Saturday of August. Certainly not planned.

This month the blip happened because of the move to the Room of My Own: after two months of building work and quite a bit of Tetris-style furniture moves, I am now the proud occupant of a front room that I have turned into a study: facing outwards on to the street, both physically and metaphorically.

The move to the study coincided with the beginning of my collaboration with a refugee charity helping a newcomer to the UK, Farida, improve her spoken English. I had put my name down more than a month ago, but the first session was arranged on the first full day of use of the new study. There seemed to be a message in this.

Farida and I spent the first lesson exchanging information about each other. Communication was difficult at times: she seemed not to understand the spoken form of words until she saw them written, and she often took recourse to the google translator in order to communicate what she had no words for in English.

And yet, communication took place with the minimum of language. She told me about her husband and elder children, still back home, I told her about mine. She had been a Religious Education and Home Economics teacher at home. And her pastimes? She likes walks to the park with her youngest child, knitting, visiting historical sights. Her friends figure large in her talk: they meet up for suhbat wa muhebbat - chat and kindness. Last week she showed me a white gilet she was knitting for her friend’s daughter; yesterday she showed me the finished piece, complete with decorative flowers and colour binding.

She’d spent a few months in my native Athens before she arrived in the UK. As she shared a couple of words of Greek she’s picked up, I was mentally transported back to Athens in the late 80s: there I was, fresh out of university, trying to teach a few young Iranians a bit of Greek and a bit of English, so that they could get by. We were all young, shared high hopes for the future - I have shared my life with one of them, the Pen Friend, ever since.

As Farida spoke about her family and her hometown, I remembered the Pen Friend’s words over three decades ago over a plate of dumplings in honey syrup, in a rooftop cafe looking over to the Acropolis. He stumbled over prepositions, was tripped up by tenses, but the language barrier was permeated by his love and the nostalgia for his hometown and the family he had left only weeks before.

Farida’s words evoked the feeling I had had that day in Athens as I listened to the Pen Friend: that here was a fellow human, with feelings and hopes and aspirations similar to my own, even though the circumstances of our birth were so different; that there was something I had that I could share too, something that might help them on their way.

Time may be the longest distance between places, but the distance closes when a human meets another, despite - or because of? - the communication gap. Yesterday we had our third session together. And it now feels that this one hour a week opens up a small window into two worlds, so different and yet so similar.

Rituals and practices

I confess I haven’t been able to do any sustained writing for more than two months - talk about wintering in mid-summer! But I have managed to keep up a more-or-less regular early morning ritual. It seems to be helping in starting the day positively, so I share it here, for what it’s worth.

• After many years, I have re-started Reiki meditations (don’t even ask me why or how I stopped: it’s a total blank). I recently came across Andrea Kennedy’s channel that offers Reiki distance healing meditations. She has a varied collection of short meditations, and keeps adding more by request. Well worth checking it out.

• Over breakfast or immediately after, I read a short extract from a Stoic master (currently Epictetus) and a book to inspire my writing (currently V Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary). I have others lined up, but any suggestions are always welcome.

  

• I join the London Writers’ Salon for the 8am BST Writers’ Hour. Another three free daily sessions cater for US West and East Coast, and Australia/NZ fellow writers. Join us too: you’ll be glad you did!

  Quote

  I just finished a (hugely overdue) reading of Viktor E Frankl’s Man’s search for meaning: I just had to share the quote shared more than once in the book.

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