Today I went to a Quaker service.
I’ve been to a Quaker service once before, in the small town where my dad lives, when I was visiting him one time. It was a small congregation, we sat on hard benches, and I remember feeling unspiritual, because my mind wasn’t focusing solely on God during the hour of silence, nor was I receiving some magical mystical experience.
I’d asked them about the Quaker church in my city and they found it in their book of Quaker churches, and told me it would likely be a much bigger one than theirs, with a lot more people speaking in the meetings (their meeting was in total silence, other than one woman reading something from the Bible, and she told me afterwards that the only reason she’d read it was because I was there, and she likes to make it a bit more interesting when visitors come!).
Well, that was a while ago – two years, maybe, or even three years. I lose track of time. Anyway, I’ve kept meaning to go to a Quaker service here, but didn’t get round to it, because it’s four miles away from my home, which is a long walk, and I don’t like taking buses, especially on Sundays when they are so infrequent.
But today I went. I tried to be organised and plan it. The swimming pool is on the way, so I walked first to the swimming pool, went for a swim, then walked to the Quaker church. It’s not really officially called a church – it’s a meeting house or something – but I call it a church anyway, in that a church is a meeting of Christians.
Well, I arrived, ten minutes before the start of the service, and went into the building. Some old men were sitting on chairs. I asked if this was the place where the Quaker service was held, and they said yes, and that it starts in ten minutes, and they pointed to the room where we go, and they said I could sit with them and wait. So I sat with them. Some more old men arrived. I wondered if it was a meeting of old men, but then an old woman arrived too. I observed these people were very old – at least in their 80s – and I wondered why there were no younger people.
After a while, people started going into the room where the service happens. I went in and sat on a chair. I observed that the chairs were soft and comfortable and that there was natural light coming from windows in the walls and windows in the ceiling, so although there were flourescent lights, they were not turned on. I felt happy that this place was comfortable, because I find it very easy to be distracted by discomfort. I also observed that this was a small congregation – about the same size as, or smaller than, the other one I’d been to. And less variety of age – at the other one, people were a wider variety of ages.
We sat in silence. Fifteen of us – and one dog. I was quite surprised and also happy when the dog came in. I like dogs, and I’ve never been in a church service that had a dog in it before.
This time I wasn’t expecting anything in the way I’d been last time. I think the reason I was expecting something last time was because I’d read about Quaker services beforehand and people had told me it’s a mystical experience and you experience God in a new way. But this time I just saw it as a time to sit in silence, and just be myself, rather than striving to be spiritual and focusing solely on God. I prayed in my head, but I also thought about other things, and opened my eyes sometimes to peek at the other people and the dog. A few people stood up to say something. The things they said seemed to be thoughts that occurred to them, rather than deep words from God.
The people seemed like simple people – not simple as in stupid, but simple as in they did not seem to be striving to impress anyone. I like this. I find most churches uncomfortable to be in because there is always a bit of striving to impress, and striving to prove oneself holier than others, and striving for self-definition by comparing oneself favourably to others. Showing off, I guess. Most people seem to do this. But these people did not show off. Nor did the people at the other Quaker service I went to. This is a major reason I like Quaker services – the simplicity and humble friendliness of the people. Of course, I’m sure I’m idealising it in my mind, and I’m sure once I get to know the people, they will not be quite how they seem, but at the same time, it was a place where I felt comfortable.
After one hour, we shook hands with the people sitting either side of us, and a woman stood up and said welcome to visitors, and then someone brought in biscuits and cups of tea. The cups of tea were all ready-made, with milk in them. I didn’t have one, because I don’t like tea with milk. I only like green tea with no milk, or black coffee. But one of the men saw that I wasn’t drinking tea and he asked if I’d rather have some coffee, so I said I’d black coffee, and he got me a coffee, which was nice.
The man sitting next to me talked to me, and told me a bit about his life and how he started going to the Quaker services.
I was asked to sign the visitor’s book, which I thought was a bit odd, because if I keep going to this church, then I won’t be a visitor any more, but I signed it anyway.
I’ll go again. I think going once to a church gives a superficial idea of how services work, but going regularly gives an idea of how the people interact – the dynamics of the group. And I find myself quite curious about it.
I had a weird and unpleasant experience on the bus yesterday. I was going to take a bus, and although I was a few minutes early, the bus was already there when I arrived, so I ran to it, and then got on. As I got on, I felt the sudden pressure and pain of the doors closing on me.
I was a quite shocked by this, so I just stood there for a while, in shock. And then the bus driver told me in an aggressive way ‘Don’t get onto the bus when the doors are closing!’
I was confused and said, ‘I didn’t know they were closing.’
He said, as if I was stupid, ‘You could see they were closing.’
I explained to him that I hadn’t seen they were closing because I was looking at him when I was getting onto the bus. He rolled his eyes and looked away. I was indignant that he didn’t believe me when I was telling the truth, and I said ‘Don’t be rude to me.’
Then the driver said that it was his bus and he could throw me off, and that I’d broken health and safety rules by getting on a bus with closing doors, and then he told me aggressively that I had to get off the bus because I’d been rude to him.
In confusion and distress, I started crying and shaking. The driver grudgingly let me buy a ticket and told me to sit down and calm down – said in a tone as if I was a hysterical woman and he was magnanimously humouring me.
I was too upset and shocked to think clearly, but afterwards I thought about how very odd it was. He expected me to see that doors were about to close, and yet took no responsibility for himself seeing that I was getting onto the bus. Surely it is he who is breaking the health and safety rules, not I, because he is the one who knows the rules, and surely there must be a rule that he is not to close doors when a passenger is standing in the middle of them! Clearly he was the one in the wrong – and maybe it had been an honest mistake on his part, but still, if you make a mistake and someone is hurt, surely the human thing to do is to apologise and ask if they are okay, rather than blame them for being hurt.
And yet more and more in today’s society it seems that people become angry with the person they’ve hurt. A large part of this must be the whole suing culture now – people are terrified of being sued, and so acknowledging that they’ve hurt someone could endanger them, and so in their fear, they lash out. In the past, before the suing culture, it would often have stood them in good stead to apologise, because it would show they were courteous and they wouldn’t lose people’s favour.
But even in situations where nothing legal would ever happen, I’ve noticed more and more that people seem unwilling to apologise, even if they know they have hurt someone, or if they know they have made an error. And when I’ve asked why this is, I’ve been told that if you apologise, others think you’re weak, or will take advantage. So I wonder to what extent that is true. I’ve always had a lot of respect for someone who will genuinely apologise, seeing it as a sign of strength, but maybe my reaction is not the norm. Maybe I should be wary of apologising myself, if the social status of the apology has changed, and it is no longer valued.
Later on, during the bus journey, an elderly woman was getting on the bus at the same time as a young woman in a wheelchair was getting out. As the young woman was in a wheelchair, and thus not the height of someone walking, it was impossible for anyone getting on the bus to see through the window that she was coming out until she reached the door. Well, as this elderly woman got onto the bus, this same driver yelled at her ‘No! Stop! Get off!’ in an aggressive way. She stared at him, bewildered, and he continued to shout at her, telling her to get off, with no explanation. She seemed quite confused, as well she might, and she eventually saw the woman in the wheelchair, and she got off the bus. When the woman in the wheelchair had left the bus, the elderly woman got on again, and apologised profusely to the driver.
It seemed to me bizarre. She had no way of knowing that someone was coming out. There is nothing intriniscally wrong with getting onto a bus when you don’t see anyone getting out. On the other hand, the bus driver’s yelling seemed quite uncalled for. He could have simply said, in a calm tone, that someone in a wheelchair needed to get out, and could the woman step off the bus for a minute so she could get through. And yet she was the one who apologised – being of the generation where profuse apologies were the norm, I guess, and also maybe being bullied by the bus driver into seeing her behaviour (getting onto the bus) as terribly unacceptable. I felt bad for her. I felt confused that the bus driver didn’t seem to see the effects of his behaviour. It is possible that apologies have simply gone out of style? That we should be thinking in terms of survival of the fittest, and to be fittest, you have to be the one who blames the other person first? If this really is the way society is nowadays, I think I would like to be a hermit.
I keep meaning to write blog entries here, but realise I have no theme. I was writing about trying to be organised, but now my ’101 things in 1001 days’ blog is about that. I like my blogs to have themes. I’ve also started writing a blog about what it’s like to have Asperger Syndrome (if anyone is interested in reading it, it’s http://aspectsofaspergers.wordpress.com/) so that is another theme I write about.
I keep telling myself that this is my ‘faith’ blog, where I write about my faith, but I actually find it quite hard to make a theme of faith. I’m not exactly sure why. Perhaps partly because everyone has different views of God and how he works in people’s lives, and people might disagree with my interpretations of God. And partly because I’m not thinking about God every second of the day, so a ‘faith blog’ might make me seem holier than I am! And also because in a Christian community, one’s faith is a kind of given, to some extent, so does one really need to talk about it, or just to talk about one’s life, or to talk about both together. So I get a bit confused as to exactly how a faith blog would unfold.
But one thing I’m thinking about lately with regard to faith is church attendance. As in, going to church on Sundays for a service, and the role that plays in Christian life. Does it even play an essential role? The Bible talks about fellowship, but it’s quite possible to have fellowship without sitting in a church service, listening to someone talk at you, and singing a few songs. If I’m honest, church services have not really contributed to my faith.
Well, when I was at Bible School, I found a lot of the lectures totally rivetting – they were really challenging and particularly challenging of the assumptions of comfortable middle class Christianity. I loved this, because they dealt with questions and contradictions that had often been in my mind, unvoiced.
But church services, in general, at all the different churches I’ve been to, are not like this. Either they seem to play it safe and give some vague talk that pretty much says the same as all the others, or they try to challenge in a superior holier-than-thou guilt-inducing way, which I don’t like.
Four years ago, I wrote about moving here and starting to attend two different churches – one in the morning, and one in the evening.
The evening one was the kind where people sang in tongues, screamed and fell on the ground. They told me I wasn’t fully receiving the Holy Spirit because I told them I found it pointless to sing the same songs over and over. They told me I had a curse on my house because I have sci-fi books and a yoga video. And their services were very loud and gave me a headache. So I stopped going. This church didn’t reflect my experience of God at all, and I found it very hard to focus on God with all that noise.
The morning church is much quieter. It’s ecumenical, and more traditional, involving repeating things – what’s the word for that? Ritual? Where the pastor says something and the congregation says something back which is on a piece of paper that you have to read from. I find that a bit odd, but it doesn’t bother me as such. Except when it’s on the screen, from a powerpoint or something, and the words are in white on a colourful background. That makes me dizzy, but I understand they are trying to be modern and interesting. They’ve changed the lights hanging from the ceiling, though, to some really bright fluorescent ones. So then I feel all wobbly and unwell by the end of the service. They are nice people there – well, there are nice people in the evening church too – but the actual church service really doesn’t have any positive effect on me, or bring me closer to God.
So it seems to me that church services actually provide lots of uncomfortable distractions from focusing on God, and I focus better on God if I stay at home and read the Bible and pray.
As for the fellowship thing, I get confused by what people mean by that word. Is fellowship where two or more Christian have to have a preplanned meeting, or could it just be conversations you happen to have with other Christians? I find I get more from unplanned conversations. In preplanned meetings, people seem to come with an agenda and assumptions, and often what they say are the things they feel they should say, and the opinions they’ve been taught to hold, and it just seems a rehashing of the same things over and over again.
Well, the last time I went to church was a few weeks ago, and then I decided I wouldn’t go again because of the new lights. I shouldn’t have to feel dizzy and unwell to worship God, and is it really worship when I am uusing odd repeated words that don’t have a lot of meaning for me. I rather use my own words and be in my own environment. I know there are plenty of different churches, and there may well be a church out there where I can draw close to God, but I wonder whether, and to what extent, finding a church is a necessity.
I know a lot of Christians feel it is, but I’ve never found a logical reason why. I meet Christians who have stopped going to church, and they see it as something bad – that they’ve ‘backslidden’. I also meet a lot of Christians who say they used to go to church but they were hurt by it so they’re not going back – so it seems to be a sort of emotional decision, based on hurt. But with me there is no such emotional decision. I have just weighed up the pros and cons and really can’t see why going to church is considered necessary. I can see why it’s useful to have a group of Christians in your life, and you can pray for each other, and support each other, and learn from each other, but I don’t see why that has to be within the traditional church setting. Although I realise that it can be hard to find a group of Christian friends outside of the church setting. When I was in Canada, this wasn’t a problem, because there were so many Christians and Christian groups, but in the UK, the main place Christians tend to meet is church.
I dunno. These are my thoughts lately, because for the first time I am actually considering stopping going to church altogether. Although I do keep planning to check out the Quaker meeting place – because that would be nice and quiet! – but even then I think that it might be in a room with fluorescent lights and weird noises and uncomfortable seats, and then in that case it would make more sense to have an hour of silent worship at home.
I will soon do a proper entry where I write stuff instead of just posting giraffes, but I’m having fun with this, and I made some more giraffes. Here are some giraffe doodles:
And here is a Mary Poppins giraffe:
Drawing giraffes turns out to be addictive! A cheap high or something – it gives me a massive grin on my face to draw giraffes and look at them once I’ve drawn them. And also to look at other people’s giraffes – I guess giraffes are entertaining! I am really not used to having such a grin on my face – it hurts my cheeks after a while!
Well, my mind seems occupied in thinking of different ways a giraffe could be depicted, and how to draw quite a few on one page. I came up with this geeky picture:
I have been having so much fun drawing giraffes, for the One Million Giraffes project: http://www.onemilliongiraffes.com/
The project itself totally appeals to me, for its pure whimsy. There is no point to it, as in it’s not for a great cause, or to raise money or awareness, or to achieve anything obviously meaningful. It’s purely to see if this Norwegian guy can collect a million giraffes by 2011. And he is clearly having so much fun with it. It actually seems like it’s achievable – that he will get his million giraffes!
And gosh, I’ve never drawn a giraffe before, and didn’t realise how fun they are to draw! They are the most comical and yet beautiful creatures. I’ve been googling photos of giraffes and finding fun ones to draw. I’ve drawn quite a few, and they’ve been posted on the site. Here are my giraffes – I copied them all from photos I found by googling, except for the green one, which I copied from a site that tells you how to draw cartoon giraffes.
Hi again. 
It was really interesting to read people’s comments. It hadn’t occurred to me that 101 goals would be awful, but I can now see how it could be – or at least overwhelming. Sort of like when I go to a restaurant and order too much to eat – because it all looks really good – and then I realise all that food will simply not fit into me, and that I’m full after the first part!
But… call me crazy, but I’m trying it anyway. I’ve made a separate blog for it, so I can organise (I can’t get used to writing ‘organize’!) all the goals – it’s here: http://101onthespectrum.wordpress.com/ I write about my Aspergers too, because I think that affects how I try to organise things. I actually only have 40 goals so far, at the time of writing this blog post – I decided to just get started on them before I’d reached 101, and maybe that would be less overwhelming.
So far, I’m really enjoying it. It’s making me think about what’s important to me in life, and also it really helps me to focus on both the big picture and the details when I have all my goals laid out, with reasons for them, and a plan of how to achieve them. I also write myself weekly goals each week, which I post, and try to achieve. Well, I started it on 1st June and now it’s 19th June, so it’s still very much a novelty, so time will tell how effective it is when the novelty starts to wear off!
Anyway, now I’ve decided that this wiblog doesn’t need to be about organisation any more, because I have a blog especially for that. I’d like to write about other things – broader things, about my faith. As this is a Christian site, I guess it makes sense to write about faith-related things. And also life in general.
Still on the neverending quest for organisational skills. Or maybe I should say ‘organizational’, with a ‘z’ – did you know the OED doesn’t have the ‘-ise’ versions of such words – only the American ‘-ize’. And did you know you can access the full OED online free with the number on your local library card. Check it out here, and see what happens when you search for words like ‘recognise’ and ‘scrutinise’.
But I digress. Back to organizational skills (maybe it’ll be easier to be organized if I use a ‘z’. A ‘z’ somehow looks more organized than an ‘s’). I’ve spent so long trying to find strategies, focusing on organization, on how to be organized, so much so that organization itself becomes the focus of my life, rather than the things which I wish to use organization to achieve. It’s only supposed to be a means to an end.
So maybe if I switched my focus to goals, the organization might fall into place. I have no idea whether this will happen, but it’s worth a try. I downloaded an organization software, and it’s all about goals. I’m also thinking about doing the whole ’101 things in 1001 days’ thing. Anyone here doing that? The idea is that you set yourself 101 goals to achieve in the 1001 days. The main site about it seems to be here, but people have whole extra blogs devoted to it. It seems like a fun idea. I have a nice idealised image of myself having fun achieving the goals and becoming organised in the process without even trying. I suspect it is not quite so simple though!
My first goal will have to be to come up with 101 goals. Or 100, if that is the first.
Well, it has been a long time since I wrote in here, and I sometimes think about it and think to myself ‘Oh, I would like to return to the wibsite’ because I liked reading the blogs here and writing my blog.
I have a question. When I log into my blog here, I have to log in twice. It doesn’t accept the first log in, but if I log in a second time, it takes me to the dashboard. It has always done this for me. Does it do that for everyone, or am I doing something wrong.
When I was 16, our A level French teacher asked us if we were organised. I can’t remember the context in which she asked us – maybe to help with study skills – but I remember I replied with absolute certainty ‘No’. I remember too that the rest of the class all looked at me and said ‘What? You’re not organised?’ in disbelief, as if I’d just said something really daft.
I knew exactly why they were surprised and disbelieving. I was top of the class. I invariably handed my homework in on time and I invariably got A’s. I would spend my lunch time and free periods in the common room doing homework, while they would chat and go to the shops. But somehow I knew then with total conviction that I wasn’t organised.
Looking back, I am wondering quite how I knew. Clearly disorganisation hadn’t caused any problem for me back then, so it hadn’t become the problem it is now. The way I remember understooding it then, and how I tried to explain clumsily to my questioning peers, was that I wasn’t organised in my head. Things only became organised when I wrote them down in an essay. It was like everything was a big jumbled confusion in my head until I started writing.
I’m quite amazed that I knew that then. I don’t think I’d ever consciously processed it though, until the teacher asked. And then I just knew that I wasn’t organised. And that is how it is in exams sometimes – I don’t think I know anything about the subject, everything is in a swirling mess in my head, I have no sense of having grasped a subject, no sense of the bigger picture, and then I sit the exam, read the questions, and write the answers, realising to my bemusement that I know them. But even then, I’m not quite sure, logically, how I know them and so I question what I’ve written, because I have no clear sense of how I know it. This is how I got a first for my cognitive psychology exam last year, and my psycholinguistics exam – it was something that completely bewildered me, because I went into those exams having no idea what cognitive psychology or psycholinguistics actually were.
But back to examining the past and how I managed to get things done back when I was a teenager. I think part of it was that I actually didn’t think that not doing homework was an option. It’s rather like how, despite my lack of organisation, I always turn up for shifts at work. Not turning up is not an option. Of course, strictly speaking it is, but then I’d get into trouble. And I think that is what I thought about not doing my homework – I’d get into big trouble, and that scared me, so I did it. Nowadays, I know full well that no one’s going to shout at my for not doing my homework. I’d just be told objectively that I’d failed, which somehow doesn’t seem as dreadful as getting ‘in trouble’ – which is a vague unpredictable awful thing in my mind, involving people’s emotions and judgements of me.
I think too it was easier to get homework done back then because I didn’t have a lot else to do. I lived with my parents, so didn’t have to worry about organising paying bills, doing housework, what happen if the guttering starts leaking, etc. I liked to keep away from my mother, so I stayed in my room. I didn’t have internet. All I had was homework and books. I didn’t have friends to go out with. The reason for me spending free periods and lunch time doing homework and not socialising was purely because I didn’t know how to socialise, so I didn’t have anything else to do. The other teenagers seemed like strange beings whom I didn’t understand and couldn’t connect to. They were motivated by things that had no meaning to me. If they’d liked me and tried to include me, I’d probably have learnt to understand them and would have socialised with them, but then they probably found me unfriendly and confusing. And so that is why I spent my time doing homework and seeming organised.
I am analysing this now because I desperately want to return to the state of getting things done. Even if I can’t be organised (which seems likely – I guess there comes a point where I must accept that my brain is the way it is and that it doesn’t do all the things that ‘normal’ brains do) at least I can surely get things done. If I am motivated by fear, then I must find something to frighten me into doing stuff.
There is one thing, though, that bemuses me. Every month, a few days before my period, I have one day where I am suddenly and unexpectedly really organised. It happened exactly a week ago this month. Last Tuesday – after being in a fog of disorganisation and chaos, I woke up with a sense of clarity – I found myself making plans and getting things done with no effort, and feeling great – feeling organised and on top of things. Trouble is, when this happens, I always forget it’s a temporary thing that only lasts a day. I plan out the week ahead, expecting to feel the same way the next day and the day after, etc., and to easily achieve what I’ve planned. The next day, I find myself sinking back into chaos, and then am frustrated with myself and despairing, because I haven’t achieved something which I achieved so easily the day before.
It took a many years before I realised this was a monthly pattern. I’ve mentioned it to people in the past, and they speculate that maybe it’s a ‘nesting instinct’ thing – before your period, your body thinks its preparing to have a baby, so it kicks in some nesting instinct hormones. I don’t know whether this is true – but it shows me quite clearly that with the right hormones, I can easily be organised. I would desperately like to find a way to make this happen every day, rather than one day a month. I have no idea how I would even go about making this happen though. I could try going on the Pill, I suppose – a different one from the one I tried before, which gave me panic attacks, and made me cry all the time at the slightest thing. But surely it’s so hit and miss – different pills will have different effects on different bodies. Might be worth a shot though – especially if it helps with the abdominal pains too.
[I wrote this entry this morning, trying to analyse my disorganisation. I am returning to college soon and am feeling disheartened that in this year off I still have not found the secret to being organised, or a strategy that has changed my life. The strategies work when I do them. I just find it incredibly hard to make myself do them consistently.]
