Tag: #adversity

Correspondence

This morning C and I went #bellringing as usual.  Just the 2 of us keeping things going during lockdown, making a noise and making sure the community doesn’t forget the church is there and the church doesn’t forget the bellringers are there.

When we arrived, we signed in as usual and there was an A4 enveloped waiting for us address to the Cathedral Bellringers, with a stamp on, so we know if wasn’t from the office.  They’d usually email or phone me anyway.

First thoughts turn to it being a complaint.  But about what?  We’re only #bellringing for about 15 minutes, only 2 bells and only on a Sunday morning.

This particular letter had a covering letter and a covering, covering letter.  It turns out that there’s someone from Berkshire who has severe autism, has written to us asking us to ring a full peal when lockdown ends.  From the covering covering letter, which is from their parents, it seems that this person has been researching #bellringing, listening to #bellringing at churches that are local to them, and has even been looking around complib, the compositions library to find something suitable.  Presumably the mathematics of it appeals to them.

The request is well worded and uses the correct terminology, although there are several things wrong with what they are actually asking us to do e.g., ring a full peal, un-muffled (both correct terminology), and the composition requested is 5040 Grandsire Triples composed by Alan S Burbidge (correct).  Apparently, Burbidge’s composition is one of the trickier ones.  The request has asked us to ring it on bells 2-9 of our 12 which would sound horrid. Not least to say that to ring a full peal will take some time to build up to, given that ringers haven’t been active for a year, we’ll need to build up some muscle tone and calluses again.

From the look of the letters, they appear to be photocopies, and given that its not from a local address, I’m assuming that other towers would have received something similar.  It must have cost a small fortune in postage stamps.

Whilst there are many things that we cannot accommodate with the request, I have to say, that it was a lovely surprise receiving a request, in writing, the good old-fashioned way, asking for bells to be rung, rather than silenced.

I wonder how many other towers received a copy of the same letter?

Sitting with adversity

I’ve just completed a free, online 6 week course in Demystifying Mindfulness course via Future Learn (www.furturelearn.com).  The course covered the “science of mindfulness, how it works and why from a political, psychological and philosophical perspective”.  Throughout the course were a series of Mindfulness Labs, opportunities to practice a meditation technique. Something not so long ago I would have said was nonsense. One of the ones that resonated with me most was the one on Sitting with Adversity.

Usually throughout a meditation the participant is encouraged to let go of thoughts and feelings and concentrate on breath or sounds.  In this particular one though we were actively encouraged to invite a difficult situation, thought or feeling and to acknowledge its existence, to sit alongside it, before considering “each in breath a new beginning and each out breath a letting go”.

So many situations to choose from. I may well have to come back to this meditation several times to get through them all.  However, at the end of the 15 minutes or so, I felt much calmer about the situation I had been thinking about.  I chose to lessen its hold over me and consider what was within my personal means of being able to do about it.  In the end, I chose to let it be what it will be.

Even coming to terms with that simple statement of letting something be what it will be and making a conscious decision to not let it affect me in the way it had been, was enough to lighten to load.

I have done several short courses via Future Learn and would thoroughly recommend it as a way of broadening horizons and dipping into something before deciding whether or not its something you want to pursue further.