Searching for Speed Bumps
Two lazy cows, a faded yellow barn and a lush green sloping field that stretches until it meets a shale peak on the horizon. That’s the view out of my grandmother’s window. A sun-drenched opening in a 4th floor apartment on the outskirts of an old mining town in northern Spain. That window is her whole world and last week I spent three days gazing out of it with her.
At 91, Abuelita’s universe is slowly constricting every day. From her bed to the living room window, to her bed, to the window. She is able to be in her own home and that is everything to her. The little things above and beyond that bring her peace. Holding hands. Sorting a deck of cards by suit. Looking through a carefully pre-selected set of photographs of the people she recognises but scrubbed of those she doesn’t anymore. Gone are those ones that now bring up more questions than answers.
Sitting with her for a few days was an exercise in complete withdrawal from my daily reality. It was hard. Very hard. Hard because reshuffling a deck of cards for the 9th time made clear to me that my value to her in that moment wasn’t my ability to tell stories or make her laugh but to simply be silently present. Hard because my body, usually so used to running on a cocktail of caffeine and adrenaline, struggled to sit calmly in one place and just hold her hand for a while. Hard because there weren’t a million different things going on around me I had to take in and make sense of.
Tweets. Pings. Stories. Emails. TikToks…. All gone.
It feels like everything is getting shorter and quicker around us. More inputs. Less time to process each one. I’ve felt my brain changing to adapt to these, but sitting and staring at those immovable cows made me realise that my body had changed too. Why couldn’t I just relax next to her without the constant need to move? My phone was out of the room. The stool was comfortable. This could be one of the last times I spend with her. Why was my leg twitching? Why was it so hard to just be still?
I hadn’t had to consciously disengage my brain and body like that before. To get out of the hyper-productive mindset of making every second count towards some yet undefined future. To not ascribe an opportunity cost to every minute that passes and to be able to let go of time as the primary barometer driving everything around me
Whether it's getting lost in some creative pursuit, being around my kids or spending time sitting with my grandmother, I NEED these forcing functions to help fray the space-time continuum. Attention black holes that demand complete submission and bring into focus the friction within me as I try to comply. Speed bumps to break the relentless search for stimulus and force me to fixate on the things I rarely get to think about. Those things that often the deep lying anchors that make me, me.
Things like the fact that those sloping fields outside that window lead to sharp coal faces. The coal faces above the mines that sustained the livelihoods of that whole part of the country for the best part of the last century. The mines that yielded the coal that my grandfather shoveled onto the trains for four decades. The trains that gave him a way out when the whole region plunged into disarray as mine after mine was shut down. The coal that paid all my family’s lifetime pensions but took chunks out of their lungs, their hands and their eyes in exchange. The family that instilled the drive in my grandparents to immigrate across a continent in search of a better life for their two kids. That better life shaped my mum. My mum shaped me.
Looking through that sun-drenched window and holding my Abuelita’s hand was the speed bump I needed to actually start moving towards those green sloping fields in the horizon again.
The speed bump I needed to start moving back towards where I came from.