Dark

There are many reasons for us to feel dark after reading the novel of Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore. 

The book takes us to a fictional Shearwater Island near Antarctica, where royal penguins, humpback whales, seabirds, and seals are at the mercy of climate change, floods and bushfires. This remote island is also home to the world's largest collection of seeds, the United Nations' Shearwater Global Seed Vault. The idea is to save humankind, to outlast humanity, to live on into the future in the event that people should one day need to regrow from scratch the food supply that sustains us.

Then there are supernatural storms, breaking radio system and satellite internet. The miserable residents of Shearwater Island don't even have power to keep themselves warm, not to mention keeping the seeds safe.

If there is a raw lesson to learn from this captivating story, it's the chapter about wombats' fighting the natural disasters of bushfires. How do wombats deal with the challenges of climate change and bushfire? They make extensive burrow systems for shelter, food and even drinking water. During bushfires, they take their families underground, into the burrows. And then the mum and dad wombats stick their bums up into the burrow entrances to block the fire and ash from coming down. And their bums get burned, and sometimes they die. 

The dark bum story of wombat is one that shines in the dark.

Journey

It has been a short while since I finished reading the book of Edith Eger, an eminent psychologist and Holocaust survivor. One of the themes in her guide book, The Gift: 14 Lessons to Save Your Life, is to free ourselves from unresolved grief. 

Let the dead be dead, that is.  

The reason? Denying your grief won't help you heal – nor will it help to spend more time with the dead than you do with the living. The same goes for forgiveness. To forgive isn't to give someone permission to keep hurting you. The harm is already done. No one but you can heal the wound.

Edith Eger's lessons are great but a bit dark. To be honest, it might be a better idea to explore similar ideas in a more heartwarming way. That's how I jumped from Edith Eger's book to that written by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. The mysterious cafe in his novels is one tucked within a small back alley in Tokyo. Go there and find a certain chair, and you will be allowed the unique opportunity to travel back in time. 

The time you can spend in the past begins the moment the waitress has poured your coffee, and it ends just before the coffee gets cold. The more important rule – and lesson – is that nothing you do while in the journey back to the past will change the present. Isn't that exactly what Edith Eger means? 

Crisis

Crisis is a fear-provoking word that gives us jelly legs. Awful things happen, and they hurt like hell. But as long as we acknowledge what happened wasn't right and it hurt, as long as we convinced ourselves we can choose to respond to what had happened, there is a transition in every crisis.

In many ways, Kristin Hannah's novel Between Sisters explores how two estranged sisters reunited. The half-sisters were raised by an alcoholic mother who married repeatedly; they couldn't remember a man ever being around for longer than a carton of milk. 

The broken relationship between two sisters seemed to be a fact of life. They did not meet but talked on the phone. They would talk about the weather, as if their lives were connected by the thinnest of strands. Then, one of them would invariably "get another call" and got an excuse to hang up.

The younger sister was a single mother working to run a campground to raise her daughter. One day, she had the medical crisis after being told to have a nasty brain tumour. This is how the two sisters came together to work through the crisis. 

What a beautiful reminder that difficult times can be a catalyst to bring out the best in people. That's the healing power of a crisis.

Run

We become increasingly rule bound as we grow older. That's why you can't teach old dogs new tricks. To overcome the trait, we must unlearn what we know and start over. 

And I've noticed my running style isn't the right way to go. As I read more about the topic, I have (somewhat begrudgingly) accepted I'll need core strength training. When it comes to static stretching after a run, I have never paid attention to this simple but proven routine – not even close. I simply press the pause button for the Strava tracking app and that's it. 

Instead of simply running a bit farther, or faster for that matter, I have to prepare my body better. I learned a hard lesson during my run tonight, when I encountered two aggressive dogs in a dark alley. Overwhelmed by the fear, I simply ran faster as the dogs barked and chased me. When their owners thought the leash laws don't apply to their animals, I had an even more stupid concept that I should crank up the speed. The faster I ran, the more speedy the dogs were after me.

I ran and ran, working my ass off to save my ass.

Memoir

When Ashley Ford was four and living with her single mum, brother, and grandmother, she taught herself to lie awake until morning because she wanted the sunrise. We learned about her backyard story in her memoir, Somebody's Daughter.

Ashley had little idea of whereabouts of her absent father (who was jailed) and dared not ask her mother why her father was in prison (because he raped two women). She moved out from the home in Brooklyn, where her mother was living with her boyfriend. She didn't want to ruin their relationship but part of her wished to tell her, "Mama, I love you, but I'll work myself past the white meat, down to the bone, and fistfight every stranger I run across on the street before we live under the same roof again."

For many years, Ashley didn't write back to her father in prison. And she didn't live under her mother's roof for seven years. She went back seven years later, when her mother nearly died after a ruptured appendix. She wasn't ready to become an adult orphan. Out of the fear of becoming parentless, she looked at her mom's dark-gray face lit up by the dead-white hospital room and came close to remember her promise to visit her dad. 

The drive to the prison (about an hour and a half) was far shorter than the wait for her father to reunite with her – alas, that's thirteen years.

Ashley Ford's forthright disclosure is a powerful and heart-wrenching self-portrayal as a poor Black daughter in a fragmented family. If I'd learned anything from her, it was the lesson not to hide from our emotions, not to suppress them, and not to shy away from them.