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Showing posts with label Observation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Observation. Show all posts

Sunday, 8 February 2015

Reading



 
Full moon, February 2015
And observing

I remember that during the time that I spent in Hungary, 1989-1993, one of my regular activities on my trips to England (usually just once a year) was to make a special trip to Norwich city-centre to spend an hour, or maybe two, in a bookshop.

I would make a beeline to one particular section of the three-storey shop where I would select a pile of books about two feet high. I would pile them up on a table and then sit in the armchair provided to peruse them in a bit more detail before eventually dividing them into three piles. One a pile of certainties, another pile of next-time-I-am-home purchases, and the last one a discarded pile.

Over the years I have become quite proficient and fast at choosing what I want to read and what I need for my work. I have developed my book-buying technique so that it now also includes diligently reading all the book reviews in my weekly English newspaper and making notes to buy those I pick out at a later date or even order them online.

There was no internet book-buying in the late 1980s. I had no access to a computer in Hungary, in fact I had not seen one until I visited Germany for the first time in the winter of 1992/93. There was no world-wide-web, no googling to discover just the book that I needed for my dissertation, but despite that my library steadily grew.

In those early days books came into my hands through the bookshop purchases described above, via visitors who, if asked in advance, would bring requested titles, via my sister if we dared to risk the Hungarian postal service, and of course through my favourite place in Budapest – Litea, a book and tea-shop combined which invariably had an extensive selection of English titles, many of which were translations from Hungarian classics which I  read and widened my knowledge of the Hungarian culture.

For over twenty-five years I have not had ready access to an English bookshop apart from on trips home. I cannot go for a wander at the weekend and pick up a few books as I would if I lived in England.

Of course there are the usual English language novels at the local railway station, and at the airport there are the latest fashionable reads, but I rarely buy novels, I sometimes receive them as presents which I greatly appreciate.

So I still bulk buy when I am at home!

I think it shocked my sister yet again when I used her Christmas gift voucher, and more, to buy my latest pile of books. One of them weighed one and a half kilos and it brought my luggage right up to its allowed limit!

Amongst the books I bought this time was Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole by Allan Ropper and B. D. Burrell. This book has recently been a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, but somehow I missed it, so I am even more glad that it jumped out at me on the shelf as I was perusing.

This is another book in the style used in many of my favourite books, i.e. using the technique of story-telling to explain medical matters through experiences with patients and colleagues.

Operative observation is what AP and Co. would have called it.

The chance to make detailed observations of my clients is so important to me in my work and so necessary to decision making and planning. This is why I believe that the bits-in-between are often the most important parts of my practice especially in the “getting to know you” stages.

Whether these in-between-times are play-times, trips to the garden, chats with husbands, wives and carers, the moments when mums or dads arrive to collect children, lunchtimes, or taking off, and putting on, jackets and boots times, all the observations and conversations that take place play an important role in the decisions made while planning conductive sessions, just as the observations that the neurologists in the books I read make while they are chatting with their patients have a huge influence on the diagnosis that they make.

PS

Recently I have also read Two Roads by Wendy Cope, who I can thank for inspiring me to start to write again and The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov who I suppose I can say the same for, as despite there being some depressing stories in this book his descriptive narratives are something worth aspiring to.

Notes

Reaching down the Rabbit Hole by Allan Ropper and B. D. Burrell - Atlantic Books, ISBN 978 1 782 39547 8

Two Roads by Wendy Cope - Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, ISBN 978 1444 7953 6 3

The Lady and the Dog and other Stories 1896-1904 by Anton Chekhov
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Sunday, 18 November 2012

Déjà vu and eyes



'A winter garden'



Memories playing tricks
Been there, seen that…

Déjà vu usually stays around for only a short time, often for less than a second. It has not happened to me for a long time, maybe even years. It has never been as clear and long-lasting as it was at a meeting that I was at recently.

Someone joined in a conversation that I was having with two people, one of whom I knew well the other of whom I have known of for ages but we had only just met face to face. A fourth person began to speak to all three of us and I stepped back from the group as he leaned over the table to say something in quite a forceful way, not a disagreement, more a reinforcement of what was being said as introducing his own opinion.

This situation is all so clear in my mind. I even thought at the time that I knew what he was going to say next, that I was just a split second ahead of him. I was so shocked by this that I think the astonishment probably showed on my face, and this is why I took the step backwards. I almost felt no part of it any more, more like an observer. I was surprised I even had time to wonder about what was happening while it was happening and to question whether it really was déjà vu or whether something else was going on. It appeared to me as I imagine it to be when people describe how they have an enhanced, nearer and clearer view of the world from taking certain drugs. The visual picture of that déjà vu is still so sharp and the sounds are so precise in my memory, just as they were as it happened.

Tricks of memory

As it was happening I had that feeling of ‘I have been in this situation before’, ‘I know what he will say next’. Then came the feeling of ‘Yes, I was right, he did say what I remember from last time’. Oddly enough, however I have absolutely no idea what the conversation was about, or of what the newcomer, or either of the other two, said. I have no idea how the conversation ended or even when the déjà vu ended. Perhaps the meeting began and I was pulled out of it, I do not know.

It is all so extremely well deleted from my conscious memory that I wonder whether something actually happen to me, like falling briefly unconscious, and that is why there is a gap in my memory. I do not know, perhaps I was just ‘vacant’ for a second but did not pass out. If I had fallen unconscious I would have been told. The next that I remember is finding a seat to sit in.

I have always loved the feeling of déjà vu

This used to happen far more often than it has in recent years, and some déjà vus, I believe, at the time that they occured, had happened more than once before. I suppose that this would be called an already seen déjà vu! The one last week was a déjà, déjà vu.

I remember how as a child and teenager I loved this experience. I never spoke to anyone about it and I suppose that I eventually read or heard something that explained enough for me to know that it was a fairly common occurrence, so I was not afraid of it.

I do not ever remember thinking that this only happened to me. I suppose that, as children do, I considered it to be normal, happening regularly to everyone. I do think that I even believed that situations really had happened before and sometimes, only during the déjà vu itself, I believe that still. This time I also thought, as it happened, that it must be true as I knew the words, although oddly, I no longer know them.

Eyes playing tricks. Or are they?

‘As children often do’… I used to believe many things to be normal but never asked about them. Déjà vu is normal,  some conditions, however, are not.

It was not normal, something I unfortunately only discovered at the age of nineteen, not to see well enough to read a book after about three in the afternoon, in poor light, at school. I was embarrassed in class because I thought it was my shyness that made me stammer and stutter and rub my eyes a lot, but that shyness was probably due to a vicious circle.

I could not read in bed, or read a script for a play in the evening at youth club. I could not read more than just a paragraph and that not without rubbing my eyes a lot. I thought this to be just how it was with everyone, especially as we had school medicals, with eyesight tests annually that I always passed with flying colours.

I remember that this was how it was from the beginning of grammar school. I now know that this is why my homework took so long if I had to use a text book and that this was not because I was stupid and therefore slow. I now know that this is why I only became really interested in really reading books when I was at art school, when I took myself off to the optician and got myself such strong glasses that I had to have them in two prescriptions, one step at a time instead of at once.

I wonder how I managed to get through school as an average pupil, pass O and A levels and get on to a degree course without this ever being noticed. It helped I expect that my degree subject was art and I drew what I thought I could see and no one questioned what was on the paper, as it was ‘artistic’ enough and my hand-eye coordination skills were quite good! I noticed the problem myself when I started to learn about textiles and weaving and I could not thread a loom. Then a whole new world opened up to me, of newspapers, books and easier learning. Learning assisted by another source – the written word.

A personal view

I wonder whether this experience has sharpened my observation skills. I believe that it has. My ability to learn through doing is still much more honed than my skill to learn through reading about it. I do find though that, as I have practiced my writing skills in recent years, my ability to understand the written word has become easier and faster.

Perhaps in believing that it was normal not to be able to read sharpened my abilities to observe the world and taught me how to look at things that I saw and how I really see them, and I learnt how to fit things together in a slightly different way in order to understand the world.

Who knows what happened? All I know is that I found it a real problem to read before I got glasses and throughout my childhood I think that this embarrassed me and made me incredibly shy and timid, in class and out.

My family could never understand why, even when I had learnt to read, I did not do it. I loved books, especially those with lovely illustrations that helped me to understand the text that I could not see very well!

I always snuggled up to my sister in bed and asked her to read my favourite Enid Blyton fairy stories to me, ones with many elves, pixies and clever owls in them. My wish not to read is still a family joke and I think that the family thought I was lazy, but it was not laziness it was because it was after three in the afternoon, the light was dim and I just could not see. I admired my sister so much that she could read so fluently, and I am very grateful to her that she always did, right until I was ten or eleven years old.

I know that it is only recently while I have managed to practice through writing, that I can understand much of what I read with just one reading. Until then anything more than the headlines in the newspaper took a few readings to make any sense to me, even when I had my now very strong glasses.

Observation

It is no wonder really that I only ever felt really comfortable and relaxed with a pencil and paintbrushes in my hands. I do not really need to see what I put on the paper as I am drawing or painting, not that clearly. I need to see what I am looking at in reality, and that I could always see well enough to interpret in my own way.

Those well-honed observation skills come in very useful in my life at home and at work!

It is not only the observation of what I see that is important and vital to my work it is the observations of what could lie underneath. The patching together and finding the reasons why a walk is hunched up, or a voice has changed in tone, or words can no longer be found. Observing what cannot be seen is all so important to a conductive upbringing too, to any upbringing especially mine when I could not really see well enough to read but did not know it for a very long time.
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Monday, 30 April 2012

Joy in the natural world






'Peewit or plover'

'Hares galore'




'The april-showers that fortunately missed me!


On my bike!

It has taken me a long time to get my bike out of the cellar, but this year not due to fear –

http://www.susie-mallett.org/2011/03/fear_8580.html

It was the cold weather that put me off this year, and tiredness. I must be getting soft in my old age!

We still seemed to be in deep winter during the chilly days before I set off to England, with even some snow still fluttering down now and then. It was not at all the sort of weather to put me in the mood for a forty-minute ride to work.

As soon as I returned to Germany in mid-April I brought one neglected bike out of the darkness of the cellar and spruced it up for spring and prepared it for long journeys. Then I wrapped it up and waited for a bit of warmth in the air!

Watching the weather

Day-by-day I watched the thermometer before I decided what to wear. Early each morning I asked myself whether it would it be my nice clothes and a hop on the tram or my cycling gear and a hop on the bike?

It was not until Friday 27th, almost the end of April, that I took the plunge. The temperature rose from three degrees on Tuesday morning to twenty-three on Friday, so off I peddled. 

It was lovely to feel the air on my face and watch the countryside fly past. Even in the city, where I cycled down streets that I have not travelled since December, there were many changes to be seen.

I doubt that the temperature will stay in the mid-twenties for long but I think that the frosty mornings may now be behind us. This will probably be the last month in which I spend money on the expensive ticket for the public transport system, until I dig deep in my pocket again next December.

Watching nature

The trams and buses have been very busy over the past few weeks, some days on the return trip being full to bursting. It was therefore a real treat on Friday to be out in the fresh air communing with nature.

I love the extra time that I get to read when I travel on public transport, but I think that I enjoy even more the time spent communing with nature on my bike.

It is not only nature that excites me, I also enjoy all the action at the airport where I love to stop to watch the aircraft taking off and landing just above my head. I love to dream of being up there. I sometimes think about making a spontaneous decision to jump on a flight that would take me home for the day instead of to work!

I have not done it yet. Instead, as I did on Friday, I watch the herons fly to their fishing grounds, smell the spring in the hedgerows, hear the peewit or plover in the still short cornfield with the skylarks twittering above. At dusk I will stop in silence, as I did this week, in hope of catching the hares in action. Observing a spring boxing-match is a treat yet to come.

But does it change the brain?

Arriving at work with ten kilometres behind me by bike I do feel much wider awake than when I travel the distance by bus and tram. I wonder whether the clients would be able to tell. We shall have to put it to the test next week.

Cycling certainly does change my outlook on the day, my personality is transformed, and my soul is awakened when I commune with nature instead of with the inside of a tram or a bus.

PS

It took me the same length of time to cycle the distance as it did four months ago. The rest seems to have done me no harm at all and the bike seemed to manage it alright too.

Notes

More on the spring start to cycling – 

http://www.susie-mallett.org/2011/03/influence-of-weather-on-well-being-of.html

http://www.susie-mallett.org/2010/03/minus-four-still-no-sign-of-my-bike.html

http://www.susie-mallett.org/2009/04/story-of-red-and-yellow-tricycle.html
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Friday, 14 October 2011

Story-telling


"Spacial awareness" by Susie Mallett, August 2011

Writing about my practice…

I realised a long time ago that I have been writing fewer postings lately about my work. I was recently in England for a month, not working with clients for all of that time, but that has nothing to do with the lack of postings about my practice.

My work is still multi-faceted, still very enjoyable and still full of really interesting clients and lovely colleagues, so it is not that I have nothing to write about. I do in fact write about it, a lot, but in notes that mount up in story-telling departments in my head. I hope that I will slowly get around to writing them down before I forget them. Often I just write down a single word in a Word document to remind me of a moment for later.

I have really missed the process of writing the stories down and thereby visualising the practice once again.  As I write down the descriptions of my practice, I am able to observe once more, in minute detail, what each client has achieved.

…is part of my practice

It really is time to do it more often.

It was when I realised today how much I had enjoyed writing about the dinosaurs that I decided that I shall turn over a new leaf by writing down stories about my practice more frequently again. I need to do this story-telling, it has become a very important aspect of my practice. It is something that I wrote about in the preface to my Book Number One:

“Through writing I gain better understanding of my own work. This is by far the most important reason why I write. Since I began to write about my practice I am more conscious of how I am continuously thinking about what I am doing and why. There are many instances when I notice this, for example I am more conscious of how I consider how I touch someone and of how I speak to someone, and also of how I do not touch someone and do not speak to someone. I am more aware of why I am doing what I am doing and more importantly how I would describe it to others.

Doing this for public consumption certainly sharpens how I think about it. Over years of experience my work has become ever more interesting, and ever more enjoyable. By writing about it I begin to realize just how much I have learnt and just how much I still do not know. It has always been great to work as a conductor. Now that I write about it as well, it is different. It has taken on a new dimension.”

I remembered this piece of writing because of an activity that I spontaneously did today with four school-age children. I have also written previously about how, when I start a new project or activity with the children, often only then do I realise what huge steps forward they have made. This is what happened today, on a day when I could have said that I was too run off my feet to see anything!

Calmly rushing

We had been somewhat short-staffed all week, both in the conductive groups and in the Kindergarten, but today six staff from eleven were missing, due to various illnesses. Interestingly enough, and also luckily enough, all four conductors and one social pedagogue were there, we all know just a little bit about adaption.

On Tuesday I had worked in four different groups, two of them on my own. Today it was Évi’s turn to be coming and going and by the time we got together to tidy up at the end of the day she did no longer knew where she was.

Èvi adapted to working in the integrated Kindergarten while I adapted to having a group of schoolchildren, with a wide range of abilities, to keep happy over lunch and for the rest of the afternoon. We ended up having a whale of a time and while doing so I had lots of time to observe how these children have developed since the beginning of the new school term.

I was alone, but it was good to be alone for once. I had to see the group as a whole because I had to keep my eye on it as a whole all the time. While doing this I saw in detail the individuals and what they had learnt and how they were putting their learnt skills into action.

We proved this afternoon that assembling Swedish, flat-pack chairs is child’s play. They all managed to conjure up a sitable-on chair before going home for a relaxing weekend!

More about that project later, when it gets further under way.

Notes

“Let me tell you a story”, Book I –

http://www.susie-mallett-booksandmore.com/

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