Be your Valentine
Never mind showering your beloved with gifts and affection, how about a little bit of self-love for a change?
It’s Valentine’s Day this week, and my family have upped sticks for a trip to Iceland, a gift for my son’s 21st which has been deferred until he is nearly 25 for various reasons, including a global pandemic and poor organisational skills.
As a result, I’ll be spending February 14th alone with the dogs, hanging out with the only person I can guarantee will never leave me even if he might disappoint me at times. Me.
Many of us find showering ourselves with love and affection difficult. Self-love is frequently regarded as a binary choice between it and self-sacrifice.
“If I’m I’m meeting my own needs instead of putting others first I’m being selfish,” people often tell me, but it isn’t true because it isn’t either/or, and meeting your own needs gives you more energy and inclination to be loving towards others.
Poaching an egg one morning I suggested to my daughter that boiled eggs are pointless because a poached egg creates much the same result without the annoying shell to pick through.
“You still have to deal with the shell in a poached egg. At the start. If anything it’s more annoying because there’s the risk of breaking the yolk.”
“Right”
“And, peeling off the shell afterwards is part of the fun.”
While my observation about eggs was rooted in what I believed to be helpful functionalism, my daughter was more interested in the experiential and in what makes her feel happy.
When I think about it, a boiled egg takes me back to my childhood, hitting the “head” of the egg with a little spoon, its handle fashioned into a figure I remember as priestlike. Peeling away the shell and dipping my toast “soilders” into the perfectly liquid yolk, and then turning the whole thing upside down so that I can bash the other end of the eggshell in. A poached egg offers no such depth and wistfulness.
While we could probably all agree on a shared desire to feel some joy and happiness in our everyday lives, the criteria we set to trigger those emotions vary greatly.
If you need everyone to approve of you and for the world to pan out in pretty much all the ways you’d like it to there is much less chance of your experiencing swathes of happiness than someone grateful simply to wake up in the morning granted the blessing of another day, regardless of what kind of eggs are for breakfast.
When I was a child my father used to peel me an orange every evening before I went to bed. I don’t recall how the ritual began but I know that it mattered because I can feel that it did nearly fifty years on.
He would sit on the stairs or sometimes at the top of the cellar steps where he had been polishing the shoes, and he would curl the peel off with his knife in one long piece. Then he would segment the fruit and put the pieces in a dish.
When I got older I didn’t want an orange anymore but my father still peeled one, sometimes eating it himself but mostly leaving it segmented in a dish where I’d find it in the morning, its skin hardened and dry.
My mother was unable to contain her exasperation,
“Why do you keep peeling him an orange? He doesn’t eat it.”
“Because I want to,” he’d say, stomping off up the stairs, often slamming the kitchen door behind him.
None of us knows the rituals and rules by which others live or the tiny moments of pleasure they might trigger, but our insistence on doing them, regardless of what anyone else might think or say, is a courageous and important act of self-love.
“The Orange”, a poem by Wendy Cope, expresses gratitude and joy at mundane things leading to a simple appreciation of being alive which all begins with the buying of a huge orange, peeled and shared with friends. If my father were alive today I would have written it out for him and put it in a frame as a way of celebrating his tiny but important acts of self-love that can often seep out and make others feel good too.
So, if you are celebrating Valentine’s Day together or alone, you might buy yourself chocolates or flowers, or treat yourself to a fancy meal. But you may also just boil an egg or peel an orange. The only thing that matters is that you do something for yourself that brings you joy as a reminder that you are loved.
On “Sideways” this week we’re talking about why it hurts when someone lets us down, how we can avoid it happening, and what to do if it does.
We hear about how speedy supermarket cashiers can cause a mental health crisis, discuss whether or not it’s important to be able to shuffle a deck of cards and discover that Martin has very little in his larder.
That’s all for this week. Thanks for being here. I appreciate you.
Until next time.