The Art of Leaving

by Madeleine Kando

My solution to being depressed as a teenager was to leave. I LOVED leaving. After high school I left for England for a year. But the therapeutic value of leaving didn’t last, maybe because London was so foggy and grey. I applied my leaving strategy to leaving England for sunny Spain.

Leaving is fine, but where you arrive has an influence on how successful leaving will be. Spain wasn’t the Promised Land for me. I didn’t identify with the Mediterranean mentality. As grey and foggy London was, it was a WASP country. And whether I liked it or not, the WASP culture had seeped into my pores.

Which made me recoil when the caballeros in Spain did everything they could to breach my ‘personal space’. Northern Europeans consider personal space as sacred. On the London subway, an unspoken rule is to sit as far way from other passengers as open seats will allow. In Spain, there was always a muchacho rubbing against you, even if half the compartment was empty.

I spent a lot of time with a rolled up newspaper in my hand, whacking Spaniards trying to invade my personal space.

I was tired of whacking, so I went back to Holland. It is as rainy and grey as England, but at least it has a WASP culture. Going back home felt like I had entered a cul-de-sac. ‘Now what’ I asked my depressed self.

It was time to face my demons, so I went to see a psychiatrist. No whacking necessary here. The therapist was unobtrusive, to the point of being shy. He was a small person, making himself even smaller by crossing his legs and hunching over during our sessions. I had a desire to take care of him, not the other way around. Read more...

POWER

by Madeleine Kando

This essay is based on Bertrand Russell’s 'Power, A New Social Analysis'. The book is very much a product of its time; a time when war with Germany was about to begin. The Western world was divided between democracies and countries led by successful revolutionary dictators. 

What is power? Is it good or bad? Or is it neutral, like a hammer when you need to put a nail in a wall? The origin of the word ‘power’ comes from the Latin word ‘potere’, which means ‘to be able’. In French, the word ‘pouvoir’ means both  ‘power’ and ‘to be able to’.

Let’s face it, without power, nothing would get done. My husband needs muscle power to mow the lawn. I need fine-motor power to move my fingers on the keyboard.

But that kind of power is self-contained; it’s neutral. The problem begins when someone seeks to exert power over others or other beings. Power over humans, non-humans, land, and other resources. There is a difference between the amount of power you need to have enough to eat and pay for a roof over your head, and the kind of power that has caused problems for our species ever since we grew frontal lobes.

There are people who crave power more than others. I myself want power over my cat. I won’t let her pee wherever she likes, and when I was a young mother, I had power over my children. I told them when to go to bed, what time to get up, etc. My husband was a CFO and had decision-making power over a small staff. We all have some degree of power, if only to control our own thoughts.

But that kind of power is barely worth the name. It is the power of men that leads nations that we should be worried about. The Stalins, the Hitlers, and the Putins of the world.

According to the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell, the desire for power is one of the strongest human motives. ‘Power is a fundamental concept in Social Science, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics. Imagination is the goad that forces human beings into restless exertion after their primary needs have been satisfied.’

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My Quest for Sleep

By Madeleine Kando

I am not a good sleeper. It is something I inherited from my grandmother. It skipped a generation, since my mother sleeps like a log as soon as she hits the horizontal plane, but reared its ugly head when I was born.

There is nowhere to go lying on your back, waiting for sleep. I could spend time in my toes or elbows but there is not much going on there, except the occasional itches or twitches.

My head is where things happen, mostly beyond my control. I approach with apprehension; a sign reads, ‘organizing strictly prohibited.’

As I walk about in that chaotic place, I stub my toes against remnants of my day scattered on the floor. Did I turn the stove off? Did I put the leftover food in the fridge? Did I close my car windows? Usually, those nasty little buggers cross my mental path when I am almost asleep, and with a jolt, I am wide awake again, heart pounding. I am back to square one.

Insomniacs are advised to establish what is known as sleep hygiene. You couldn’t come up with a more distasteful term if you tried.

To develop sleep hygiene, experts provide a lengthy list of dos and don’ts, which carries the risk of investing half your evening preparing for something that might never materialize.

It is recommended that you exercise for half an hour, then take a warm bath or shower, and top that off with relaxation exercises for another 30 minutes to an hour. Unfortunately, the don’ts list includes all of the things that I really like: drinking alcohol, watching a whodunit movie that gets my heart rate up and texting about not being able to sleep.

To make up for that, I rely on a bag full of paraphernalia that includes earplugs, a face mask, soft music, a soft pillow, scented candles, etc. I watch psychedelic movies that are supposed to put me in a trance, and if you promise not to laugh, I will divulge my secret ingredient: I knit entire sweaters in my head before I am able to fall asleep. If you knew how many sweaters I knitted, you would be proud of me. Some with rainbow stripes, some dull grey, others with a star shape. On good nights, I fall asleep in the 4th or 5th row. Other nights, my sweater looks more like a 10-foot-long scarf before I give up and throw the whole scarf in my mental trash.

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