Danielle Shaw

‘Listen and act; only by doing will you learn if you are moving in the right direction. Release your worries and fears; study instead your progress. Work it for a reasonable amount of time, then let go. You don’t have to understand, manage, or control. Just be in the moment. Follow the signs. Everything changes; your worries and stresses won’t help you predict, force, or restrain change. Surrender. Tomorrow is already within you, let it burst forth and flower.’ Kiini Ibura Salaam

Yesterday I hit a wall. Okay, so the constant dropout of internet connect didn’t help my state of mind after almost nine hours of trying to make a few simple changes to my website, but still, I used that forbidden phrase more than anyone should in an entire lifetime… ‘I can’t.’

Luckily for me I have an incredibly patience man who also just happens to know almost everything about almost everything and so came to my aid. But not without me shouting and refusing and shedding a few tears in the process. And even after a quick fix on the things I’d spent most of my day trying to work out, one thing was very clear. The wall I had been banging my head against had wiped me out. Completely. And I couldn’t let that happen again. Even though I felt that I hadn’t moved forward because I hadn’t succeeded, this morning, with the above quote waiting for me in my inbox, I realised what I could change, and thus learn.

It’s true that I’m very likely to find more things that seem impossible for me to work out unassisted (probably tech issues), but I can use my time more efficiently moving forward. There are so many things on my ‘want and need to do for 2012’ list that I really have no excuse for not shuffling things around when something gets the better of me. Today I have allocated distinct time slots for the things on my this. Of course I’m not going to be completely strict to the minute, but it will give me an indication if something is going way beyond what it should, which might just highlight my need to put my hand up and ask for help. Might. Overall this should result in me still getting things done, less stress and ultimately avoid smashing full force into that wall.

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As the summer months approach, I’m usually more able to wake up early, kick start the day with the lighter days. This year, however, is disproving my theory.

Last night I had a conversation with my man about morning people vs night owls. After returning from a working trip in a different time zone, he seems to think that he’s naturally a morning person that has tried to have the best of both worlds. And me? I’ve always thought of myself as an owl, not so much because I dislike mornings, but because I find it so damn hard to wake up. “It’s because I dream so much!” Is that even a reason?

And so, this morning, after a very slow start and a mind begging to be let back into its own world of dreams, I got to thinking about the mechanics of the waking mind vs the art of dream construction.

There are so many dream dictionaries available, and yet every time I try to decipher my dreams from them, I get stuck. I mean, how can you understand the meaning of a dream that has characters and sub characters, plots and parallel universes, zombies and love, by a book that labels categories as simple as ‘black’ or ‘rat’? So maybe our dreams aren’t meant to be understood literally, but instead perhaps they are an extension of ourselves, and in the life of a creative, perhaps a valuable one.

You knew that though, right? But what if the space of sleep in as equally important as our waking space, in terms of our growth and creative development? Should then, we go to bigger lengths to experiment what ‘works best’ in enabling our potential through sleep and the art of dreams? And how can we use that part of us to better the waking self? To push our boundaries, to go beyond what it is that our open, conscious mind knows and somehow tap into what our subconscious, turned off self knows. Maybe if we listened, we’d find a place of harmony, where we wouldn’t separate the days and nights as separate entities of time, but rather as one continuous stream of being, simply in different stages. And if we can build on that idea, what does it then mean for the notion of ‘time’ and the approach we take to any given task with a designated timeframe? If, that is, our days are no longer separated by the rising and setting of the sun, but rather the progress we make on any one thread, idea, project, development.

I recently had a conversation in a dream that links directly into a body of work that I’m currently embarked on. And I took note. What I said in my dream was a solid explanation for the fundamentals of the work, and something I hadn’t voiced in my waking life.

Perhaps, then, we should take a bit more notice as to what goes on into our sleep, when all our rules and structures are broken down and we’re able to go somewhere that might actually help us reach a new level on waking. Worth a thought, at least?

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The rain in London has, for the past three days, been very English. With holes in my boots I’ve groggily stomped my way through unavoidable puddles and under drops that seemed to fall from every imaginable place.

On the second day, I was making my way over Tower Bridge, or trying to. If you know the far South steps of the bridge, you’ll know that they’re narrow. Solid wall on both sides, only room for one person going up, one person going down. I was then also wearing very, very stupid quarter length wellies, that, it turned out, rubbed at my carves like hungry mice.

Third step up, I tripped. The cameras in my bag broke my fall. I made a mental note to check them the second I got underground and tried to get up when I realised a man was fussing over me. Arms wide, mouth open. I wasn’t the only one stopping the step traffic. Embarrassed, I beamed a smile at his gawk and hurried to my feet and round the corner.

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Her shiny black armour tunnels through the rain. Wiry arms stretch and bow to keep her pushing forward. Pushing, for me. The smeared clouds run dry, the landscape shifts from concrete to green. The blur of nature curls and whispers, not wanting to breathe our poison. Still she clicks, insides churning, my foot tickling her belly. Laughter growls as the sun dips behind the fast approaching straight. Still, she presses. She knows that if she stops now, I’ll break. Snap like the insignificant twigs beneath us, like the loose pebbles discarded by the tarmac. Yes, if she stumbles, I fall. Home she purrs, deep in her throat. Home I echo. Knowing that this is it. The only place it exists. Just me and her; cocooned in her black painted cloak. Home.

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Yesterday I sat working, thinking more than writing, and as I looked up to my man, my mind drifted off… to his Christmas gift. It is, afterall, that time of year. Suddenly I found myself smiling like a ridiculous fool. The more I tried to stop myself from smiling, the more I smiled. Deep in concentration, I don’t think he even noticed, and yet I found myself interested in my reaction. Wondering why the corners of my mouth turned up, why the facial expression that we all know as a smile is, in fact, the way it is.

I broke his concentration. He believes it’s hardwired into us. I questioned out loud whether a child that grew in a society without smiles would still have the ability to do it themselves. If they never heard laughter, would they still laugh when something tickled them? Would it even be a tickle that would set it off?

Later in the evening we watched a programme that opened on a conversation in which one character complained how women always leave lights on. This made me laugh. And my partner? Silence. Now, was it just that I found this particular guy funny or was it that it simply applied to me? I could almost hear my dad, ‘why is it that our house is the only house on the whole street with every light on?! Do we really need them all on?’ Suffice to say my dad was blessed with three women in his house.

So this morning I couldn’t help but give ‘laughing’ a quick google. I found a few articles that quote Robert R. Provine, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. After numerous studies he concludes that it is, as my man so aptly put it, hardwired in us. He believes that laughing actually came before spoken language, and by several hundred years at that.

He goes on to say that laughter rarely has anything to do with humour. Believing that the feeling of togetherness, a sense of community, a joined feeling that connects us to people, is the reason for our laughter. And that of course would make sense for both my smiling and laughing attacks yesterday. Both very warming thoughts and yet neither even remotely funny.

As a writer, reader and a person who loves all things word related, I started to think about the idea of laughter as the first kind of human communication. To show something as funny we show characters laughing, and yet, what if instead they laughed at times of unity, hope and community growth. Would we find this odd, even though it seems that is where we get most of our smiles from in reality? I began to contemplate if there’s a way to incorporate this earliest form of language into literature, art, media. But without words? Is this possible? So far, I have no idea. But I am certainly going to work on the idea and see where the trail takes me. Afterall, it seems I owe it to my humanity. And evolution.

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