Blog – PipBrennan

Travelling alone but together

Sunday Blog 156 – 20th October 2024

When I landed in New York on the first of October, it was my very first visit to America. I’d meant go to an in-person yoga retreat with my favourite online USA teacher in 2020 but…the world had other ideas. I waited until 2024 and chose New York and New York state for my first US trip.

“Won’t you get caught up in the elections?” people asked.

“I’ll be gone before the election itself,” I said, not entirely convincing myself or others.

As I exited JFK airport, I was unable to resist bursting into a cheesy rendition of New York, New York. I quickly realised that New Yorkers weren’t outgoing and friendly, and certainly didn’t find me amusing. The only person who talked to me at the airport was a man who emerged from the shadows, unsmiling, asking if I wanted a lift to New York. He didn’t seem to have a car. I didn’t dignify his sinister approach with a response. I may be light-hearted, but I’m not foolish.

Clambering into an official yellow cab, I was safely on my way, expecting my first New York moment on the drive to my hotel. What a fizzer. Where was the Brooklyn Bridge when I needed it? It was the ugliest drive in human history. Plus the driver was almost entirely silent the whole way, didn’t chat companionably about anything, not even the election.

Fine. I was there to write anyway, and I’d chosen the Library Hotel for the first three days to get myself in the groove. Their hotel is categorised according to the Dewey Decimal system. I was in Science and Math(s) floor, my room was the sub-section Animals. This meant that all the books in my room were about animals.

Down in the the Reading room there was endless tea, coffee and snacks supplied, and an inspiring view to New York Library. As a result, in my first 72 hours of the American trip I was able to do what I said I was there to do–namely get on with the editing.

There was a quick foray to have a look around (Times Square disappointingly was not a Square), and work out the subway. I dined alone downstairs at the Madison and Vine restaurant and reflected on the great tragedy and liberation that solo travel and its fleeting relationships bring. I knew I’d never see the people in the Madison and Vine restaurant again and felt elated and hollow all at once.

And I couldn’t help wishing that I was in London rather than New York. How I love London town.

And then the moment the train pulled out of Penn station on a Friday night to take me to Rheinbeck in upstate New York, I began to fall in love with USA. The train line hugged the Hudson river, the scenery was captivating.

Rheinbeck was where I was attending a weekend writing workshop at The Omega Institute (a hippie paradise). It was one of my trip’s absolute highlights-Cheryl Strayed’s Wild Awakening’s workshop. She is the author of the memoir Wild. You may know it as the movie starring Reese Witherspoon as Cheryl when she hiked the Pacific Crest Trail in an attempt to wrestle with her grief at her mother’s early death.

Having come all this way to attend the workshop, I sat at the very front, close enough for Cheryl to say-

“I like your trousers.”

“Why thank you, Cheryl,” I said.

You can’t get that with an online course. In the picture in the bottom right she’s looking towards me, clocking my trousers.

Straight after the workshop’s conclusion on Sunday at lunchtime, I was whisked away to a noisy family gathering, just like the ones we used to have in my childhood home, now sold, presided over by my parents, now both dead.

I’d only met my cousin Jane and her husband in London, everyone else I met for the first time in glorious noise and confusion. We were having early dinner at my cousin Catherine’s house. The connection is that her mother and my dad’s father were brother and sister. They had both left Ireland, one to travel to Australia, the other to America, and they never met again. The next generations however are keen to connect.

Catherine reminded me so much of my Dad, how she smiled, the way she reads her paper in the morning. Mum and Dad had stayed at Catherine’s home in the nineties – I slept in the very same room they did. It added potency to my travelling shrine to them. Everything about this visit filled my heart and readied me for another go at New York.

For my last five days in New York, I loved, loved it. My apartment on Wall Street was a great location for everything. As well as ascending the Empire State Building and the pediment of the Statue of Liberty, I had the cultural experience of getting my hair cut. I marinaded in my hairdresser’s wisdom. “New York is New York. London is London. It’s best not to compare.” Who needs a yoga retreat to get Zen and wise?

I also posted a parcel of all the books I bought and couldn’t carry back with me. This offered a frontline seat to witness the cultural phenomenon of American bureaucracy that Ellis Island museum had warned me about. Two supremely cold and laboriously inefficient staff members presided over the necessary form filled out in quadruplicate to get my parcel out into the world. Luckily there was no one else in the post office at the time or I’d probably still be there.

I also bought groceries to cook some soup, did my washing. How I love to do the ordinary things in another part of the world.

But what this second part of the US trip had more than anything was people. I was travelling alone but now I had family and friends. Fun family catchups including a day trip to Mystic and an evening ascension up the Empire State Building. Lunch at the Chelsea Hotel with a family friend, dinner with one new friend from the writing workshop. A walk on Brooklyn Bridge and soup at my apartment with a high school friend who’s lived in the US many years. Catching Hannah Gadsby perform with another new friend from the writing workshop.

I lost last Sunday in transit back to London from New York, hence no blog. Today I was determined not to miss the Sunday Blog but fretted because it was another transit day. London to India. I’d already drafted it but still it needed marinading, more time to emerge. Would the interwebs let me down at the airport? I rose early for the trip to Heathrow, with the blog all but done. Sad to leave London but excited for India.

I had plenty of time for checking into my flight and getting on with the blog, but it was not to be. My India visa was very confusing in terms of its validity, but not to the staff at Air India. They wouldn’t let me board my flight to my yoga retreat, and I’m hunkered down in a Heathrow airport hotel, waiting for a fresh visa, googling flights and practicing being Zen.

Oh well. At least I’ve had no trouble posting this Sunday Blog!

Love note to Limnisa

Sunday Blog 155 – 6th October 2024

A collage of three heart-shaped images showing Limnisa Writing Retreat in Methana, Greece, and the author

I’m running a little behind–or is it a little ahead–in my Sunday blogs on this valedictory trip remembering my dear Mum. There’s a bit of commuting going on. London. Athens. Limnisa. London. New York. That’s all since 18th September. As I’m in America now, it was already Sunday on Saturday, so it’s quite easy for me to become flummoxed and feel like I’m missing deadlines.

Last Sunday’s blog was a piece I wrote at Limnisa, but I didn’t talk about Limnisa itself. I thought I’d save my Limnisa Love Note for this week. It gives me a chance to re-warm myself with the memories.

There’s no getting around it – it’s a schlep getting to Limnisa. But then, that’s true of anywhere in Greece. Limnisa isn’t on the map, it’s a retreat centre situated close to Methana (as in methane). Methana is a port town in a volcanic area with hot springs and mud baths. Occasionally there can be a hint of sulphur/ rotten egg in the air, but the wind blows it away. Once the ferry from Athens (2.5 hours) drops you at Methana, Limnisa is a ten minute taxi ride. After all that, you’re dropped at a dirt path. The first time I attended Limnisa five years ago, I stood at the top of the path for a while, not quite sure what to do next. This time I knew you’ve got to walk down the dirt and gravel path just a little for Limnisa to suddenly appear like a miracle.

And really, isn’t that a metaphor for writing? A lot of schlepping, last minute total confusion then voila! One great sentence.

Once you’re at Limnisa, you have your meals, tea, coffee, wine on tap. There’s yoga and meditation depending on the day. The beach is just there for a dip any time you feel like (bring your beach shoes), and your room is a haven to retreat to for a nap.

There’s also apartment accommodation a fifteen minute walk away for those who prefer it, or when the Retreat Centre is full. The apartments are modern and there’s less competition for bathrooms, and the view from the balcony of the sunrise and sunset was to die for. I tried both this stay, but I did find the walk to the retreat centre was a bit tricky. I kept missing the path in the olive groves and ending up in someone’s back yard, having to scramble up rocky slopes to get back on track. And did I mention the heat? After 10am it was quite a hot walk. I should’ve taken up the offer of using a bike.

As well as sun and swimming at Limnisa, there’s outings including taverna visits and walks, and hot spring visits if you fancy covering yourself with mud. Then there are the sunrises, the sunsets, the everyday quiet miracles of a beautiful location.

What’s special to me about Limnisa is the tradition of no talking until 1pm. It’s simple magic. Mostly women attend Limnisa, and to have a ban on talking is just what we need to be released from the tyranny of social engagement. To put our writing first.

But then, when 1pm passes and we meet for a delicious Greek lunch, the talk naturally turns to our writing projects. And all water cooler conversations are about writing. If you want to turn to books for inspiration, the shelves are groaning with them. I read a memoir written by Hilary Mantel I’d never heard of (An Experiment in Love – would recommend).

A week’s stay is the minimum, but I wish I’d stayed for two. Holidays are supposed to go slowly, but this week sped by.

And there’s this. A quarter of this trip was paid for by my writing. I won fourth prize in the Limnisa Writing Competition held in 2023, and received 25% off the cost of my stay, to be redeemed by 2024. There were so many times during the week I thanked myself to making the effort to come and claim it.

I dreamed of Mum so vividly twice while at Limnisa. That hadn’t happened at home in Perth. The first time I was so excited to see her then realised she was gone and I’d have to grieve her all over again. The second dream was a gentler visit that ended in a hug. Just as in real life, I made sure to tell her who I was before I hugged her because she couldn’t see any more. She confirmed she knew it was me and she hugged me so warmly. I think I could get used to the dream visits.

Travelling shrine

Sunday Blog 154 – 30 Sep 2024

Graduation photo

From the night before she died, I started making shrines for my mother. It began with a candle and a photo nestled alongside the fragrant bouquets I’d received from kind friends and family. I burned candles all night long, without stopping, in the days between her death, the funeral, and my departure for an overseas holiday one week later.

Heavily influenced by my emergency reading of “The Way We Live is the Way We Die” by Buddhist nun Pema Chodron, the shrine grew each day. She suggested that snacks could be good addition to a shrine. Maybe Mum would get hungry as she traversed on the unknown sea to the afterlife, the bardo states Chodron wrote about.

First it was a mini sachet of marmalade and vegemite, for the toast she liked to have every day. One slice of bread, toasted, cut in half diagonally, marmalade on one half, vegemite on the other. That’s how her parents, born just before the turn of the 20^th century had their toast too.

From there, I added butter menthols, minties, then branched out with her favourite lip balm. All these items were always in her handbag, nestled in a sea of tissues. She was so horrified when The Body Shop announced they were ceasing her favourite line of cherry lip balm. As soon as we heard this we’d made a pilgrimage to our local giant shopping centre to retrieve enough of the remaining stock. Maybe these would see her out. There was just this one pot left when she died, with about a quarter left, so on the altar it went.

Each day I added in pieces around my house, things I couldn’t bear to throw away in January when we cleared out her home of 65 years. The Holly Hobby Betty mug, missing its handle. The rusted thimble she’d stopped using years before when her failing sight had ruled out sewing.

When my brother came over for the funeral, we’d hired an air bnb so there was room for him and his adult children. Once, we would have all clambered into the family home, had our meals around the family table and shared our aching hearts together. Now, we must improvise with hired premises, all of us flung to the four winds. I moved in for the week he was there.

When I arrived at the air bnb, the boot of my car was still full of the last of Mum’s things from the residential aged care facility. Photos and books, mainly. I left most of them in the boot, then pulled out the three Perspex photo frames shaped in a V, big enough to hold two A5 photos in each. Since the 1980s, Mum had displayed these on the mantelpiece with a photo of each of her six children either on their graduation, or in my brother’s case, a beautiful photo of him as a young man. I displayed them at the air bnb just as they had sat on the family mantelpiece for decades. With candles, of course, although I’d switched to fake tealights by then, to comply with air bnb rules.

Two shrines wasn’t enough. I then started one at the graveside as well. Her favourite cupid candle holder – her tastes were very twee – with another fake tealight to illuminate her way to her final resting place.

When the funeral was all over, when the week was over and we checked out of the air bnb, it was time to break up the six photos. I handed my brother the photo of him in his prime, delegated out most of the others. I tucked away this one of me at my graduation in the back of my diary. Only when I took it out of the frame, I found the one of me and my parents tucked at the back. Me, 23. My parents 62 and 63. I’d asked them to the graduation at the last minute, being young and thoughtless. But even with this last minute invitation, they’d gratefully come, put on their formal clothes. My smile looks much bigger in the one with all of us.

Before I left Perth for my current Europe/New York/India trip, I meant to bring one of the funeral booklets with me. But I forgot. Then I found these graduation photos with their hideous brown background. So, this will have to do. Have shrine image, will travel. Mum’s with me all the way.

Early steps on the valedictory tour

Sunday Blog 153 – 22nd September 2024

One of the absolute wonders of travel to me is that I can be me, but somewhere far from home, if I just travel enough miles. And since Wednesday, I’ve travelled 17,000 kms/ 10,563 miles. The I, the Me that is housed in my body can find itself on the other side of the world in a new bedroom, looking in a different mirror as I clean my teeth, rolling out the yoga mat on a new floor in the morning. The magical time travel effect is heightened if I return to a place I’ve been before. There I am again, the same but different.

Top left is the 1975 photo of us in our finery to see my uncle off on his European travels. I’m the smallest one on the left. What an occasion this seemed to us!
By 1978 my brother left on his odyssey to India, South Africa and the UK, and the top right image is the one he snapped of Mum, looking for all the world to be excited. In truth, she hated it when any of us left home.
The bottom left shot is Mum and my exhausted sister Gay in London. After the very first long haul flight we’d endured, we were turned away by the cabbie in Victoria station and had to walk with all our suitcases and completely inappropriate foot wear to an uncertain destination. At a certain part of the trudge, I think it was my brother who again snapped this shot of Mum looking very happy despite the elusive bed and breakfast. She was a driving force in planting the travel bug in us all. Her entire salary as a teacher librarian was set aside for several years to finance this 1979 European trip.
In the late 1980s she got to enjoy some child-free travels, including Delphi, the image on the bottom right.

Travel beckoned to me but also challenged me from a very young age. One particularly traumatic airport farewell with our brother in 1979-we were leaving him in London and didn’t know when we’d see him again-put me off for some time. I cried the entire long haul flight back to Perth. Travel is destructive, my fourteen-year-old self had decided. It causes painful separations.

Predictably by adulthood I’d coarsened any such sentiment about family separations, and left in 1990 for a two year working holiday in London. This stretched into a decade, during which I only saw Mum a handful of times. The moon was one of our ways to stay in touch. I’d look at the moon, she’d look at the same moon on the other side of the world. We did have letters and phone calls, but the moon felt like a direct line to each other.

I boarded the plane from Perth to London on Wednesday this week for my working/ writing/ yoga/ valedictory tour for Mum exactly one week after her funeral. The full harvest moon as the plane took off was breathtaking, but resisted all attempts to be captured in a photo. It was there to greet me at moonset in London just over seventeen hours later.

And here I am, walking through faraway places I’ve been before. I went down the very London street where Mum is looking triumphant while sister Gay sags against the railings. I’m now in Greece, back to the retreat centre I last visited in 2019. But everything’s changed without Mum in the world.

This phrase from favourite book kept nagging at me so I’ll let E.M Forster have the last word.

No funeral without laughter

Sunday Blog 152 – 15th September 2024

Perhaps you noticed there was no Sunday blog last week. It was half a conscious decision to pause, have a minute’s, or rather a week’s silence. The other half was the exhaustion of washing up on the Sunday between my mother’s death and her funeral, with the clock running down, and the right Sunday Blog still elusive.

After all, what was fitting to write about, in the lag between the death and the funeral? Where I worked through the shock and surprise of the only thing that could have happened?

As always, I sought refuge in doing, organising her funeral. I was propelled by the chance to capitalise on the quicksilver few hours of a funeral to honour her memory, pay respects.

And we did it, shaped the thoughtful send-off our mother deserved.

Her legendary humour was showcased in the eulogy, how she had bemoaned her thin hair with the quip “I’ve seen better hair on bacon.” Also, her rebellious attitude as a fifties and sixties housewife who was not a slave to housework.

Once her younger cousins, still footloose and fancy free, came to visit Mum dressed in their finery for a night of dancing. One of her cousin’s dainty shoes was momentarily fused to Mum’s dining room floor, the likely culprit jam or marmalade. “Stick around!” Mum quipped.

For someone who had outlived most of her friends and family of her generation, Mum pulled a crowd. How wonderful it was to hear everyone spontaneously applaud her at the burial. How that eased the memory of me, all alone with the protea, walking her body out of the residential aged care facility just two weeks earlier.

And now, it’s all over, I can began to digest the reality of a world without Mum in it. The new normal will slowly emerge from the sadness and the laughter, the sting of the loss of her, and the relief that she’s no longer suffering.

And always, fond remembrance of the woman who always preferred a good book to chores. Someone who figured that housework wouldn’t kill her, but why take the risk?

Goodbye darling Mum

Sunday Blog 151 – 1 September 2024

Almost to the very end of her long life, my mother, Bet, remained who she was, of sound mind. Funny, spunky, unpredictable.

In the emergency department last week where she was being treated for her broken hip, she was next to a man who had imbibed a little too much alcohol. We were talking about him afterwards when we were (finally) up on the ward, and despite all the pain she was in, she still managed a quip. Never a potty mouth, she said from her prone position on the hospital bed, “He only had one word in his vocabulary. And it rhymed with ‘duck’”.

Between the hospital and coming back to the aged care facility, she wasn’t quite the Bet that we knew. It was so hard to see her, here but not here, and increasingly unsettled. So many times over the last few years, I have felt the truth of the Brene Brown quote above about caring for a loved one (from Episode 88 of We Can Do Hard Things.) Both are true. It is an honour. It is unbearable.

Thrown into this mix was my impending five week world-wide trip. London, Greece, New York, India. Writing and yoga retreats and workshops. Would I be the person who left, missed her mother’s death? Her mother’s funeral? I tried this idea on but it didn’t quite fit. There was nothing for it but to live with the agonising uncertainty and clusterfuck of guilt and confusion and sadness with a side-dish of selfish desire.

But just like Mum made the decision to move into aged care so we didn’t have to, made the decision to sell the house so we could get on with that mammoth task while she was still with us, she slipped away on Tuesday morning in the early hours. Considerate to the end, Bet made sure I’d be there when she died, and that I could be part of her funeral.

My grief and relief have been like a dog chasing its tail ever since her passing.

The day Bet died, the funeral home that attended to take her away presented me with a beautiful single protea. I followed Mum out of that aged care facility, protea clutched in my hand. I got to walk her out, just like I’d walked her in.

In the sifting and sorting of the last things, I found an incomplete diary of hers from the European family trip we took in 1979 when I was 14 and she was 54. It only covered the tortuously long flight over there and our first two days in London. We were away for four months in all and I longed to read her account of the whole trip, but alas, it was never written. Those few pages though took me right back to that life-changing time, when as a 14-year-old I knew my destiny and future would include travel. Much more travel.

So one week after the funeral, I’ll pack my suitcase and my journal. Head off on a valedictory tour for my beautiful, beautiful Mum. Finish all the diary entries, and the damn manuscript edits while I’m at it.

None of my Favourite Things

Sunday Blog 150 – 25th August 2024

Picture from the bottom of a hole, looking at an ivy covered aperture to the sky,

Of all the careers to fall into, like Alice down the rabbit hole, museums would surely have been the least likely one for me. Long before Marie Kondo, I understood all too well the dull sheen items get over time when they no longer spark joy. One of my favourite ever sounds is the thud of my bagged items hitting the bottom of the charity bin. To date, I’ve almost never thrown something away and later regretted it. And I’ve thrown a LOT of things away.

Back in 1987, in the last months of my Arts degree, I worried myself into a rag wondering what on earth I’d do. Then two weeks after graduating, there I was. Employed in the history department of the Western Australian museum on their collections catalogue (back when the hideous 1970s building was still in place.) I was just passing through though, and two years later I ended up in London’s Greenwich Maritime Museum.

About a year into my six-year tenure at Greenwich I met the woman who had the newly created role of “De-accession Co-ordinator.” Her actual job was getting rid of surplus museum items. Given that on average only around 3% of any museum’s collection is on display, there was quite a big scope for her role. How jealous I was at the time. Here was my dream job, disposing of unnecessary items and getting paid well for it.

Why is this topic so present for me right now? In this incredibly melancholy week which began with my 97-year-old mother breaking her hip on Monday, somehow the topic of shedding things keeps coming up for me. Trying to find a way through this vigil time of negotiating the end of a loved one who didn’t believe in religion any more but was a very spiritual person all her life. And was also a huge hoarder.

As I bumble and stumble through each day, I’ve been listening to the Pema Chodron book How You Live Is How You Die. She talks about how getting rid of as much as we can before we die is a good idea. Mum’s life is already confined to a small room in a residential aged care facility, but like all of us witnessing our parents transitioning, there seem to be so many lessons for us.

Shed the things. Embrace the joy of chucking shit away.

Grateful for gratitude

Sunday Blog 149 – 18th August 2024

It took me 39 days to complete my 28 day Gratitude Practice. It started with a bang – within the first three days I’d found a ten dollar note at Maccas when I went to use their loo, and then won an Instagram competition which included a 45 minute consultation with my US based writing mentor.

The messy middle included me dropping my gorgeous heart-shaped turquoise gratitude stone (see this blog) and chipping it. I ordered heart-shaped gems online which turned out to be tiny, but look fabulous scattered on my yoga altar.

After the too-small hearts debacle (Temu is persistent and confusing), I went to a gem store in person. Fully intending to purchase another turquoise heart, the range of heart-shaped gems was limited and didn’t include a light blue-coloured one. He showed me a lapis lazuli heart but it seemed too dark. Then he placed a rose quartz heart in my hand. My fingers curled around it reflexively, and he pointed out other stones in vain.

“You don’t want to let go of it.”

I bought it of course—it had picked me rather than the other way around (see image above). Then I read up on the qualities of rose quartz – love and harmony. While my chipped, blue turquoise heart represented communication and writing, what I’ve ended up with is a gentle pink love-infused rose quartz heart. I don’t even remember how the turquoise heart came into my life, I want to remember it leaving, and today I’m going to dispose of its remnants, let it go with, of course, gratitude.

But the gewgaws and faldelals of gratitude really are irrelevant. What I’ve really learned over the last 39 days of my 28 day gratitude practice is a) I’m not very good at doing things every day and b) how incredibly helpful it is to focus on being grateful.

And it’s not just about monotonously listing what you’re grateful for at the end of the day. You can be grateful for what’s not happened yet. The day I tried that exercise, I got mixed up as it looked like I’d already done my gratitude write up. But it was just that everything I’d visualised unfolded throughout the day. Other ideas that don’t involve repetitive lists is mentally saying “thank” when your left foot hits the ground and “you” when your right foot lands as you walk about your day. A kind of walking meditation and gratitude practice all rolled into one. You can also be grateful about the good things that will happen to people you love, and extend that to strangers or “the world” at large.

What happens for me when I’m grateful is the chatter of discontent and self-criticism quietens, my bandwidth of creativity and resourcefulness opens up.

So independent of any gemstones, I’m grateful for gratitude.

Through a mirror darkly

Sunday Blog 148 – 11th August 2024

This time last week I was poised on the precipice of three days of conference presentations, already reeling from the impact of trying to process insights from a pre-conference research symposium day.

At the time, I was intensely curious about the possibilities of “researching what we implement, and implementing what we research”. Could this be my next life focus? With my limited attention span, my idea of becoming more serious about research waned as the week lengthened and other subjects crowded in. Even so, research was on my mind.

Then I tuned into an episode of a podcast series I listen to regularly—Family Secrets with Dani Shapiro. Usually she interviews people who have written memoirs about uncovering family secrets. In this case, it was America Journalist Susannah Breslin’s Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment.

What rivetted me was her description of the moment she realised she was being watched. Aged seven, she had been already part of the experiment for about four years. Her mother signed her over to the 30 year longitudinal study largely to access the childcare. She’d already voiced what her actions had showed—that she no longer wanted to be a mother. So, little Susannah was dropped off each day at this special early childhood centre that was set up with one-way mirrors and hidden areas for the researchers to sit and observe in secret. Children could play or attend classes, all the while being watched. The study aimed to determine if adult personality could be predicted from childhood behaviour.

Seven-year-old Susannah was confronted with the M&M experiment. She was offered sweets, which she declined, even though she was experiencing the post-school hours of ravenous hunger. She wanted to be seen as mature. When the researcher left the room, Susannah lunged for the bowl but knocked it over, scattering the M&Ms across the table. “Not wanting to be caught making a mess, I grabbed candy and stuck it into my mouth. Then suddenly I froze and I could feel my cheeks getting hot. And I looked into this mirror on the opposite wall, and I could see my cheeks were pink, and I just had this sense that there was somebody on the other side of the mirror who was watching me.”

Both her parents were taken up with their research lives and divorced a few years later. Meanwhile, the study seemed to Susannah like “a third parent.” Only it was a completely impassive parent, making no move to support or guide her as she spiralled into problematic drug taking and acting out sexually as a vulnerable young teen.

She reflects on how mistaken was her belief the study was a third parent. “I had offered up my data on a plate to an entity that had consumed it and used it for its own purposes, which were not necessarily aligned.”

Many years after the study ended, Susannah, by now a journalist, visited the school where she had been a lab rat. There was a researcher still working there, and she called out to them, said she was part of the study. “Yeah, we get a lot of you around here.” More adult children in search of their third parent.

And so, one week later, my research zeal is already withering on the vine. Data extraction for non-aligned purposes does not excite me.

Ah well, think of all the time and energy this will save me!

Converging Threads

Sunday Blog 147 – 4th August 2024

I’m sitting here on the 23^rd floor of my Brisbane Hotel, here for the Health Innovation Community conference. It’s only the pre-conference day and already my thoughts are broiling with ideas and inspiration.

Today was all about early career researchers breaking into the digital health space. As one of the consumer advocates attending, I was banging my usual “involve consumers” drum.

In truth, I am very ambivalent about research. About how we measure it. The number of papers cited doesn’t really seem to me to be the key metric to see if what we invest in research is paying off into actual, genuine change for people. And what we research. What makes a perfect topic for a PhD may not be the issue that really needs addressing, from a community perspective. And don’t get me started about how involving consumers in research is so often an afterthought.

The disconnect between health research and health services is a familiar frustration for me as someone that straddles two worlds. My roots and first love are in working with health services and system change. But I recognise research is important to drive improvements. One of today’s speakers, Dr Christopher Longhurst, nailed it for me when he said, “we don’t research what we implement in our health services, and we don’t implement what we research.”

This.

What crept into my thinking as I heard this was an inkling. Maybe I need to become more serious about the tiny bit of research I am currently doing as part of a pilot program at Curtin University? Is this how I get the threads of my life of writing and health advocacy to converge?

Then he shared this quote “No one who loves life can ignore literature and no-one who loves literature can ignore life.” (A quote from Laura Esquivel, author of Like Water for Chocolate. This is from her non-fiction collection of essays, Between Two Fires)

His quote landed directly in my heart. Like a direct message to me, that my love of reading has not been wasted, and my love of advocacy is not in vain.

Let’s see how these two continue to converge…