Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: gratitude

  • some delightful stranger

    Some delightful person left a little note in our letterbox this week, thanking us for something we had not done.

    It is wrapped in a glossy little gift box hot pink with white polka dots, which folds open like a Chinese takeaway. There’s something so satisfying about those boxes. Inside is a mess of silver glitter, a note, and half a dozen transfers which are intended as play tattoos. One says, backwards:

    We accept
    the love
    we think
    we des
    erve.

    Another has a Day of the Dead skull drawn on it with flowers round the bone. The note, when I unfolded it, read:

    “Thank you for being so kind this morning when I parked in front of your house. I was running late & had nowhere else to park, your kindness was appreciated! Have some temporary tattoos for your kids!”

    It is a strange feeling to be thanked for someone else’s kindness. But I loved it. I wish I could get hold of this stranger and put them in touch with their real recipient. Only as I write does it dawn on me the obvious thing to do will be box it all up again, glitter and all, and deliver it to my lovely neighbour, who likely is the real fairy godfather. It is such a lovely sensation to open the crackling box, spill glitter on my toes, read the cutely lettered note and know that some person did some other person a small, meaningful favour and that other person noticed and appreciated it, and has gone to some trouble to thank them.

  • so much spoilt

    It’s very nice to “take time every day to think through your day and see if there’s anything you can be genuinely grateful for”. But such advice also makes me a little sick. Why don’t our social-media lists of “today I am grateful for…” start with breathable air (thank you, Shanghai), clean running water (thank you, Sahara), and supermarkets overflowing with foodstuffs? How numb do you have to be before it requires a deliberate hunt through your day to see “if there’s anything” you can be glad of? If there’s anything? Anything? How slowly and creakingly does this process have to run before it will effect an actual change in our over-consuming, greedy, wasteful, polluting and entitled habits? We are wrecking our globe. Very fast. Not just for us but also for the people who have no clean running water and for the children of the children who work in toxic factories making our iPhones. There is no point blaming ourselves for the lassitude and ennui, the misery of depression and anxiety that too much meaningless abundance and a dearth of social connection and life’s meaning inevitably creates. I get that reminding ourselves to be grateful is a huge improvement on whinging and complaining, like the woman on the home renovations TV show who wailed when her house was passed in at auction This Is the Worst Thing That’s Ever Happened In My Entire Life!!! But I want us to change faster and wake up more thoroughly. And glib phrasings like this one on Upworthy “Add #365Grateful to your Instagram photos and instantly be part of the gratitude movement!” make me feel ashamed. How bleak would that sentence feel to a hungry person, a person without land or a roof, someone who’s living out their adulthood in an endless refugee camp that stretches in tents as far as the sandy horizon. How they must wish that people who have enough disposable income to give each other cards and presents on so many occasions annually that two weeks from Christmas we are already complaining about Valentines and Easter merchandise in the shops ~ ~ ~ would be more than grateful.

  • why am I having to go through this??

    The last time I was at the airport I watched a band of six merry hipsters in beards (boys) and ballet flats (girls) and narrow cuffed jeans stop at the boarding gate to take a picture of themselves. One volunteered to be not in the picture and the rest fell instantly into a Tommy Hilfiger pose, falling comfortably against each other, one shoulder sliding up and another down, all of them availed of a facial expression they could hold for many seconds without distress or strain. We went through the glass gate one by one holding our passports and our passes. The sixth and final hipster made an unhappy discovery: unlike his five friends, he had not paid extra for “speedy boarding” and was compelled to turn right where they all turned left and wait in the longer queue with all of us schlubbs. His face fell apart. It was wonderful to watch. He was tall and broad-shouldered and carrying a dense brown beard. His shirt resembled a lumberjack’s jacket. His voice came out whiny and high and aggrieved. He went all the way round behind the counter to reason with the airline crew member, waving his boarding pass: But you don’t understand! We’re all travelling together! Her expression was priceless. She tried a couple of times to explain the airline’s policy, too polite to point out that he and his friends were probably seated together and would all be reunited after fifty metres of tarmac in another four or five minutes. He looked as though he was going to cry. The woman rolled her eyes and let him pass. On the tarmac I saw two people kneeling in front of their carry-on suitcases, called out of the queue, stuffing in the extra handbags they’d thought they alone would be allowed to bring onboard. The tickets had cost around 70 Euros each and the airline’s posters at Schoenefeld Airport said, showing a man in a wheelchair, Travel Is Everyone’s Right. It seems to me equality and access are everyone’s right but jet travel is a fast-ending luxury. When we got on the bus at the other end of our short flight a beautiful milky-skinned red-headed girl was just in front of me. She showed the driver her pass and explained in careful German where it was she wanted to get to. He told her she would have to buy an extra ticket, her Eurail or whatever it was didn’t cover that. “But…” she said. She showed it to him again. With great courtesy he explained that this airport was outside the metropolitan zone, therefore: fresh ticket. She threw her head back and wailed. In English: “Why am I having to go through this?”

    At the Turkish place round the corner from my street the guy rolled out a long streak of dough and made me a Turkish pizza from scratch, although rain was falling outside and it was five minutes to closing. I carried it home warming my hand, walking through the soft rain, watching how the illustrated stickers of snowy revellers in the windows of the Apotheke blared colourful contrast to the black sticky wastes of nighttime in December in Berlin. A small woman on the subway train had made a speech about how she is “im Moment Obdachlos”, homeless right now, and because she cannot live on “Luft und Liebe” alone, on air and love, she would be grateful for any small donation anyone could spare. Then she walked the length of the carriage stopping to ask everybody, and thanking with her musical voice anyone who put their hand in their pocket and gave her a small part of the passport to the travel that is everyone’s right.

  • living in the garden

    living in the garden

    Last night I slept under my own roof for the first time in four months. So to speak. It’s a beautiful sublet in a groovier part of town, bristling with bars, but very quiet behind the city wall of our foremost apartment building. I’m in the back, windows facing the trees, in a place with high ceilings and old DDR coal stoves clad in green and corn-coloured ceramic tiles. Downstairs is a baby with lusty lungs. A black and white cat sleeps in the courtyard. The owner of the flat spends her summers living ‘in the garden’ just outside town, which sounds idyllic, and has rented me her keys, her crockery, her weird hot water system, her dreamy curtains. Turning off the reading light I felt momentarily assailed by ghosts and spirits, a movement in the darkness, a sense of swarming: all the people who have lived in this old building in the past; and it occurred to me this was my first night sleeping out, beyond the palings, in the saddening wilderness of old-time East Berlin.

    H2O HoL windowglimpse