11: madiklos boards a plane

New ambitions for the perenially contented – December 2022

My darling child,

I keep wondering where you and I were sitting the moment my life changed. Was it a quiet early morning in Paros, you reading beside me with your book held up in the air over your face, me eating my first-ever donut peach and anticipating my third swim in the lake-like sea?

Was it on the rocks near the harbour in Naxos at sunset, sharing a box of soggy chips, drinking our beers and being amused by the marbled cat that picked its way across boulders to lie on the marbled rock that matched its fur.

Marbled cat on marbled rock

‘Why can’t I do this?’ I wondered aloud.

‘Do what?’ you asked.

‘Be here. Work here. I can do what I do from anywhere. Why can’t I do it from here?’

‘Why can’t you?’ you asked.

Having to say out loud why I couldn’t made me realise I could.

This is the art of good listening: responding to a statement with a pointed question, so that the speaker can work through something out loud and discover the kinks in their thinking.

You’ll make an excellent therapist.

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My adult gap year starts in March.

I’m leaving the flat in your hands. I’m packing up hundreds of my unshelved books and taking them to Bronwyn to look after and read while I’m gone. I’m giving up my gym membership, swopping the beloved lap pool and our beloved Katy-yoga-teacher for foreign tramping as next year’s movement of choice. I’m leaving my dictionaries, my systems, my comfortable little habits, my routines, my people, my pottery classes with the Useless Assholes, my tea exactly like I want it.

I’m doing a thing I didn’t think was either financially or practically possible.

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Goal setting has always been fuzzy for me; a process of elimination rather than acquisition. I’ve always known what I don’t want more than what I do want. No fighting in my home. No resentment and simmering indignation and unspoken hurt. No violence. NONE. Which means no violence in speech.

No mess and no dirt and no accumulations of decades of dust. No bright lights. No agglomerations of unnecessary things. No actions inconsistent with my core self for the sake of pleasing others.

When I was a teenager, I fell in with people older than me. The secret lives of queer and anti-racist whites were revealed to me; other modes of thinking and being. In adulthood, whenever I heard people discussing the dreams they’d had as young people and how they’d achieved or not achieved them, I remembered that for me success was always a mood, never a thing or a position or a title.

I thought about dark nights in quiet Sunnyside, in small flats, in rooms full of people who could be arrested at any moment by the stupid police following the stupid rules of the stupid elite for being queer or black.

The stupid police were bloody-well everywhere, like an ant infestation.

I thought of illegal music and illegal books passed around surreptitiously like the illegal substances they were.

A certain kind of person, a sense of community forged against convention, soft lighting, art, music, books, and unwavering rebellion against orthodoxy are what filled the frames of the dreams for my future.

Mostly, those were all I wanted and ­– more than mostly ­– those are what I got.

But in every single journal of mine there is some form of lamentation over the fact that I have no time to write the things I want to write. In 2016 or thereabouts, I realised that I was becoming bitter. Women with no need for employment and all the time in the world to write what they wanted to because they had rich husbands became a source of resentment for me.

I was turning into a bitch in my head. A kind of violence lived there. I didn’t like myself.

I decided to stop dreaming about being the kind of person who could take months off from earning money to write a book. It was turning me into someone who started resenting other people for just living the lives they happened to have.

Every month, I work to pay the bills and there is nothing beyond that. No week or even month in which I can dedicate myself to creative pursuits that require extended periods of concentration. Every book I’ve ever written has been squeezed in around single-parenting-on-a-meagre-freelance-income.

I can never take my eye off the work-that-pays to do the work-that-matters-most.

I love the work-that-pays and will never stop doing it. (In fact, that was another vague dream of mine: I didn’t want what my father had – a job he hated.) But I also have important unpaid work to accomplish that I cannot do it in the never-ending frenzy of a month-to-month existence.

In the year ahead, I will have opportunities to assess how I might make it possible to do this other work. With you and your friends covering the flat’s expenses on this side, and with my wonderful editing work providing an income, I will have a chance to try on new ways of thinking about what I do and how I do it.

Next year, Love Letter will become a record of my year of travelling beyond the parameters of the good life I have. It will become a travelogue. The reason Love Letter started – you going away – is going to be flipped.

Instead of being the one staying behind and writing letters, I’m going to be the one going away and sending letters home.

I can’t believe I formulated a dream sitting by the Mediterranean sea, and six months later, I bought an open-ended ticket to a new adventure.

I have, in a way, wrestled a small, black goat over a wall. I have, like Mia urged me to, ‘become the kind of person who goes to Greece’.

All the letters I wrote in the past six months moaning about how hard I’ve been working are now records of a plan I had and have executed.

It turns out that beyond fulfilling the vague dreams of disaffected youth, new dreams can be dreamt in late adulthood and they can be materialised through stubborn jaw-setting determination.

Of all the stories Ouma told me about her childhood, my absolute favourite one has always been the one about Madiklos.

Ouma’s two older brothers had to work in the fields in the holidays and one day the two younger sisters tagged along. Ouma and her sister annoyed the boys so much while they tried to work, that they decided they would send the girls home. The girls were very small, and the brothers knew they would get lost, so the boys put a mielie sack on the donkey Madiklos, put the sisters on his back, and tied their feet under Madiklos’s stomach using a long rope so that they wouldn’t fall off. Then they ordered Madiklos to go home.

By the time they reached the yard, the girls had sagged and shifted on that mielie sack to the extent that when your Oumagrootjie (your great-grandmother) heard Madiklos enter the yard, she went out to find her daughters hanging upside down under his stomach.

I loved that story so much – and Ouma always spoke about how much she adored Madiklos – that one year I asked Sam to draw me a picture of a girl on a donkey, which we framed and gave Ouma for Christmas.

Wendy asked last week how I’ve been and I said ‘Still working like a donkey’. I forgot, of course, that Wendy knows a lot more about donkeys than the average person. She wrote back. 'Because donkeys are so tough and resilient, you don’t know they’re sick until they’re really very sick.’

It was a small revelation. I’ve always been fascinated that I never seem to never get sick the way other people do. I go for years and years without so much as a sniffle. Then I crash. Hard. I get end-up-in-hospital sick once or twice in a decade.

I told Wendy she might have finally identified my spirit animal for me.

Then she wrote: ‘And just to add … donkeys are highly intelligent. Their stubbornness is completely misunderstood.  It’s an evolutionary instinct to stand back, weigh up, hold their ground, and then act – unlike skittish, nervy horses. Donkeys survive in the harshest environments. They’re amazing.’

I’m totally claiming the donkey as my spirit animal!

It took a lot of stubbornness to stick to my plan once I’d formulated it – was it at sunrise in Paros or at sunset on Naxos? – and I’m a little bit stunned that for the first time in my life I have had a clear goal about something I wanted rather than something I didn’t want. And I’ve made it happen.

Thanks for helping me see the unseeable.

All my love,

Kowski

PS: Before I head off though, I’m still doing my January Self-Reset, so that I can regroup after the last beyond-hectic stressful six months in which I made these plans.

There are two weeks left to become a founder member subscriber of Love Letter and do the course with me for free.

Right now, I’m more excited about Self-Reset than about getting on that plane. I REALLY need to remember who I am when I’m not working 12-hour days and seven-day weeks!