Tag: family

2022i4, Tuesday: Weight matters.

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Weight isn’t just a matter of physics. It’s a matter of heart.

Anyone with a smattering of physics knows there’s a difference between weight and mass.

Mass is how much of something there is. It doesn’t change. A litre of distilled water masses a kilogram. Here, on the moon, in microgravity. Everywhere.

Weight, though, is something different. We routinely talk about that water “weighing” a kilogram, because here, on this Earth, it’s true. Six trillion trillion kg of planet under our feet make sure of it.

But not elsewhere. On the Moon, the same water “weighs” a sixth as much. A human being “weighs” 10 or 15 kilos. And in space? So little it isn’t worth talking about.

In a way, therefore, “weight” is context-dependent. One could almost say it’s subjective.

I know, I know. “Subjective” doesn’t mean that.

But what I’m trying to do here is lead up to the idea that for us humans, weight is about more than just a collection of molecules. How we feel, what we know, what we don’t – all these can imbue objects with a quality which makes them heavier or lighter, even when gravity stays at 1G.

Lift your work bag on two successive days, with the same contents, and it’ll feel different. A meeting you dread or a lunch you’ll love? A task that counts or drudgery that doesn’t? One day: light. The next: leaden.

But sometimes extra weight isn’t a burden. It’s a sign of how much something matters.

For most of us, there are things which define who we are. There are people, of course, thank goodness: those we love, those who love us. But there are things we do. Actions, activities, obsessions. The things which – if they were taken away from us – would leave us only partially there. Robbed. Even bereft.

I know what these are for me, because I spent years without them. No-one’s fault but my own. They weren’t taken away; I let them slip away from me. Told myself I was too busy. Family, work, no time for anything else.

And I paid. I became a smaller, sadder, sorrier person. More tired. More worn. Worst of all, someone with less of myself to give to others.

One is music. Long-term readers will recall I’m a piano player (never a pianist – nowhere near good enough to say that). I didn’t play for years. I don’t play every day now – but most days I do, and I know that I’m the better for having it back in my life.

The other, though, is capoeira. A martial art suffused with music. Born in Brazil, now worldwide. I first tried it almost 25 years ago. Then I played, solidly, for up to five or six hours a week, for several years around the year 2000. I loved it. It fed me. The physicality, the flexibility, the sense of energy and community and communication. Like nothing on earth. I took gradings. Became a senior student, with a blue belt.

Then, for years, I let it slip. Life. Work. Excuses.

Then, after we moved out of London, I discovered our new home had its own capoeira school, Brazilarte. I started training in 2019. Mestre Biscuim and Contra-mestra Sininha, its founders, became friends. They became family. And through the mad months of Covid, capoeira helped keep me sane. Kept me breathing.

In the two years I trained with Brazilarte – not always regularly, as work and family crises sometimes got in the way – I never wore a belt. It didn’t feel right, wearing one from so long ago. And thanks to the pandemic, there was no chance for a batizado (what we call a grading; literally, a “baptism”) at which I could earn one anew.

Not till last November. The Brazilarte Batizado was a celebration: of capoeira, of survival, of community. It was wonderful.

And at the end, Sininha tied this round my waist. A mark of family. Of belonging. Of faith and love. Of my return to capoeira as though I’d never left. Even of a kind of forgiveness for the times I’d let myself walk away.

And of an obligation – it being an instructor’s belt – to share the love with whoever I could.

And just for a moment, my knees sagged. My mind knew the belt massed a couple of hundred grams. My soul knew it weighed far, far more.

Today’s the first training session of 2022. This evening I hope I’ll feel my belt’s true weight. It may not be what I deserve. But I know it’s what I need.

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2021v7, Friday: Finding family.

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Why I welcome the fact that I ache. And a quick link to a writeup of one of the most interesting Supreme Court cases around: Lloyd v Google.

Short thought: “I ache, therefore I am,” as Marvin once put it. “Or perhaps I am, therefore I ache.”

I ache. And I’m happy that I do. Because it’s 48 hours or so since I went back to capoeira for the first time in months.

It’s not the exercise that I’ve missed – from time to time I’ve stopped mid-run and trained a little, solo, in the park.

No. It’s that even for an introvert like me, the community of training with others in this most organic and communicative of martial arts has been a painful thing to lose. That feeling as your mind, soul and body ease into the ginga, the music wraps itself around you, and techniques start to flow the one into the next. As you smile, full of malandro, at the person you’re playing with. As the physical conversation between you ducks and weaves, slow, fast, slow.

God, it’s glorious. Although God, it hurts a couple of days after. I’m 50. I don’t bend as well as once I did.

But every ache is a benção, a blessing.

Because I’m back with family. Or rather, back with one of them.

Here’s the thing. We all have multiple families, which sometimes – but not always – overlap. If we’re fortunate (and my heart breaks for all those for whom this is tragically, painfully, sometimes dangerously not true) our first is with blood.

Another comes from the person we choose to bond our life with: spouse, partner, name them what you will. (My good fortune on this front is boundless; a wife and daughter who are both beyond compare.)

And then there are all the other communities which you find. Or which find you. Some of which will themselves wrap you in love and care, and so will become found families in themselves.

For all but the most wholly solitary among us, these multiple families are the earth from which our lifelong learning, growth, evolution, even our ongoing ability to be human, springs.

My capoeira family is one such. I’m blessed to have so many families. Blessed.

So, yes. I ache. Therefore, I am. Thank goodness.

Someone is right on the internet: Despite my best intentions, I wholly failed to make time to watch the submissions in Lloyd v Google, which sees the Supreme Court wrestle with some fundamental ideas in privacy and data protection.

I’ll try to make the time, then I’ll probably write something. (A radical idea: digest the source material before opining. Good lord.) As usual, the SC has the video of the hearing up on its website at the above link. Open justice for the win.

In the meantime, the UKSC Blog does a great job of summarising the submissions: a preview here, then a rundown of Day 1 and Day 2.

If privacy is at all important to you, and goodness knows it ought to be – it (along with worker status) seems to me to be the critical question of how individual rights interact with contract law and business for the next few years – the upsums richly repay a read.

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Being a father without a father: the pleasure and pain of Father’s Day.

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Sussex, late May, 2014.

Father’s Day is bittersweet.

Sweet, because my wife and daughter are blessings past compare, proof if any were needed that God, fate or the universe can forgive our failings and give us a life far better than we deserve.

And bitter because I no longer have a father to celebrate.

I lost him on 27 September 2014. I remember our last day together just the two of us, in late May that year: as we trod the West Sussex countryside, the limp from his 2012 stroke present but no longer dominant, talking and walking as we had so many times, ending on a bench outside his village’s church as we watched the birds swoop overhead. I remember our last phone call a few days before it happened, his voice a whisper, drained as he was by six weeks of radiotherapy. I remember his funeral in the cathedral in Winchester, whose bishop he’d been for 15 years, struggling to keep my voice clear and level as I read from the book of Ephesians (the end of Chapter 3 and the start of Chapter 4).

Almost six years on, the loss has long passed into normality. And aside from an ache that he never got to see his grand-daughter grow into the amazing person she’s becoming, mostly it doesn’t hurt too bad.

But one thing still stabs home. His death came just as I was considering – very late in life – becoming a lawyer. It was four months later that I started studying law. Two years later I started bar school. Four years later I became a pupil at Outer Temple. And five years later that I became a tenant.

And it hurts that he wasn’t a part of that decision. Because before every one of my significant, life-changing career calls till then, I’d always sought him out. And we’d walked. And talked. And asked and answered questions. And pondered in silence, the only sound our footfalls and nature around us. It was a part of my process. And it was gone.

He’d have loved the vicarious thrill of me becoming a barrister. Every millimetre of it, through GDL, BPTC, pupillage and tenancy. He’d have found it fascinating. Asked thoughtful questions. Wanted genuinely to understand the how and the why. And, I can’t but think, that having him do so would probably would have made me a better lawyer.

Perhaps that’s why, in fact, I didn’t really talk about the experience with my family (other than my wife and daughter, of course), until the BPTC results came through and I knew pupillage lay ahead. The thought of doing so without my dad being there was just – wrong, somehow.

So here I am. I made it. I love it. But every so often, as I encounter some abstruse but fascinating legal point and my face breaks into a smile as I ponder the sheer beauty of the reasoning around it, just for a split second, I think: you know who’d have loved to talk this one through? And the smile flickers.

Still, in some ways he’s at my shoulder. If I consider an argument that isn’t properly grounded, or a tactic that isn’t honourable, I can almost hear him gently asking me why I’m going that way. Not always, but sometimes. And that voice is usually right. And takes me back to that bit of Ephesians, which tells us to “live a life worthy of the calling you have received”. Yes, I know it’s talking about another kind of calling altogether. But still, it rings true.

So here’s to you, my father. Rest in peace. Rise in glory. Be blessed. I know I am.