Hi there
Welcome to the first day of official British summer.
It’s been 40 degrees in the Mediterranean this week, and the footage of a glacier melting and crashing into a Swiss village is a stark reminder of the real effects of global warming.
It’s also a time of deep paradox. This spring has felt magical; an unprecedented intensity to the sunlight, blossom and birds, nature fizzing and frothing. The water is already 17 degrees – more like summer’s end rather than the beginning. Climate change is upon us.
It feels like a new era – of climate, of politics (Reform ahead of Labour in the polls; Trump remaking the world in his image) and, increasingly it seems to me, of morality
The unfolding human disaster
Did you see the images of the crowds, including many children, lining up with empty bowls and containers desperate for food in Gaza: the gaunt faces of the starving?
This isn’t a medieval siege, or even a climate-change induced famine: Tom Fletcher, the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, said on the BBC last week that there is enough food to fill 10,000 trucks, enough food to feed everyone in Gaza, sitting in warehouses on the other side of the border. Fletcher’s passionate warning – “that history will be tough in the way it judges us on this” – feels apt.
He reminded the world that the UN was accused of not doing enough to prevent genocide in Srebrenica and Rwanda, that we all said we didn’t know. This time we’re being warned about withholding food from civilian populations.
As the BBC reported: “Asked if his assessment of forced starvation amounted to a war crime, [Fletcher] said: ‘Yeah, it is. It is classified as a war crime. Obviously, these are issues for the courts to take the judgement on, and ultimately for history to take a judgement on.’”
Questions I’m asking myself
I’ve been a close student of world affairs for the past 3 decades but the powerlessness of this moment, the knowing that so many – including children and babies – are starving when salvation is so close feels agonising. I know there is wrong on both sides; that Hamas’s murder of 1,200 Israelis was an abomination (looking at videos of the massacres at the music festival…I know those kids could be ours).
The question I’m asking: Is the scale of the Israeli response justifiable? According to Sky News: “At least 54,249 people have been killed in Gaza since then, including 3,986 since Israel resumed its offensive, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.”
I don’t usually go there in this newsletter. Indeed, I wasn’t going to write about it today.
But to be honest, I can’t really think about anything else. And the impotence of our concern, our collective lack of agency to insist people are fed feels terrible. I wish I had the answer. I don’t. It’s impossible to ignore…or should be.
We can’t just look the other way. We have to acknowledge that this is happening on our collective watch. That’s why I’m raising this topic today.
Write to your MP, donate to Médecins Sans Frontières or Save the Children or other aid organisation of your choice. We talk a lot here about embracing midlife and our power. That includes the power to speak up about what we see happening in the world.
What I’ve learned about world events from being an editor
Perhaps that is the great paradox of the news media. I used to believe, as an editor, that sending journalists into danger was important, because if people were informed, we could force change and get justice. And now? Hmm. I’m not so sure there is a straight line any more between bearing witness and something being done.
I was talking to my friend Christina Lamb OBE (an incredible foreign correspondent) about this the other day. Sometimes, she says, she feels like she asks people to relive their trauma for her work, but that the pieces and books aren’t changing anything.
If the telling of the stories doesn’t change anything, is watching the suffering voyeuristic? Their hell served up as heart-wrenching bulletin content before we lucky ones click away to The White Lotus or Nine Perfect Strangers or the new series of Just Like That… (all of which I enjoy by the way).
Balancing the light and the dark
So in the spirit of the light and the dark – which feels so omnipresent currently – I’ve been pondering the theme for June’s NOON Circles, which kick off next week.
(Find one near you – we’ve got brand new ones in Windsor, Cambridge, Bath, Knaresborough/Yorkshire and Birmingham, alongside our old favourites. Do come along and check them out. If there isn’t one near you or you are nervous of going in person, come try our Online Circle – held by me – on June 2nd.)
An upbeat topic: Your Fxck-it List
One of the Circle hosts begged me for an upbeat theme – so we’re going to be talking about DreamLists or Bucket Lists – or what one of you described to me as a Fxck-it List, as in “Fxck it, I’m not going to live forever so I’m going to make sure I do whatever it is before I die.”
I know magazines are full of lists like this, with high-profile people telling us their “hot lists”. What I’m talking about is more like a personal Desert Island Discs: You don’t have to be a celebrity to write your DreamList / Fxck-it List. And you don’t have to fantasise about the usual things (safari in the Serengeti, oysters in Monte Carlo’s Hôtel de Paris…).
The list can and should be eccentric and highly personal – extending beyond the things you’d like to visit or see. It’s a good Queenager exercise to write down what really matters to you at this point in your life. What makes you truly happy?
When are you going to start?
I have a Post-it note next to my desk which says: “How am I living my best life?”
It reminds me to focus on what matters to ME. To resist excursions which are tempting because they fuel my ego rather than my deeper purpose. Ego, I’ve learnt, is really a lack of self-confidence – doing what others think of as shiny rather than what truly serves me.
So my DreamList includes meditating every morning, swimming every day, with the intention to spend more time in natural beauty, swimming in the River Dart or the sea. Also on the list: enjoying London. Balance.
I want more time for deep thought and writing, and more time hanging out with you lovely ladies in the Circles and at our events, which is pure joy (we’ve got a host of new fun things coming up. Check out the NOON Events page for details). The DreamList is a real exercise in self-knowledge and self-empowerment. Where do you want to get to in this next Queenager phase? What do you want from your “one wild and precious life”? (Thanks, Mary Oliver – read the full poem.)
How is what you are doing every day contributing to that? Small regular steps get us closer to our goal: Eating the elephant one bite at a time. True Queenager satisfaction is in doing what pleases us, what makes us feel good – leaning in to that Jungian sense of becoming the most evolved version of ourselves is our true purpose on this earth. And bugger what anyone else thinks!
The other list to-do too
I suppose the corollary to the ‘Fxck-it: I’m doing it’ List is the ‘Fxck THAT’ List. That’s the list of all the things we’re NOT doing anymore.
That could be dealing with the toxic situations that make us feel bad. Or people pleasing or running ourselves ragged for those who don’t deserve it. It’s about knowing our value. I’ve spent so many decades trying to do the impossible, squaring the circle and squishing and contorting myself in the process. Well, not any more.
It’s hard to throw off the patterns and habits of 5 decades, but when I act from a new, truer place of wholeness, I feel so much happier. Life is calmer. More purposeful – things fall into place, the synchronicity feels miraculous.
It comes from DOING less and BEING more. Less hustle more peace. (Sounds good, doesn’t it?)
How I did this recently
I’ll give you an example. A fortnight ago, I was knackered, tearful, stressed. It was a beautiful day (that weird May summer we’ve been having). I gave myself a Magic Permission Pass to go to the pond with a Georgette Heyer book and spend the day doing NOTHING. With no phone. When I got home, I had a flux of incoming good news about projects and work. Less really can be more.
I’ve been conserving my time and energy, doing what I need and feeling much better as a result! Last weekend I had a lovely time at Wasing Book Festival (held on the lovely estate where we do our retreats – come and check out the one on July 18th). I hung out with my BFF Tiff (she’s the woman on the bench that I talk about in my book Much More to Come). At Wasing, she interviewed me about all things Queenager – then we swam and sauna-ed and lay in the forest under purple rhododendrons giggling and putting the world to rights. All the good stuff.
It’s very important in life to note and celebrate when we are having a good time – because wow, we know it when we’re having a nasty time. Similarly in our own fortunate lives, it’s important to remember those who suffer and try and do our bit to help.
Enjoy your Sunday.
Much love,
Eleanor
