MS.

 The thing that is hardest is that sometimes, even usually, there isn't an issue.  Or maybe something's not quite right, or it's just being tired, or a strain, or a cold, or maybe age.  Or is it coming on? When it hits though, after the body audit and the checking, then I know he's back.  There are names for it: episode; incident; attack; but I think of him as Marcel.  When Marcel has called it's both annoying and frightening, is the visit coming on, in progress, or over?  How long will this one take to leave? What will I do?  What work-arounds, excuses, changes might be needed?  Dr Deb, the neurological specialist, one of New Zealand's experts, told me there may be no reason for Marcel to make a serious visit ever again, and he hasn't in well over 4 years, she didn't exactly say that, what she said was eat well, sleep well, get some exercise, manage your stress and there may never be another attack ever. Others have lived their lives with only minor episodes.

But Marcel is still around, in the shadows even if he doesn't come out. He has talked to the insurance companies and told them he might get me, so they don't like me and don't want my money.  Occasionally I get a pins and needles feeling on my head, or in my arm, always on the right, and I get worried, worst case; I feel a little numb for a few days, or weak on the right, or I drop things or I limp.  But it's not been serious for a very long time.

Oftentimes I need to sleep more.  But that and eating well and walking a bit is all right.  It hasn't affected my work since the first visit.  I do get tired, but that may not be his fault.

Most people never see Marcel, I've always been clumsy and I've only known him for 5 years.  And really I'm very lucky, I'm not progressing with Marcel, I'm something called relapsing remitting.  Marcel has visited and left.   Many people think he's not real as they've never met him and never seen him with anyone.  The first time I was paralysed all down my right side.  I couldn't walk properly or stand, or shower, or write.  Marcel or MarSel (closer to his real name) hit me for three weeks very hard.  Then I met Dr Deb, and we took blood from my spine and I had an MRI and she said, "There's no doubt in my mind, this is MS".  Maybe he came because of the stress of the quakes, as no one in my family has met him, so physical and emotional stress may have been his first beacon. That's how I met Marcel, but I think sometimes he's there somewhere in the background, wanting to hit me, but has kept his distance for 4 plus years.   I am lucky, he's like an earthquake or a robber, or a plague who comes like a curse in the night. And he's not a tumour or cancer so I've always felt blessed that it wasn't worse. 

He mainly visits women, well 75% of his friends are female.  He loves people from the south, so if you live in Kerikeri you're very unlikely to meet him, but Invercargill or Dunedin you will know one of the people he stalks. 

I wish insurance people would understand  Marcel isn't a death nell, for me and for many others he knows, but like a sometimes reoccurring cold.  And although I know him, my mind is quick, and according to Dr Deb I am possibly unlikely to be affected again.  Well 'maybe' minor things.  Those affected when they are younger are the classic cases. And some people are progressing and they need our love, our understanding and donations to the neurological researchers (who really are world leading in NZ).

The Chinese say (Tao Te Ching chapter 71) that no disease equals a short life, one disease a long life, and that is about if you know you have something you can watch it and yourself, but if you don't know you could just be struck down.

I watch what I eat, I sleep more, I walk a lot and I listen to my body now.

Poetry leaves me cold - Rev JS Fisher 1933 - 2007

 Poetry leaves me cold.  

It doesn’t touch my soul. 

It bores me beyond my interest.

I read and go cold trying to milk meaning from the crafted text.  

And I think of my father who loved TS Eliot, and ee cummings and would delight in reading and sometimes recording his favourite lines….. so his ordained voice made the sounds break away and fly from the stuffy pages, 

and resonate as observations and truth lit his world with ideas and themes and bold words that made him feel that he had known and connected with the writer  and his comrades who shared a reaction to the artefacts …. That now just sit on a page or screen and leaves me cold and bored.

I wonder what ever happened to the sparks and insights he breathed life into.  Did they die with him, or do they still resonate in the holy spaces where he first found them….. 

Touching other unsuspecting inhabitants of his discoveries.

Or are the words all cold.

Lost discoveries, embers that no longer smoke but lie in my memory.

Times and moments of discovery again covered up to be unearthed and shared by others who cannot read the poems as he did, and now convey sadness and absence of the voice and mind that made them dance and sing.

Or is the fire out. Did they go out with him?  

Poetry leaves me cold.

Through another looking glass- another new normal.

This is living in the science fiction novels and stories. We’re akin to Blade Runner and in a similar feel to Soilent Green, the village of the Damned and War of the Worlds.  We’re there.  We’re in that fabled point where things have changed forever.  #ClimateBreakdown
-@SamNZed 5 January 2020

When you’ve had one new Normal, you don’t expect a second.

Earthquakes. 13,000 of them and then we found the emergence of an overgrown rural town where grudges were served cold through the city, and the predominant new money/ Two lounges /SUV/huge heat pump set held the line against any change to how they think things were done in a mythical history-less past.

Many worked from home.  It saved money and for most it was healthier. There were many agencies which just tried to work harder so they felt important.

But with the old city gone, and even though polls showed Don&Doreen Chch wanted parks and leisure spaces the Council developers and the Govt wanted to take things as close to 1980 as they could and replace the failed deserted central city that no one local wanted to visit, with a tilt slab concrete 2010 central city.  That is retail spaces, offices, council SuperTeam drop in kiosks and other economic suicide measures.

As a sort of Eastern Euro Communist tribute-city  - Christchurch is punching above its weight.

So part of the ‘resilience’ weirdness the idea was to create things that while they didn’t work then they will now if they’re in concrete caves with big bits of glass at the front.

So we build offices and make all public servants work in them. We cajole and annoy lawyers and other office dwellers back into the central white elephant ignoring the growing pungent smells of stale misplaced smugness.

The most exciting things after the quakes started was working from home, finding new shops, and the gap filler art work installations. And the locally produced You Tube videos!  You can’t forget The pallet pavilion of stacked wood like a castle where you could buy food, read, sometimes see a performance or art exhibition.

And the food in caravans popping up!  Coffee, different types of food.
Container shops!

There were some exciting things in Christchurch.

But here’s the thing-  much of the new Exciting stuff was totally destroyed in an unseemly push back to the past.  Christchurch - You loved the gap filler but it’s over, you liked the exiting food proliferating but we’d rather capture any money here and close this down.

And that silly idea of flexible work styles.....

And now pandemic.

Most of the digital gains as our economy shifts, the leg ups we can get from our earthquake and now our lockdown days revealed are being reversed as fast as possible.

We learnt a lot over the COVID lockdown about office work.  Working at home was, for many efficient. It was cheaper.  It was safer.

We’re already pretty much back where we were.  We’re in Wellington central to feed the already probably doomed retailers. They are great people doing their best, but I think it’s terminal.

As an aside -  Who’d have thought sending people to town to spend their money would be believed to be strong enough to counter the fourth industrial revolution, recently hastened by COVID lockdown? We can wait and see if the Canute strategy has enough No8 wire to succeed.

The only way to have the nirvana central city the Wellington and Auckland councils want is to start converting Central retail into accommodation, and assisting businesses into a comfortable back paddock to die. Auckland has already been doing a great job here.

We’ll click our heels and wake up in 2019.

But we’re on our own.

And here’s the thing.

Two years.

The time taken to test and commercialise a vaccine, the inability of the USA to govern themselves and the poverty of the large, emerging economies, peppered with border chaos in Africa mean this may go on till EITHER NZ is bullied into bursting our bubble and sacrificing 20% of our population before we have a cure, OR it will take two years.  Of course there may be another pandemic on the shoulders of the other.
Snow is a fantastic opportunity to not run to the past.  To say ... do we all need to work in shops or offices? Full time?  8 till 6?

Say goodbye to Wellington

Goodbye and yeah nah to you Wellington. 

Now away across a friendly northern shore, I don’t miss the wind, the self importance we co-possessed, the noise and the queues to be noticed. 

Or your smug, rank manufactured smell of relevance. 

The odour that always blows out to sea, 

And is lost forever, except in anecdotes, and replaced instead by still bigger egos and new currency, for now and trading upward.

But then there were the smells of the coffee and arty boho corners, the favourite spots for lunch or Java …. the theatre opportunities, the possibilities of strangers…. The young hospo staff: our smart future, educated with potential and hope and minimum wages.

Wellington you promised so much, but delivered only fleeting notes of the soundtrack I chased.

Were you just a young triers’ waiting room, where we struggled earnestly until we were sorted and spat out?  

Were a few of us, was I, really not in synch, not the right grade, or was never really able to play the game?

Is your Capital - which longs for imagined good days which allow you not to be beaten, they say, - just a place where your dreams can realise themselves grotesquely on the CV, and smear your ever so important personal brand? 

Or is it really the true heart of what was Godzone - noble, fair, conquering, governing, misplaced, and where locals are strangers?

But Goodbye and seeya - Wellington you’ve shown me all your warm balmy scripts, from politics oozing through the slate, cruising in Cuba, pinball 3 am, parties where we strove and tried hard to have fun, no matter how apart we felt.  ….and then, later parties where no one even cared anymore, just being there and seen, the liaisons, rumours, personal disasters, the wins.  

The ache of irrelevance.

We’d need all the editing in China, the splicing of transcendent moments where it did all come together spectacularly and beautifully, and we did touch the stars and a few people saw me touch the light briefly. But then I fell, my light unwanted.

 

It’s over.  And there were Too few moments in a town where the artistically gifted, watch the children play.  

And however warm, windy, tantilising, I wasn’t for you, not you for me, fun but not my sickly breakfast condiment, but an ex home which is pining for the fjords, as the poets said.

Yeah nah. 

Has the enlightenment gone out?

This is my second attempt at this title.  

I still can’t write it.

The end of Fairy Dancing

There are many instances in the last 6 years when I remembered thinking 'I'd have never believed this would happen in a first world country'.  This is one of them, something that is a warning but really just something that in my opinion should have been avoided. I'm not trying to blame anyone. As an historian I know the future usually just notes in these instances it was just a fail and a product of how we think and do things.

My daughter was 4 years old when the second big earthquake hit Christchurch.  She was half an hour before going to the highlight of her week: Fairy Dancing.  I never understood Fairy Dancing as a discipline - It was learning steps to Dancing to music while dressed as fairies.  It was and has been the only thing Charlotte was prepared to rehearse for.

When the 22 Feb quake hit, of course it was off.  So the ground shook for ages, she wanted to go to Fairy Dancing and she couldn't.

What was really upsetting was that the aged brick hall / church on Linwood Ave she was just about to leave for was flattened, leaving a pile of debris.  Charlotte and her fairies were incredibly lucky.  She was upset when she went passed the hall, but I think it was one of us that told her, in shock, that was where Fairy Dancing was.   She's never Fairy danced again.  As far as I know she's not seriously rehearsed anything since.

Little children are constructing the world.  This is the shop.  This is the street.  That is my school, that is another school, that is kindy, that is the church....  the world is small.  As they develop they understand what is constant and what they can rely on.  As time goes on like building blocks, the world grows, the specific classes and sets get bigger and they learn.

In the case of kids from earthquake zones, and I imagine war zones and other disaster areas, the construction of their world, their certainties, get broken.  The things they have started to count on are wrong.  The school isn't going, the shop is a pile of bricks, Fairy Dancing is gone.   And in our case tangentially, my parents don't love each other and daddy lives somewhere else- although that was 2 years away.
In Charlotte's story she went from being very excited and bubbly to reserved, moody and sad.  I'm sure my struggling also contributed, but she ended up in counselling and intervention with a range of professionals.  She started school the following year and 6 years later she still has fear issues but it's hard to pick what has caused what in her mosaic life.  But it has altered her.

Charlotte has done ok. We lived in the east; poorest, most affected. Some kids around us from broken houses, blended crisis families, living on the knife edge of poverty and gangs anyway may never recover; with a life of crime, mental issues and substance abuse beckoning already.

What I really wanted to say though was we did at least one thing right.  We enrolled Charlotte in a school that wasn't earthquake affected - over the other side of town.  Her brother was already there and Tim's earthquake story is another story.  Why was this good?  Because the government decided to review schools with an aim to closing a number in 2013.  Only in Christchurch : in the earthquake zones.  And in the poorest part of town.  Not in Auckland, Wellington or anywhere not broken by fault lines. And not schools that couldn't reopen.

So the children around us, got back to the School, their school, THE school, to have it closed in a protracted process that now seems disgusting. Many had lost their houses, their friends had moved, their parks had gone, and their parents traumatised. The one physical certainty many of them had or held onto was gone.   Adults also like certainty and things they can trust and the sight of crying mothers and other whanau will be with me as long as I hold my mind together.  And the children sobbing was gutting.  One leading example of many was Phillipstown School which had a vibrant Maori community, and merged with a larger, by reputation rougher, school.  It was closed, probably contributing to some big issues for the children that went there and I'd imagine any dollars saved will be spent in future years many-fold more as a result.  The rock for many will have been school opening again and going back. Little kids don't care about politics,they are learning about life and what they can trust; and the lesson we as adults gave them was bitter and brutal.

Was this a project someone had in their hard drive for a rainy day, or what was it?  Could rationalising schools have waited 5 years (after all repairing houses has)?

Whatever : it happened.  I believe WE as a nation failed. We failed people that didn't deserve bad treatment.  So my lesson from Fairy Dancing is when we think about crises and opportunities, we need to think about people first.

In any major disasters think about people, particularly the young, the old, the weak feel, as that is what a society (or community if you must), has to be judged on.

17 September 2016- history always repeats

I nearly didn't post this, but it was cathartic to write as i feel I've been here before and I really can't believe some of the things I see and hear. I may delete it, but I've spent an hour plus so for now...

My thought today is take a deep breath. Kiwis your life has changed. Probably irrevocably. Adjust. We aren't going back. Just find a Zen state and be mindful of what is happening.

First a disclaimer. I was crap at dealing with the Christchurch/Canterbury earthquakes. I fought the change and the loss. One thing I did learn though finally, was I had to learn to do less. There was an initial urge to pretend nothing had happened, do more to overcome changes and the unavailability of people, venues and time. I didn't accept the change and cut the cloth to match the situation. 

Rather than accepting travel was difficult and take longer I tried to ignore it and pretend no disaster had happened.

It took me back to my service in Sri Lanka, where I fought things until I finally had to just aim to do one thing a day. (Due to heat, travel issues, technology, dust, the people there). Anything more was setting up failure and stress. And I got good at that then.

And now?

What I saw in Chch : Stressing to do things while ignoring what is happening and our adjustment to living under threat and with change, is taking an advance on well being that has to be paid back later. This is where the upset, anger, mental health, substance abuse, violence and family meltdowns started. Not the events but how we reacted.

Wellington imo needs to realise what's happened and slow down, pick what's important and simplify, taking time to acclimatise to our new world.

Important is health and safety, the work of our awesome fire service, health, police and rescue workers and everyone's wellbeing. 
Unimportant is Continuing with all pre quake projects and workstreams and trying to catch up the lost week which is dumb.

Acceptance.
Rushing as fast as possible to do 'work' is not accepting. Moving back into all offices RIGHT NOW, given streets are broken, public transport disrupted and staff adjusting is also dumb. Move back in good time, or let people change how they work. We haven't had a major loss of life and a Kaikoura event in Wellington but need to think and prepare so we don't. Things have changed. We now live with imminent quakes not hypothetical ones.

We've had a disaster which impacts on people's energy and psyches as well as offices and carparks and we have ongoing and continuing seismic issues.

There will be more earthquakes, there will be continuing injury, health, building and transport issues. This will happen. There is already upset and panic, this will intensify. We have to focus on what is important managing this, and continued safety, not achieving the work programme we had before. They might coincide if we take time to work smarter - (rather than quicker and in spite of our situation).

I'd personally think from what I hear the number of urgent BAU issues and pre quake cabinet papers public servants are running around to complete needs to be examined. Our customers want sustainable quality outputs. Not rushed stressed half baked solutions from stressed staff in crisis.

Likewise those urgent restructurings.

And those vital performance reviews and reports and other things we do.  

There are important things we do. They go to the top of the list. And right now one of these is to accept the world has changed. This is life. This is reality.
My wish is we learn from 2010-15. We benefit from the insurance rebuild injustices, and the bad treatment of schools and communities. We learn to accept what has happened and we look after each other and our communities. We accept what we can't change, change what we can and are discerning about what we focus on.