Blog – PipBrennan

Calculating anniversaries

Sunday Blog 168 – 19th January 2025

Is it just me that gets confused each and every year about which anniversary I’m celebrating? It’s the same conundrum every time January rolls around, and darling husband usually knocks off a year of wedded bliss.

“The year you get married is year zero,” he’ll say, and that almost makes sense.

“But if we got married in January 2009, that means we’ve been married sixteen years, right?”

Eventually we settle on sixteen years married, which is just as well, as I’ve already done the fifteenth wedding anniversary in 2024 (crystal, as in I bought a crystal-ly kind of photo frame for our wedding anniversary last year – see pic, bottom right.)

Like many couples, we’ve been together a lot longer than we’ve been married. During the service, our celebrant told a story. (Apologies for the hetero language.)

“In ancient China they believed that the Gods tie a red string around the ankles of a Man and Woman who will one day be Husband and Wife. As the years pass, the red strong becomes shorter and shorter until they are united. I believe that this is indeed true in Pip and Paul’s case — destiny really did have a hand in their meeting. It may perhaps have been rather a long string…”

Our wedding anniversary is five days after my parents’ who celebrated their wedding on a scorching day in January 1957 (see pic top left.) They’d been married for 63 years when the picture of them was taken at their granddaughter’s wedding (see pic in the middle). That was the last year of their marriage, as he died in October of that year.

Does that mean we stop counting at 63, or do we think of it as their 68th wedding anniversary, now both of them are gone?

I don’t have any answers, just more questions, really.

Cherry-picking from religion

Sunday Blog 167 – 12th January 2025

At the tender age of 14, my family’s tightly woven Catholic framework that had swaddled and coddled me loosened. The impetus for this was my eldest sister joining the Orange People. As I puzzled through all the culty aspects of the Rajneshees, I suddenly realised that the brand of Catholicism I’d been raised in was, in fact, a cult.

By age 19, my faith had unravelled to the point I deliberately bought a bacon double cheeseburger deluxe (remember those?) from a fast-food outlet on a Good Friday. It was a powerful, if humorous, repudiation of my childhood faith. Together with my sister, I munched on its greasy goodness with relish. We laughed and laughed as we ate, but I’m sure it wasn’t just me secretly checking for lightning bolts from the sky. Meat on a Friday was always a no-no, but Good Friday? Sheesh.

As an angry young ex-Catholic, I boldly declared my new views and thinking. As the scale of sexual abuse in the Catholic church emerged, my justification was complete. But under the conviction and bravado, there was a deep sense of loss. I missed the quiet time each Sunday, sitting with others and sitting with myself. The belonging. The rituals. But it was and is clear to me that religion room is a locked door that I never want to re-open.

Over the years, I’ve mitigated that loss as best I can. I drew a line separating religion and spirituality. The former I associate with power and control while the latter is a direct, personal, mystical relationship with Higher Power/God/dess. I immersed in yoga nearly 30 years ago and learned, among other things, the vitally important fact that you don’t have to listen to or believe your thoughts. Taking responsibility for my choices and consequences was in. Feeling like a slut-shamed extra rib was out. Certainty and black and white thinking was out, puzzling paradoxes and grey were in.

Can I cherry-pick from other faiths? I’ve often wondered. This week, tuning in to Rangan Chatterjee’s interview with Alain de Bottom about happiness and fulfilment, I was plunged right back into the loss I once felt as I listened to a keen description of what I missed;

Religions are giant machines designed to help people to cope with the weakness of their impulse to do what they think is right, but lose sight of at critical moments… They’re machines for repeating things.

As someone who’s had the chance to visit Europe and stand in awe in the giant medieval cathedrals, I nodded my head as he said religions “are alive to the kind of sensory nature of human beings… using things like architecture, music, art, fashion, design, the visual realm to instil a message which might drain away.”

We remember and forget, remember and forget.

Yes, I concluded as I listened. Not only can we cherry-pick, but we should cherry-pick. I can join other yogis at least once a week to create shared quiet time. At home I can listen to Tara Brach’s discourses over and over (with the same Dad jokes that I somehow always find amusing). Seek out gatherings with people to enjoy a meal. Take the opportunities to mark festivals and occasions.

Let the ongoing, discerning cherry-picking roll!

Incomplete list

Sunday Blog 166 – 5th January 2025

Life is simple. Everything happens for you, not to you. Byron Katie

I spent the in between New Year space listening to Edith Eger’s memoir The Choice mainly because I thought it would provide my key to all mythologies I talked about in my last blog. It didn’t exactly-it was a gripping, beautifully written memoir more than boiled down list of hard-won wisdom. But to have such a powerful, wonderfully written testimonial from an Auschwitz survivor with nine decades of life to reflect and consider – that was a compelling if challenging start to the year.

In between listening to talking books, (Make Change That Lasts by my new favourite Rangan Chatterjee was an easier listen), I leafed through my luscious new lemon 2025 planner. It got me thinking about not just goals and habits but beliefs. The insights to live by (if you will) – guard rails to make more skilful decisions. And what is our life today but the cumulation of our decisions in the past?

But I can only create an incomplete list of insights to live by. Partly because they arrive like excitable, welcome house guests, seem very familiar, and how could I ever forget them? And then they go, and I forget them. Forget and remember, forget and remember.

Also, because as I said last week, these kind of lists, a fantabulous key to all mythologies is always going to be elusive. But this is more a list of what seems compelling, right now. So here goes…

Taking responsibility for our own ~~stupid~~ decisions is the one and only way through to freedom. (Damn) It seems so compelling to blame external circumstances, and certainly we do need some time to feel sorry for ourselves and have our wounds witnessed. But if we are stuck at blaming others and circumstances, that guarantees getting stuck in the pain. As Byron Katie says “Life is simple. Everything happens for you, not to you.” There’s a lesson in there somewhere and when you get that lesson you may be lucky enough to progress to the next lesson.
Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. Or as Edith Eger says, victimisation occurs (such as the horrors she survived) but victimhood is optional. Her perspective on this as an Auschwitz survivor are compelling.
Nobody rides for free. Pain is inevitable (see point 2) and ongoing (see point 1)
Thoughts are real, but they’re not true. Our thinking causes our suffering. (It’s so terrible that this happened to me. Why me?) When we change our thinking we adjust how we suffer. When we can ask where’s the lesson? The door to freedom is close.
Feelings gotta be felt. With the right support, we can feel the powerful feelings of our traumas. And we can heal. (see point 2)

Right, off my soapbox for today. But if you have a favourite insight, I’d love to hear it.

In between the years

Sunday Blog 165 – 29th December 2024 (I checked the date twice lol)

This in-between Christmas and New Year time is one of my favourites of the year. I love how quickly the days melt away. How I have to check my calendar more than once to verify which day I’m on. It’s a time to reflect on last year and then crack open the new year planner. Mmm. Stationery.

So first, to reflection. The pages of my 2024 planner reveal a mixed picture. Some weeks I filled out my week-to-a-page planner with appointments, goals and habit tracking. Sometimes I didn’t. Weeks at a time actually, and that’s a first for me. Plus, I also didn’t do the three, six and nine month check in with my 2024 goals. And it showed.

My major goal was to finish editing my memoir. While I’ve worked hard on it over 2024, the revision is MAJOR. So I’ve made strong progress, but I didn’t finish.

Aside from goals, reflecting on 2024 was a tearful exercise. January was when I had the melancholy task of project managing the sale of the family home of 65 years. It was a year I swapped out the certainty of being a health advocate (my day job for more than 25 years) for the nuance and confusion of being a carer. By August we lost our beautiful Mum at the grand age of 97.

So 2024 was always going to be a hit and miss year in terms of goals. It got me thinking beyond goals and habits to wisdoms to live my life by. A kind of key to all mythologies of how to live life. I started working on this but it turned into an unwieldy octopus of a blog. I’ll tackle that in 2025.

For now, I’ll post my 2025 vision board, done yesterday in a wonderful 2025 visioning workshop with my yoga teacher. It’s almost but not quite complete. There’s quite a lot of travel, starting with a February 2025 trip to Carmel-by-the-Sea in California to attend a writing retreat. I’ve had my eye on this for more than a decade. On Christmas day I got a text there’d been a cancellation and I didn’t have to think twice. The answer was yes.

What’s on your 2025 list? Hoping you’re enjoying this in between time.

One more selfie

Sunday Blog 164 – 22nd December 2024

“I’ll go if you go,” we’d both said. The Christmas party at my mother’s residential aged care home was like all the events. Kindly meant, organised with care. Riven to the core with loss on the part of the residents, anticipatory grief on the part of the families and the mental absence of those with dementia.

“I’ll wheel you away the moment you want to,” I promised, after I’d worked out that getting stuck at the event was one of Mum’s resistance points to attending. Even in the drastically simplified living environment of her aged care resident room, Mum managed to find new things to be anxious about. Most of her meals she took in her room, and having an empty table for the dinner tray to be delivered was another emerging phobia. I could see her looking around vainly – she was largely blind by then – to make sure it was clear.

On this occasion I did convince her to attend the Christmas party, a long-table lunch. I noticed how little I wanted to engage with others, I just wanted to focus on Mum and her comfort. I managed desultory chit-chat with the woman to my left, Mum spoke to the resident on her right. I didn’t think there would be enough time to build a connection, and I was right. I never saw her again.

“Let’s take a selfie, Bet.” As always, she smiled her beautiful smile, even though we both wanted to be anywhere but there.

I wheeled Bet back as soon as we could decently excuse ourselves after dessert.

Mum lasted so much longer in the residential aged care facility than we’d thought – making it right through to August. But she never really connected with other residents.

Recently, I woke from a vivid dream from my second round of sleep. That sleep after 5am where I can awake feeling more groggy and less refreshed than when I first awoke. There was Mum in my dream. She was like she was in her late 80s – still spry, still getting on a plane every now and again to visit her son in Sydney or maybe get on a cruise ship.

It took me a little while to realise it was her in the dream, and then I said; “I can get one more selfie!”

She didn’t look at the camera, every time I tried to take one, she was looking at me, and then I woke up and thought, “You wouldn’t want her back, suffering like she was, for one more selfie.”

But still, feeling her loss keenly this first Christmas without her.

Wordle Mini-lament

Sunday Blog 163 – 15th December 2024

Up until this week I could’ve told you how many days ago I landed in India. 50. That was the day I missed Wordle by losing five hours and several layers of my stomach lining through the stress of actually flying there there. (You may recall the muffed visa, missed flight, nice man at Delhi airport putting me in a wheelchair and rushing me to my closing flight).

After unpacking and settling into my Rishikesh room I opened up the Wordle app. It whirred uncertainly for a while with the weak Indian internet. The circle of death stopped eventually, but the app told me I had a streak of zero. I shook my phone in despair, but it was immutable. In desperation, I did Wordle from the day before from the archive, just in case it magically reinstated my tally. It didn’t. By missing a day, I lost my impressive streak of around 120.

This week, I busted again. One of those easy words with way too many options broke my streak of 50. But it was a light and easy loss.

A little time to dwell on witnessing the Wordle wound. Reflecting that victimisation occurs (the person putting together the Wordle for 13th December choosing a word with way too many options) but victimhood is optional (linking the loss of my Wordle streak with my self-worth.)

India has already taught me about the perils of ego-driven reliance on Wordle streaks.

And so I am valiantly moving on.

Resonant spaces

Sunday Blog 162 – 8th December 2024

Two images of me in 1983 in my Perth Building Society uniform. One with daggy hair, one with a pixie cut

Getting somewhere on time for me is often assisted when I have the arrival time noted as earlier than required. For example this week I had 12 in my diary for Christmas lunch, instead of the correct 1pm. That created a cheeky extra hour to wander around town, something I don’t do all that often.

I meandered past 95 William Street in the centre of town where Perth Building Society (PBS) used to be. I worked there in 1983 and as I stood at the entrance to the building where the ATM once was, I could almost see myself on that Saturday when they’d entrusted me with the keys to the main Perth branch.

Being thoughtless and 18, I’d been clubbing the night before, and imagined I would wake up on time without an alarm. At 9am I did rouse, however this was the time the branch was meant to be open. I hurled on my uniform, first rang a taxi (I didn’t have my driver’s licence) and second PBS, to let them know I was fifteen minutes away.

The wait for the taxi was agonising, but as my Leederville digs were very close to the CBD I was deposited there by about 9.15am. Yes, there was a queue of annoyed customers. I had to leave my handbag in the taxi as surety as I had no cash to pay the taxi driver’s fare. Debit cards were not a thing yet, or at least, I didn’t have a means to pay him other than cash.

Leaping from the taxi, I threw the keys to the supervisor who was waiting with her brow crossed and any expectations of my future potential crushed. No time to rest in the shade of her opprobrium, I rushed to the ATM to withdraw money for the taxi driver. He was still idling the engine, watching me keenly, not at all confident in my tacky eighties handbag as surety. I hurled enough cash at him and then rushed back into the branch to begin my Saturday morning shift.

I still had the giant spider earrings I’d worn to the club the night before. In my haste to dress, I’d forgotten to remove them. They jangled like pointed reminders of my utter unsuitability to be a PBS cashier.

They never entrusted me with the keys again.

In the 1983 photos of me in my PBS uniform (see above), I’m down to the last months of living at home in daggy old Scarborough before moving out to cool Leederville. I’m barely tolerating the effort to pose in my uniform.

2024 me stood and peered in to the large PBS space, now split in two and inhabited by a completely different financial institution. One side is all fancy-looking cubicles for people to discuss their banking requirements, with cashiers at the back for the straight forward stuff. I mentally conjured the long counter that we used to stand behind to help people open bank accounts. The cashiers did the deposits and withdrawals, calling from the back of the space to the long queue that was nearly always there. “Can I help you?” we would say, until I for one felt in need of some kind of psychological intervention.

How resonant it was to stand on the very same floor space again. To pay a visit to the past with the present me. And this, I realised, is part of my obsession with travel. I feel this resonance when I return to places I’ve been before (especially you, London, and you too, Greece). But the wonder is available at home as well, with enough blank time in the calendar.

Trust begins at home

Sunday Blog 161 – 1st December 2024

Being a constant consumer of self-improvement, I’m always looking outside myself for advice. I am aware of the irony of writing a Sunday Blog about trust beginning with me. But isn’t self-development is an endless round of remembering, then forgetting, then remembering? A regular podcast reminder of the importance of connecting in with my own values and living them is a must for me.

This week I listened to Ep. 497 of Rangan Chatterjee’s Live Better, Feel More, and I was washed through with the moment of remembering what I’d forgotten. The importance of building trust in yourself.

I am blessed to be (blissfully) unaware of feelings of anxiety or fear during the day. Nothing especially enlightened about that, I think it is just a neuro-quirk. It’s during my middle of the night wakefulness that I can often access that spot of depression, the twist of unease. And it is almost always the pressure of undone things. Things I said I would do, and haven’t.

Rangan talked about his three questions each morning and I paraphrase slightly: 1. What’s one thing I’m grateful for? 2. What’s the most important thing I need to do today? 3. What quality do I want to bring to the world today? And his three questions at night: 1. What went well today? 2. What did I do for someone else today? 3. What can I do differently tomorrow?

The simple act of deciding the one most important thing I need to do today, and reckoning with whether I did it, is building and re-building trust in myself.

Now the big question is, do I buy his beautiful journal just for the 3 questions each day, or do I squeeze them into my regular diary?

In the end, isn’t all self-improvement about justifying stationery purchases?

Permission to be cringe-worthy

Sunday Blog 160 – 24th November 2024

The Blind Boy podcast I listened to last weekend dug into the topic of cringe. That when you try out things creatively, it’s cringeworthy. Because it is. And over time, it might become good, but first, there must be cringe.

My family of origin, like so many, was not always a friend to the mess of taking creative risks. However, in 1981, at the tender age of 17, I was given the journal pictured above by one of my siblings.

I instantly fell in love, indeed I fetishised it. In the front I wrote my hopes for the beautiful new journal. As if I was Anne Frank instead of a very ordinary teen in very safe, vanilla, suburban Perth Australia;

Hope for this book handwritten by me in 1981
For every page to hold beauty.
For me to express what is in me.
For each page to stay with me.
As something that can last and not be rejected in the passage of time.
Not to become a fruitless waste of words and be condemned to the fire, but to last.

In my teens I was immersed in reading polished classics created through painstaking editing. It was all C.S. Lewis, Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell. Books that had stood the test of fashion, and remained in print when so many of their contemporaries were consigned to literary oblivion. It was hard for me to see a path from where I was in 1980s Perth to where I could join them as a writer. But I really, really wanted to.

By 1987 I’d finished my Literature degree and finally, finally started journalling. Not in this divine red and gold sun journal, but in a crappy old spiral bound notebook I’d partly used for one of my subjects.

Since then I’ve journalled erratically but regularly, creating a mish-mash of agonised reckoning with the latest drama, and filling in the storyline. So much of what I read astonishes me, such as the order of when things happened. And my mother was so right. Always include the surname of people you write about. There are so many people that come and go and leave no trace but a first name in your journal. The red journal emerged from a box recently, and I decided I’m going to use it as my day to day journal once my current one is finished. Like a going back into my teens and early twenties, giving myself permission to just get going. Cringe is fine. The secret is to allow ourselves to just keep on turning up, having a go. As this Austin Kleon blog summarises, the more we create, the more likely we are to achieve the quality we crave.

Every night I dream of India

Sunday Blog 159 – 17th November 2024

It’s been a bumpy, busy old two weeks since I returned from Rishikesh. And almost every one of those 14 nights, I’ve dreamed of India. Unusually active dreams with colours, sounds, sights of India. And lots of animals.

Because I’ve been dreaming of India, does that mean I’ve been celebrating, not appropriating Indian culture?

While in Rishikesh, I often thought of Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert. Back in the 1960s when Richard or Ram Dass had tired of using LSD to enlarge his mind, he travelled to India. Spent months in ashrams, meditating, learning yoga, weaning himself of hallucinogens. He wanted mind expansion that didn’t finish when the trip wore off. He was one of the people responsible for bringing yoga to the west, and for that I am very grateful.

Then, he turned his attention to end of life care. He essentially became a death doula, although that phrase wasn’t used then. He educated others to do support dying people– Elizabeth Kubler Ross was one of his students. I’ve been re-reading his last memoir, Being Ram Dass, finished just before his death in 2019 at age 88 where he “escaped the confines of his increasingly painful frame.” By then he’d lived with the after-effects of a stroke for 22 years, and being in his body was generally not a lot of fun.

This week, I had a two-night work trip to Sydney and while there, saw a post about a friend’s ex, where she let us know he was in his last hours or days. He’d been confined to an aged care facility for the last decade, decimated by early onset dementia. The day before, I’d seen someone walking the streets of Sydney, just out of the corner of my eye. I knew it couldn’t be John, but it looked like John. Bustling along with a vigorous stride, how he was when I knew him best, twenty years ago. Her next post confirmed he had died.

That night in Sydney I met up with an old friend who also lost his mother this year and we swapped tales of our parents’ deaths, all of them in their different ways were a knock-down, drag out fight to the end. Like it was for John. For Ram Dass too. We agreed we want something different for ourselves when that (far-off, we hope) time comes.

Tonight, back home again, I walked around the block, savoured the sounds and smells of my suburban home paradise. Saw a plane in the sky and was grateful I wasn’t on it. Grateful for all the things.