Life in Motala

This fall my brain has been squirting out stress hormones at an alarming rate. My muscles are tired from trying to cope with it all. My arms shake, I burst into tears often and my blood pressure hits the floor. Noise is really difficult at the moment, especially cloppity ladies heels. Trying to keep a clear head through it is a great challenge. I can reduce it somewhat if I lift weights so that my muscles can burn it faster, but I have to be careful not to exercise too much, because then they get over-tired and it gets worse. I can only speculate, but I think the massive stress is due to grief and having 8-hour days. Grief needs space and time and I don’t have that, so my body is doing the slow version, struggling to do what has to be done, alongside what needs to be done.

On a completely other note, one pet peeve I have is the lack of cultural-neutral scientists. The latest idiocy I read about was research in kissing. According to the research the point of kissing is that men and women boost their immune systems by doing it. Adult kissing is a modern behaviour. Men and women líving as couples is a modern idea.

Kissing, like so many social behaviours, originates in the realm of child-care. The exchange that starts in the womb and carries on through breastfeeding, continues in kissing. It is not just about the immune system, it is about getting food and triggering protective behaviour in the adult. Adult primates kiss each other after aggression, behaviour often called appeasment - a fancy word for role-playing I’m-a-harmless-baby, which hopefully triggers a I-will-protect-you response.

On my father’s side of the family, who lived more or less the same way since Viking times until two generations ago, kissing was something that only happened in private and adults kissed very seldom. Small children got tita or tuta - words for kissing and rubbing noses. Rubbing noses is something that has really fallen out of fashion. It is a shame, because it is really nice.

Jane Goodall kissing a primate. Please "love" me! Great body language.

Taking a walk along the canal during a break at work. The canal boats are laid up for winter.

Board game season again…

Ingrid excited about Halloween. She’s off to a party. Only a few Swedish kids go trick-or-treating. If they do, they hand over small painted cards in exchange for the candy.

If we are given the Western baby treatment, and separated from our mothers at birth, one part of our brain becomes convinced that life is elsewhere. Despite this, every now and then I get to feel complete. Those moments in time sing with a resonance that humble my darting thoughts on other days, when I think a project or a smart idea or any other search for ‘paradise’, is going to make an emotional difference. 

When I am not in the happy place of zero (mind)contact with the past and future, I think about how we interpret ourselves. Sensations and emotions arise, and we struggle to label them according to what we have learned. Our culture teaches us a lot of unproductive and stupid ways of interpreting ourselves, so the word struggle really fits.

I used to think positive thinking was sort of lame because emotions don’t originate in the conscious mind. But digging deeper I see that it might help by stopping you from making things worse than they are. The reason for this is that people often think they are worse off than they really are, i.e. they have negative interpretations of their emotions.

If you want to try positive thinking, a big tip is DON’T USE PRONOUNS. Your brain doesn’t understand them. Don’t say stuff like "I am a secure and happy person" while looking in the mirror. You lost your brain’s interest with the first word. Instead say "Excited" in a clear voice when you want to re-interpret jumpy emotions or "Run" when you find yourself losing your cool. Your brain won’t get that you are the one who is doing the talking, and it will be thrilled at some guidance that is aligned to what is really going on.

A big problem here though is Freud. (You often hear that the biggest opposition to a biological view of humans is religion, but I think Mr Vienna with the notebook might be a much bigger problem.) When my thoughts make a negative interpretation of my emotions I often find Freud’s pandora box in the background. His concepts like ’drives’ are pretty scary.

Thank goodness for the moments of eternity, of feeling at one with the world.

Epsom, famous for its salt, is about an hour south of London. We stayed both at pretty garden bed&breakfast (complete with a dog called Jasper) and with friends.

Part of the garden at Hampton Court Palace (which I last saw when I was 12):

Taking it easy at a pub by the Thames

Medevi Brunn just 10 minutes north of Motala is the site of Scandinavia’s oldest spa. People have been coming to drink the water from the natural springs there for thousands of years. It is full of minerals and flows from the south towards the north, which is supposed to make it extra special. Countless people have lost weight here, drinking water, eating porridge and taking walks. We drank the water and tried out the oldest bowling hall in Sweden.

Spent the weekend at a friend’s cottage while Ingrid went to visit her dad. Spent hours looking for mushrooms, taught Lucky how to eat blueberries off the bushes, found moose droppings, got temporarily lost, went skinny dipping and had a long sauna. Life in the country doesn’t get any better!

The country roads feel unsafe when there is a lot of traffic, so mostly we cycle inside the town. Today we went down to Vinnerstad, to where the speed limit changes to 90 km, turned and made a wide circle back, about 15 k.

Crossing the old bridge over Strömmen (the river) back into Motala

Today the canal was full of coloured balls, after a "duck" race.

I love August. Always great weather and fun things to do. And my birthday! The best thing about getting older is getting better at making memories. 

We had a great party! Lots of food and fun and we finished off with a Metallica Guitar Hero battle.

I won the lottery again for crayfishing in Boren! It was a fantastic night, warm with no wind. So fun! We caught 103!! Here we are getting the boats ready to go out at 6 in the evening. Later at midnight we picked up the traps.

This is Motala’s famous (well, in the 40’s anyway) beach, four km long! The south end is shallow, but farther north on the beach it gets deep with a great sandy bottom. I snorkle a little, don’t see any fish but I like looking at the water.

Vätterviksbadet is 15 minutes south of Motala. The water doesn’t look that great when you step in, but if you wade out a bit it gets deep with hard packed sandy bottom. It is an open spot, so it feels a little like being at the seaside.

Just a few minutes farther south lies Vadstena, perfect for an ice-cream and a stroll. Vadstena is so very, very, pretty, we could walk around there all day.

August and the sun came back with a vengence. Over 25 degrees and the only place to be is in the water. We’ve been testing lots of swimming places- Twenty minutes north of Motala on RV 50 lies Hargebaden, which combines swimming in Vättern with a warmed up pool and slide. Fun!

My 29th house move and Ingrid’s 4th! Our new home is like a country house, a little battered, lots of fruit trees and quiet corners in the garden, but only 3 blocks away from the center of town. The kitchen has that great let’s have some red wine and enjoy this cooking-feeling.  

Sunday had sunny weather, so we spent it swimming at MTSS (ice cold water) and cycling down and around the south part of town.

Watching the bridges go up for the boats is fun. It is amazing to see huge slabs of concrete rise into the air.

After two short weeks of warm weather we went back to dreary, cold "English weather". Luckily the lake had warmed up a little so now we can swim at our favourite spot by the marina. We try to swim every day, but some days it is just too cold.

Thankfully ice-cream tastes good even when it is raining. Here we are having lunch at Två små hus, the milkshakes are the starter.