The Return
Seeking perspective in a troubled world
The video…
I watched a video this week of a small girl in Gaza, crying. She was crying because her shoes were gone. Her parents had sold them. They were brand new, gifted to her by a woman I follow now and then on Instagram - @roseyingaza. She raises money through her channel and buys food and items and distributes them. In the video, the child is sitting on a chair, swinging her small dirty feet and softly crying. Rosie takes her aside and washes her feet and gives her a new pair of little pink crocs. The child is not smiling yet. You can see that she can’t yet fully trust that these shoes won’t also be sold or taken from her.
I’ve been back in Ireland two weeks. I’ve begun work on a yurt, and after three days my body is already resisting. The garden needs work, and I spent two days bringing my old farmhouse back into liveable standards — cleaning black mould from the walls, fixing things that have broken. I can’t afford heating oil right now, so the house is cold, damp, and is basically a drag on one’s mood just being here. I feel like I’ve landed back into an older version of myself, and I feel like throwing in the bag and giving all of this up.
I know how that sounds.
Holding two truths…
When I saw that video, it deflated all the heaviness I was feeling. Of course it did. How could it not? And yet to intellectually understand something and to actually change our emotions around it are two very different things. The sight of that girl moved me. It touched my heart. And then the moment passed, and I was still sitting in a cold house with black mould on the walls and a body that didn’t want to pick up another cloth, nor drive in my van to pick up a second bottle of cleaner.
This is not something I talk about very often, how perspective arrives, and then doesn’t fix anything. We treat it like it should be enough. Like once you’ve seen the harder thing, your own suffering should dissolve out of decency. But life doesn’t work like a perfect scale. Pain isn’t cancelled out by worse pain. You can hold someone else’s reality as true and still feel your own as true. The little girl’s feet were cold, worn, and dirty. So is my house. These are not the same thing. And they are also, in some strange way, both real.
I keep returning to the image of her on that chair. Not yet smiling. Not yet trusting that the good thing will stay. Those are tough lessons for a child of that age. Those are the lessons of an adult world. She shouldn’t have to experience the difficulty of believing that the good thing, when it comes, is actually going to stay.
The return…
Last week I wrote about the wonderful Irish character. And I meant it. The warmth of people here, the particular wit, the infinite jests and manifestations of our psyche, mixed with the weather and the troubled ancestral past we carry in our bones. Ireland is real and it is beautiful and it has shaped me in ways I am still discovering. Both things are true. The place contains multitudes and so do I.
But here is the strange and honest tension at the centre of my life right now, one I haven’t said aloud before: I have built a life that funds itself through physical labour in a cold country that drains me, in order to sustain a life in a warm country that energises me. The yurt work, the gardening, the farmhouse, the multiple trips to the hardware store, the loading and unloading of my van, these are the engine. And the engine requires a version of me that I am not sure I want to keep being.
This is what I mean when I say I’ve landed back into an older version of myself. It’s not Ireland’s fault. It’s not the farmhouse’s fault. (….well, maybe just a little) It’s that I can feel, viscerally and without much ambiguity, the difference between who I am when I am alive to my own possibilities and who I am when I am simply pushing through. And pushing through has been, for a long time, how I measured my worth. To keep going. To not complain. To find meaning in the satisfaction of a thing built with my own hands.
And I do find meaning in those things. I’m not dismissing them. But I am also sitting with the question of whether I have been, at least in part, running an old programme. One that was written a long time ago. One that maybe it’s time to rewrite.
There is a part of me - and if I was to get all shamanic about it, I’d call it the ‘horse spirit medicine’ in me, that wants to drop all of it. Sell the tools. Lock the farmhouse. Walk the Camino de Santiago and just write about that. Burn every bridge that feels like it’s holding me back. Dedicate myself fully and without compromise to my deepest impulses, my creative ones, the ones that feel most true. To stop this story version, dedicate fully to a new one and start living it.
I recognise this impulse. I’ve felt it before. It comes at thresholds. I write about them often enough. They intrigue, dumbfound, inspire and challenge me, as they do us all. I am at one now, Thresholds are uncomfortable places. But strangely it’s those uncomfortable places that can make us feel most alive. I’m sitting at a threshold and resisting. Or is it resistance? In times passed I’ve moved through thresholds swiftly, with the determination and strength of a horse changing direction mid gallop. This one is different. rather than a sharp cut from one thing to the other I’m seeking a wise transition, a fading of one as the other comes into fully focus.
It’s no wonder we approach change this way. When you’ve let go of the last thing and the next thing hasn’t arrived yet, when the old self feels too small and the new one isn’t fully formed, nothing feels solid. and it is very easy, in that space to spiral downward or project yourself onto some heroic future version of the journey where everything finally makes sense.
The Camino fantasy is real, and I’m not entirely dismissing it. But I also know myself well enough to know that walking away from everything is sometimes wisdom and sometimes just the urge to outrun a feeling that will be waiting at the next destination.
The question worth sitting with is this: what is this trying to tell me.
And underneath all of it, underneath the cold house and the tired body and the identity questions and the dramatic impulses to jump on a plane and have nothing to think about but one foot stepping in front of the other, underneath all of that there is something constant: the silence emanating from he who knows that the wisest one speaks the least. Something that requires a certain honesty to even name.
I have so much.
I have a farmhouse, even a cold and mouldy one. I have work, even when it exhausts me. I have the freedom to question my life, which is itself an extraordinary privilege. I have a creative practice, readers, a voice, a growing sense of what I actually want. I have warmth I can return to… I have feet that are warm and shoes that no one is going to sell.
I don’t say this to close down the questions I’ve been raising. I say it because it’s true, and because I think the wisest thing I can do at this threshold is hold both things at once. The difficulty and the abundance, both are real. The longing we all feel for something more fully alive is also real. What I already have is also real.
The little girl on the chair, swinging her feet, not yet ready to smile. I think about her. I hope the shoes stayed. I hope she learned that some things can be trusted. I hope someone is keeping her warm.
I’m trying to learn the same thing, in my own much smaller way.
Threshold’s are not a failure.
The older version of myself that pushed through everything served me, once, Now I want to thank it and release it, and do so with grace.
We don’t have to burn every bridge. Sometimes it’s fine to carefully cross to the other side.
Thank you Daithi. Beautifully written and super relatable. Thank you for your willingness to ask these hard questions, and for reminding me to listen for the still, small voice within… May you walk through these thresholds with grace 🙏