The art of flânering…

Here is a paradox – I love traveling, but I hate being a tourist. I mean a typical tourist with a map, walking boots, a backpack, and a camera, looking bedazzled, lost and confused. Instead of chasing the sights, I much prefer to blend in, feel the city, walk around and just experience what it has to offer. I flâner as French would say (and perhaps on purpose use a sensual concept that cannot really be directly translated into English). In high heels, of course.

Even though my French equals my baking skills (i.e. it is pretty much non-existent), somehow I feel I conquered the concept of flânering in Paris, when for the first time traveling alone I realised I cannot really read maps. So I just walked around aimlessly, without an intention or objective, without hurrying myself. By being indirectly and unintentionally affected by phenomena experienced only in passing, I discovered so much more than I would have otherwise. Because flânering is not about a destination, but rather a pleasure of a walk, discovering details, which in the rush of everyday life too often go unnoticed.

It was during my recent trip to Hamburg that I indulged in flânering again on one of those typical autumn evenings, when the sky is heavy and grey, yet the palette of bright colours enlightens the earth, creating the atmosphere, which sets you in a bitter, yet somewhat sweet melancholy.

 

As I was walking aimlessly, experiencing the charms of ducks swimming in the lake, clouds floating in the sky, little cafes giving life to the city and glittering shops overshadowing architectural masterpieces, I realised that the funny thing about flânering is that - before you know it - your mind starts doing exactly the same thing. Thoughts start strolling around your head with no sense or purpose, taking you to new directions and discoveries, which you rarely stumble upon. You simply get lost in your own world, letting thoughts be, letting them go.

In their expedition, they inevitably venture into the matters of the heart. Revisiting memories of people we loved and lost, uncovering voids, some of them so extraordinarily deep that there is not enough sand on this planet to fill them. They are as grey and heavy as the sky I was starring at. Yet they are surrounded by brightness of colours on the ground, painted by the people who stayed. Or found their way back into our lives. The more you think about the reasons why things turned out the way they did or did not, the less sense it makes. Until you realise that matters of the heart are not logical or ever possible to truly understand. They just are. And they are what they are.

While flânering through the city that will never be mine, opening Pandora’s boxes that should have perhaps better remained closed, all of the sudden I stopped and asked myself: how did I get here? Am I meant to be here or have I completely lost track? Was it me who chose this path or was it just a series of happy accidents?   

This is where it becomes evident that there is more to flânering than letting your feet and thoughts go. It is a complete philosophical way of living and thinking, as Charles Baudelaire interpreted the concept of a flâneur. It is about what appears to be small and insignificant making all the difference in your life. It is about taking left instead of right when you are not even thinking about it. And still, somehow, this random decision leads you to become what you should have been in the first place. 

I don not know whether it is destiny that brings us there, but I could not agree more with Steve Jobs (not just because of the recent tragic loss, but because his Stanford commencement speech is one of the best speeches I have ever heard): “You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect the dots looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

My dots of Hamburg flânering connected in a coffee shop with my favourite combination of caramel macchiato and a blueberry muffin. When I looked around me, there were no voids left, just yellow leaves on the floor, brought in by the autumn breeze. Like me, they probably should not have been there. But it was pointless trying to understand why we were all there, because only time will tell how all those small dots, painted by flânering on an October evening, will one day, eventually fit into a bigger picture.  

The secret meaning of an Indian summer

It happens every now and again that a sight of a weather forecast is so unbelievable that I cannot help but capture it. Temperatures well above 20s are something that you rarely get to see in the UK, let alone at this time of the year. This Indian summer was simply too good to be true. And if something is too good to be true, then it probably is. 

Just like other extraordinary things in our lives, the Indian summer comes when we at least expect it. It is impossible to predict it and even if it was, we would find it hard to believe and very likely laugh it away. As we do every time somebody says that our lives are about to take an unforeseen, virtually impossible, ‘more than we ever dared to wish for’ direction. Seriously, who would believe that crisp morning air, cold autumn breeze and grey drizzle, which quite rightly started announcing the winter, will be replaced by warm sunny days, so pleasantly overwhelming that they are hard to describe?

This beauty with no compare confuses us. When we already put our summer wardrobe at the back of the closet and drag out all the warm clothes and extra blankets, when we change the mind-set from summer brightness to autumn blues, life turns upside down and proves us wrong. Or right in case you are (as I am) not the most organised creature on the planet and keep on procrastinating reorganising your wardrobe. Either way, we tend to go into a self-preservation mode, striving to ignore the nice days fully aware that they are not here for long. 


Eventually and inevitably, we all fall into a carpe diem mood. This is when the indulgence phase starts. Enjoying every minute of this amazing phenomenon, putting everything else aside and losing sleep just so we would not miss a single sunshine or a starry night that we know will be gone any minute now. But as one sunny day rolls into the next one, we forget about the greyness of everyday life. Something that should not be there in the first place becomes more real and genuine than anything else.

Yet there are very clear signs, which indicate that the Indian summer is, in fact, just an illusion. The days, for example, are not as long as they should be and leaves began to change, some of them already falling off the trees. Subtly, yet persistently they remind us that the reality should be different, that it soon will be different. 

If the Indian summers should not be there in the first place and do not last long enough to have any profound impact, why do they happen? Due to their shortness, they rarely teach us a lesson. They also cannot be viewed as a cruel game, showing us how perfect life could be, but it is not, because they rarely make us sad. And they are completely out of our control, so there is nothing we can do about them, but to take them as they are. There is one thing, however, that they do do. They set memorable milestones, occasionally break records and more often than not leave unforgettable memories. Something to think and smile about over a cup of tea on a cold winter night.

The Indian summer is goodbyeing and we have no other choice, but to move on. And where exactly do we go? This reminds me of a famous and for this occasion more than appropriate J.D. Salinger’s question asked in The Catcher in the Rye: "Where do the ducks go when the pond freezes over?" The answer, even though it might seem complicated at first, is simple: they fly south. The option that I seriously entertained when I realised that everything about this Indian summer was perfect for me. So perfect, indeed, that I would wish to turn it into a rule rather than it being an exception. But then again, that would no longer be an Indian summer.

The chaos of a relationship vocabulary

Once upon a time, when I was waiting for coffee to be brewed in my favourite coffee shop, I spotted this: 

Through my giggles on pointlessness of sand, snow and coffee vocabularies, it suddenly hit me that the treasure of phrases we have for romantic or – perhaps more appropriate – intimate relationships should not be underestimated either. Just based on the expressions I have heard recently, I can compile quite an impressive list.

It all starts with ‘meeting someone’, having ‘a crush’ or perhaps slightly more dramatic being ‘blown away’ or ‘swept off your feet’. Then things get going by ‘hooking up’ or ‘getting to know each other’, which is suppose to be a pre-stage of ‘dating’. Dating again comes in different shapes and forms of seriousness and might be more appropriate to be labelled as ‘going out’, ‘seeing each other’, and even ‘kind of seeing someone’. Which would be what exactly?

Then, there are as popular as ever ‘casual relationships’, ‘nothing serious’,  ‘just a fling’ and I even came across a ‘random London thing’. Apparently, if you are not a Londoner, you cannot understand. Other for me hard to understand forms are ‘complicated relationships’, ‘open relationships’, and ‘rebound relationships’. And if we get sick of them, we just go on a ‘break’. Needless to say, all these relationships are very likely going nowhere, but as Paulo Nutini sings in his Last Request:

Sure I can accept that we’re going nowhere

But one last time let’s go there

Oh, yes, let’s! Just for the fun of it… Because there is also such a thing as ‘having fun’. A principle that underpins no strings attached ‘one night stands’ and ‘booty calls’, which might extend to ‘friends with benefits’ (I will refrain from using a synonym of we know what kind of ‘buddies’), ‘fooling around’, ‘sleeping with someone’ or even better  ‘sleeping around’. Speaking of which, there are also ‘affairs’ and ‘open relationships’. All is fair in love and war, right?

If we finally venture into a territory of actually being ‘in love with someone’, then we get to a ‘real relationship’, ‘full-on relationship’, ‘serious relationship’, ‘exclusive relationship’ (oh, don’t even get me started on the whole exclusivity thing!), ‘committed relationship’, ‘long-term relationship’, ‘living together’, ‘practically married’ and let’s not forget a classic of postmodern times a ‘long-distance relationship’.

In this rich vocabulary, the real deal of ‘engagement’ and ‘marriage’ seems to be as rare and out of fashion as black coffee and espresso. And perceived just as equally boring, unexciting and flavourless.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said: “The borders of my language are the borders of my world.” Just from the top of my head, I counted 40 different expressions for relationships (sincere apologies if I missed any other important one, which I'm sure I have). These words are not just extending the boarders of our world, but are also creating picturesque landscape, in which we eventually got lost. With different meanings to different people and in different contexts, the above expressions confuse, rather than enlighten. Not surprisingly, more often than not in a relationship we ‘don’t know where this is going’. While relationships became more important than ever, they are equally impossible to pursue.

By naming and engaging in all those forms of relationships (what comes first a relationship or a name for it is pretty much a chicken or an egg type of question), we made our lives complicated beyond comprehension. When in essence the meaning of a relationship should be as simple as one of my colleagues put it: “A certain person is the most important person in the world for you and you are the most important person in the world for them." In the light of this realisation, the pointlessness of a relationships vocabulary reaches its full potential. There is a relationship or there is no relationship. And that might as well be the happy ending. 

Why did I start blogging? A special someone, anxiety and PhD

I am sure that there are as many reasons why someone starts blogging as there are bloggers out there. Here is mine. It was not an instant decision. The idea was rolling around in my head for a while, but somehow I just didn’t feel ready for it. Until one day I met someone (as you would!). Someone, who simply through our incredible conversations, but without ever mentioning it, triggered me to start entertaining the thought of writing again.

If you read between the lines, you could probably see that this person is very special to me. So special indeed that blissful happiness drove me right into anxiety. I knew the feeling of unexplainable panic and dreadful fear for no rational reason whatsoever, I had it before. I also knew I had two options: 
1. run away (what I usually do best)
2.   google it and try to understand

For the first time in my life, I took the option two and googled 'relationship anxiety'. Not much useful came up; a few websites with brief explanations on what it is, zillion symptoms, which gave me the impression that one suffers from anxiety pretty much all the time, and – make no mistake – contact details of specialised advisers, who can help you to get over it, for a good price of course. There were also a few forums, where, interestingly enough, mostly men were describing how they feel and sought advice on how to snap out of it. As much as it was an amusing read, none of it was of a particular use to me.

However, it did make me realise that what I was feeling was not that uncommon. We just rarely talk about it. Probably because it is so insignificant and silly. How can you obsess and be in an unreasonable state of agony over someone you just met? There are worse things in life, right? Well, you tell me. My situation is even more bizarre, because my special someone (obviously completely unaware of my emotional state) is about to move away and my already mastered strategy of running would have probably worked just as well. Once again I learnt how the universe might not always play fair, but at least it has got a hell of a sense of humour.

More importantly, I realised that I want to write about it. I want to write about what seems to be very silly, yet also very serious experience and feelings, which frame my thoughts and views on life. And here we are, at the concept of framing again. I always somehow end up here. It must be related to the fact that it represents a central concept of my PhD, which is taking way too long to complete now. Anyone who has ever had a go at a PhD probably knows, what I’m talking about.

It happened at the airport in Paris where I found this postcard. The beautiful sights of Paris in a frame that selects and emphasises certain aspects of perceived reality in one way rather than another. And that is when framing took over my life… And my PhD.

It was during one of the late night calls when my other special someone, who was doing PhD at the time, but moved to Australia a few years ago (yes, my special someones have tendency to move away – another one, for example, moved to Yemen, and no, I did not pick that up from Friends), asked me how I would title my book, which I would publish in what is called a post-PhD period. I instantly said Framing Everyday Life. Since it seems that I am as far from the book as I am from having Tiffany’s ring, I figured I would lend the title to my blog for now. Just to see how it works.

That leads me to the third reason, why I started blogging. I always liked writing and sharing my ideas with others. During my PhD (have I already mentioned that it is taking me way too long to complete it?) I developed a strange fear from displaying my ideas outside my computer screen. The more I thought about it, the scarier it got. Just imagine… You write something, publish it and then someone reads it, perhaps remembers it, quotes it and worse of the worst, might criticise it. But the day of PhD submission is near, so I might as well get used of sending my thoughts and ideas out into the world, waving them goodbye and wishing them good luck with finding new friends.

I found this quote in one of the beauty magazines recently: Feel the fear, but do it anyway! And here I am, feeling the fear, but pressing the ‘publish post’ button anyway. 

Goodbye my first blog entry! And good luck with finding new friends!