Discombobulated in the City.
Image credit: iStock Athens
The light has changed now its Autumn; the sun is lower with more shadows. The whole quality of light shifting from summer to autumn; this change always enchanted me. Years ago, at university I would spend hours in the black box theatre in North London trying to recreate this light, up and down ladders hauling the heavy black lamps, using gauze and stencils to diffuse the light to create this quality.
There is a gentle cooling breeze as it moves through the trees and leaves, rasping and rattling. The dog stops and sniffs here and there as I take him for his evening walk. I can see the sweeping expansive basin rising into Parnitha, one of the four mountains that surround the city of Athens and the sprawling metropolitan area. These mountains at times protective, awe-inspiring, at other moments I feel suffocated by their presence like a wall looming over me.
I haven’t felt the exhale of Autumn for a long time after living near the equator for so many years. Although I thrive in hot clients, Autumn was my favourite season, that liminal space. Whilst I loved the heat, Summer seemed tinged with disappointment in my younger years. It had such high expectations, like a haughty spoiled child with insatiable demands that we enjoy ourselves endlessly. My life never quite lived up to its lofty expectations. It was never fun enough; I never had quite the right outfits, never hung out with quite the right people. Maybe that’s why I loved Singapore so much, no seasons, just never-ending heat, but without the expectations and demands of a finite summer.
When I lived in London I always remember Autumn arriving, soothing us, bathing the city in its golden light, like we were being wrapped in soft blankets, all sense of expectation gone with the last of the summer sun. As the nights drew in and the air sharpened with cold breezes from the River Thames, the expectation turned to a feeling of mystery filled with spontaneity. Long nights dancing, the cold air stinging my face after hot and sweaty clubs, theatre nights wrapped up and warm, long evening conversations that went too deep for summer frivolities. And somehow the history of bygone eras always seemed to seep through in these colder seasons, I imagined Victorian London easily on these nights.
Winter came quickly after Autumn in Athens though, too quickly. I wanted to languish in those Autumnal days, that space in between. It was surprisingly harsh, dark mornings and cold rain reminded me why I dislike living further from the equator. I kept having to remind my children it would be cold outside, they only knew that warm tropical rain, where we splashed our way down the street in shorts and flip flops to 7-11 to buy ice cold coconut water in the warm humid rains, cracks of thunder so violent you thought the earth would break. .
But every few days the weather would brighten to brilliant Greek blue skies in-between the clouds and the rain and wind would stop momentarily. We didn’t have those endless days of heavy, low hanging, slate grey clouds of countries further north. Then the floods arrived, gushing down steep streets, running off all the surrounding mountains.. Potholes and junctions deep with water, homes flooded in some neighborhoods and electricity cut. It was the same amount of rain received in 24 hours, that we would receive in just one hour in South East Asia. But this dry parched land, long neglected by state is overwhelmed easily.
iStock Athens cityscape
This sadness inside me is stubborn and won’t leave just yet. Leaving a place or person you love is a horrible deep pain. That pain doesn’t subside easily. Some days I wonder if I really have the resolve to do this. I want my old life back, but there is no going back. That life is dissolved; it no longer exists. Our apartment rented out to a new family, my kids places at schools taken, my car sold to a new owner driving it about the city now, my presence in the myriads of places I used to frequent gone. Perhaps imprints of energetic presence left here and there. I wonder if the aunties at my favourite noodle stall notice I haven’t been for a while. Probably not, the international community comes and goes in these places. No matter that I had been going there for a decade. If I close my eyes I can drive or walk around the city and remember all the short cuts, all the places I would park, the people in the stores, the accents, clipped and melodic mix of Malay, Hokkien, Tamil and English, the smells of frangipaini, the calls of the Koel bird, the electronic chirrup of the pedestrian crossing with its rapid tik-tik-tik-tik, the shopping malls with their distinctive scent, and gargantuan underground carparks, the old aunties pushing the cleaning carts in and out of the restrooms, the endless pick up trucks filled with migrant workers from Bangladesh. Yes I can quite easily traverse the entire city in my mind, some days I do just for fun, I’m afraid I might forget otherwise.
Paradoxically in many ways Greece was my first real feeling of home. When I think back and reflect on what home felt like as a child. I spent my early childhood years, after leaving Canada, in Wales with my mother. It was a cold, desolate and melancholy place for me. Of course, I had happy days and times, but the overriding feeling for me, was that I wanted to escape. It didn’t ‘feel’ like home, even though we had a physical home there, I knew one day for certain I would leave immediately.
When I arrived in Greece for holidays, or a short spell of living here, it felt like home instantly. The hot dry heat, the smells, the sounds, the food, even the discombobulation of the place felt comforting. A deep sense of safety, the feeling of being loved and belonging amongst my family. But coming back now, I don’t feel much sense of home or belonging, I feel stuck, like I want to move about the city invisible.
This is a place that has no single answer to any question. It is a place defined by paradox. The fierce exclamations of a nation that prides itself in freedom or death, but also a nation shackled by its own chaos and disorganisation, with a stifling suffocation from heavy state control at times. The state wields the sword of bureaucracy with endless stamps and obscure departments to navigate, that no one seems to really know what they do, ask and you are met with a shrug. This form of bureaucratical control takes your most precious commodity, time. This lack of trust between state and people is palpable. But it is has also created a kind of magic too, a deep currency of human connection, the life blood of this country. Whilst there is nepotism and the ‘who you know’ circuits, there is also a deep humanness and heartfelt desire to help one another, often expecting nothing in return. It is a place you must develop a deep sense of faith that somehow everything works out, albeit often excruciatingly slowly and not in the way you might expect.
This land sits a such a complex point geographically and culturally, part European, part Balkan, our ties with our orthodox brothers and sisters across Russia and Eastern Europe. Influenced by hundreds of years of Ottoman occupation, and before that Byzantine culture. The tectonic plates beneath us colliding between the Europe and Africa. No, it’s not an easy place to define, that friction is felt daily which can leave one feeling constant frustration.
“Greece is not a country one can understand immediately. You must live it, breathe it, suffer it.” Jacques Lacarrière.
Previously I had lived in places with heavy state control, but we traded that for efficiency and organization, a free market with minimal oversight at a daily level. Nothing was nuanced, everything was consistently applied, no one crossed the red line. The biggest reward? The gift of time. Whether you liked it not, you could see how it benefited the harmony of society. The citizens follow the laws, and the state delivers the results. Whilst there are people unhappy with the system, and undoubtably people who have indeed suffered at the hands of these regimes, overall, there is a trust built through this consistency and sense of fairness between state and people.
‘Corruption erodes trust, and without trust, no system can function effectively.”
Lee Kuan Yew
But as I lived longer in these places I noticed something pernicious creeping in too, everywhere I looked people were glued to their phones increasingly, more so than in other places I traveled to. People barely seemed to look each other in the eye or even greet each other anymore. And whilst these lands are places where many exchanges are fast and transactional, there was an imperceptible shift, I saw less people smiling or laughing, everything was done online, fast efficient with little human contact. After covid more businesses closed and the energy felt a beat off, a slow sense of dehumanization. But the lure of organization and comfort is seductive, it offers you a type of freedom. In structure we find freedom always.
“Freedom can only exist in an ordered state.”
Lee Kuan Yew
I find myself continuously asked, ‘why did you move here?’ A perfectly acceptable question, but one which I really have no clear answer. There was no single reason, we didn’t have to move, which makes the move all the harder. I consented to leave a life I loved. I stop trying to explain. I see people’s attention drift off when I cannot supply them with an easy palatable explanation. I choose to walk away from a community, a part of the world I have a deep energetic connection to, to build something different, something not yet in existence,, something I am not even sure of.
‘..Its like walking yourself backwards through all the choices you’ve ever made, carrying on further and further into the past and finally realising that personal decisions only ever played a partial role in configuring a course through through life. The rest was determined by circumstance and serendipity; by the combined decisions of family and ancestors that brought you to that particular point in time, by remote events you had no control over but that helped sculpt the context of your options and by an unfathomable number of people whose paths run parallel to yours. ‘
Julian Hoffman, Lifelines - Searching for home in the mountains of Greece.(pg 8)
Finally, much later than I expect we reach spring. It is not a foregone conclusion though. It drifts in and out tantalizing me with its softer air and brighter mornings and then it turns cold, windy and wet in a moment again. Around orthodox easter the days finally lengthen from morning until evening. The birds in a constant playful chatter, fluttering and swooping like children playing. As we drive down to the southern tip of the mainland the vegetation is so much lusher than I have ever seen, a mix of olive groves, pine trees, and conifers. The grass is long and deep it reminds me of soft abundant English grass. The flowers are like an explosion in my heart, overgrown grass verges spilling over with wildflowers, yellows, pinks, purples, fiery red of poppies and the strong smells of herbs and oranges. Some of the fields almost look like meadows you might find in alpine landscapes, especially with the steep jagged peaks rising sharply behind, with snow-capped tips, it’s intoxicating. We walk around ruined castles on the sea, and climb through steep stone villages, the air still sharp, the sun coming in and out. The land that pushes me to my edge and then rewards me constantly with such rich and pure beauty. With its harsh sharp edges and deep warmth and love.
Photo taken by me. Peloponnese, Monemvasia.
I somehow make it through the winter in this discombobulated city where everything feels upside down, where no-one plans and everything is last minute. It often felt like I was moving through a surrealist painting where nothing seemed connected, random groups of people thrown together, endless tiny streets where parked cars are almost touching nose to bumper, driving through them I had the sense I was in never ending maze and might never escape. I find myself sometimes standing on a street corner where I have a vague and hazy memory from my past of being there before, I can’t quite place the time or person I was with. My past colliding with present, in random moments, much like the city itself, graffiti leaden walls next to ancient relics.
The physical and psychological strength needed to scale Everest, K2, Kanchenjunga, Lhotse and all those 8000 peaks, is something I have always been fascinated by and read about endlessly. Climbers repeatedly talk about the mountain striping you naked, you have to sit with yourself, all your fears, insecurities,, you cannot run or hide from anything. I almost hesitate to write this, as it sounds dramatic to compare myself to someone scaling Everest. I mean, I didn’t move to Siberia, or Mongolia to live in a yurt, or traverse the amazon, or sail across the Atlantic solo, people’s bravery astounds me and the strength of the human spirit. No, I just moved to Athens. But this was an internal mountain, one I had to scale I realise as I reach my one year anniversary in just two weeks. I can’t even articulate why it was such an initiation, logically on paper it does not make sense. But it was nevertheless an arduous climb, coming to this ancestral land stripped me right back to bare bones, many times I wanted to turn back, but the decent can be just as treacherous as the ascent. Often panic stricken I realise there is nowhere to run to, I have to fulfil this initiation in my ancestral land, whether I like it or not.
“Other countries may offer you discoveries in manners or lore or landscape; Greece offers you something harder — the discovery of yourself.”