Boredom opens channels. We know that. But only after we’ve swum in some rather turbid waters. Time is so drawn out when we’re bored. The German word for boredom invites us to take the time to understand where our boredom comes from, to swim in the waters. Langeweile. “Lange” means long and “weile” means a while. As I watch our children amble through late June and July –– restless, agitated, lazy –– I realize that unlike them, I never experienced the hot and sticky ennui of summer boredom. I was always surrounded by cousins and grandparents and friends. If I wasn’t learning to sail, I was collecting urchin shells or playing bingo or watching Vougiouklaki films under a hot Athens sky. My childhood summers were idyllic and action packed. This year, summer for our children is a mix of part time jobs, city camps, overnight camp and plenty of boredom. I know they’re at peak boredom when they’d sooner lay on the cool kitchen floor and stare languidly at the ceiling than walk to the ice cream parlour up the street. Our eldest child has worn the same old concert t-shirt everyday this week despite mounds of clean options on her bedroom floor. “I’ll put my clothes away tomorrow,” she’s been saying since June. There’s been so much boredom in our home this summer that at times I fear we might drown in it. Lanegweile. Or maybe it’s just me who’s bored, or more specifically, wrestling with my boredom and projecting my frustrations on to my family? Is it a creative rut? is it the heat? The endless cycles on the dishwasher. The stillnesss of our street. Is it that socialite writer, Derek Blasberg posting shiny pictures on Instagram from our beloved Folegandros? Comparison really is the killer of all joy. And as it happens, a fast track to boredom. But then I watch our son throw tennis balls against a brick wall in the parking lot behind our house and marvel at how utterly absorbed he is in the mindless repetition of it all. Or notice that every chair in our kitchen has turned into a makeshift loom for our youngest child who weaves half a dozen bracelets a day. And when not not putting her clothes away, I see that our daughter morphs from slovenly teenager to Marie Kondo. What I observe in all three children is how boredom, when given room, turns into an urge to do. To tidy, to weave, to throw a ball at a wall. My husband takes to the garden when he’s bored. Or makes a bolognese sauce. He’s a do-er. As Adam Gopnik writes in All That Happiness Is, “genuine happiness is always rooted in absorption in something outside us and begins in accomplishment undertaken for its own sake and pursued to its own odd and buzzing ends.” I know this to be true when I’m absorbed in clay or in the rhythm of my body’s strokes underwater. It’s a heavenly state to be in. It comes and it goes. It’s not something we can hold on to or force into action. And so, I’m surrendering to the boredom, to noticing what I notice. As graphic designer, Ellen Parr says, “the cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

Two years ago I moved a withering orange tree –– a gift from my mother in law –– into a fresh pot, gave it fertilizer, water and sunlight and watched nature do what it so miraculously does; recover. As with any meaningful recovery, it took time for the orange tree to heal from the trauma of being moved outside –– to a weekend of thunderstorms and scorching sun –– with no warning. Acid yellow leaves turned a verdant green, and within six months, half a dozen plump oranges sprang from its robust branches. This morning, my friend, Josephine came over to assist with a second transplant. The tree had outgrown its pot and needed a much larger home. Joe was a teacher for many years, and as such has a way of instilling confidence in a person so that they feel they can take on the task themselves. We used my bread knife to loosen the tree from its original digs and Joe stood alongside me as I moved the tree and packed it in with fresh potting soil. I was convinced that the new pot would be too big, but it’s actually not. It’s hard to know what a plant might need in the future –– what any of us might need in the future –– when we’re so intensely immersed in the here and now. This felt good, though. Planning ahead. Creating a home that my tree can grow into.

I realized this morning as I wandered through Mount Pleasant Cemetery how much I’ve come to appreciate cemeteries. As a child I used to hold my breath whenever a cemetery was in sight. The very idea that some wayward spirit might follow me home was reason enough to steer clear of them for good. Superstitious thinking can wreak havoc on a child’s imagination. When my Nanna died, a woman I adored, my Dad suggested I stayed in the car during the burial service. I remember chatting to the limo driver and thinking that whatever was happening at the bottom of the hill was not for children. Cemeteries were not for children. My own kids have shown me that children don’t need as much protecting as we think they do. At their great-grandmother’s wake all three of my kids commented on how lovely her outfit was. They greeted Nonnina in her casket much like they would have greeted her in her kitchen. Bright green lawns, which her cemetery has acres of are a lovely playing ground for children. Death is part of life and life is part of death. Over the years I’ve come to see cemeteries as a place where death and life intersect. Cemeteries can and should be community destinations, much like they were before we had art galleries, parks and concert halls to congregate in. When we visited my stepfather recently at the beautiful Brompton Cemetery in London, I was happy to see how vibrant and alive the cemetery is. There’s even a cafe where people commune for English breakfasts or a jolt of coffee while visiting a loved one or cycling to work. My brother meets clients at the cafe from time to time because the cemetery is so centrally located. Lime trees, wildflowers, foxes, birds and bats all live there. Dogs bark. Humans weep. Bicycle bells tinkle. There is so much life in Ukulu‘s cemetery. On my walk this morning, I came across dozens of flat headstones blanketed in cherry blossom petals and dappled light. It was as if nature herself was celebrating the lives beneath the soil.

What I love about Elsa Dorfman’s family portraits is how warm and unpretentious they are. Known as much for her large scale polaroid portraits of mid-century literary greats –– Allan Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, Anais Nin –– as she was for her humble family portraits, Dorfman is just the kind of photographer/person I’d want to photograph my family. The very idea of a scheduled family photo session feels as comfortable as a colonoscopy, but everything I’ve ever read about Dorfman says she was as warm and authentic as her pictures. Family life is messy and complicated, and in that complicated mess are moments of tenderness, unity and pure joy. A professional photographer is rarely there to capture those moments, and if they are, it’s often the seconds in between shots that are the most tender and real. A few weeks ago, on a family visit to London, we managed to squeeze twenty of us into one frame. Of the many photos we took, it was the one with uncle Mark –– in charge of the self timer –– leaping across many small feet and toys to land in his place that I love most. It’s the photo before the photo, blurry and unpolished, neat smiles blown wide open by spontaneous laughter. That’s what Dorfman’s archives were made up of. Her B-sides. The photos that families didn’t want, all the “mistakes” that at 20×24 were too expensive to just throw away. That’s the gold, I’m realizing. The raw, clumsy, beautiful and unpredictable moments that glue a family together, that make them who they are. That’s what we hold on to. That’s what we stick to our fridge. That’s what we’ll leave behind long after we’re gone.

Only my Mum would describe the red of the walls in her new home as “porphyry”. It’s esoteric. Pretentious, even. But not coming from her. Earlier in the week, we spent half an hour discussing what white she’ll paint over the porphyry with. White is her default wall colour. A blank canvas for the colourful textiles, objects and paintings that she travels from home to home with. “The cabinets will be stone,” she says. “As in grey?” I ask. “No, stone.” She means a creamy white, the stones that wash up on a Greek island beach, maybe. I find people’s associations with colour fascinating, how memories and past experiences influence the images and ideas that come to mind when we think of a specific colour. Our perception of colour varies, too. My winter coat is chartreuse. “I love your yellow coat,” some people say. “I love your green coat,” say others. Neither one is wrong. Perception is everything. “I think the cashmere has too much yellow in it,” she says. “The walls will look like they were painted with vanilla ice cream.” How delicious. I suggest Benjamin Moore’s OC-122 –– my go-to for a crisp but warm white. “Anything’s better than porphyry.”

Given that my grandmother didn’t cook, it’s ironic that so many of my memories of her are attached to food. I think it’s partly because we ate things in her home that we didn’t eat anywhere else. Ice cream sandwiches. Hot dogs. Cinnamon donuts. Cracker Jack cereal. I grew up in England in the 80s; our junk food was limited compared to what was available in sunny Bermuda. While my grandmother appreciated fine dining, she was happiest eating a tuna sandwich on the golf course. Or a freshly battered corn dog at LaGuardia Airport. “They’re the best in the world.” One of my favourite things to do together was to go grocery shopping at Miles Market and load up the cart with ice tea, Kraft slices, sugary cereals and mini marshmallows that I’d eat by the handful on the way home. Years later, once I lived in Toronto and I was able to visit her more often, either in Florida or Manhattan where she then lived, she’d always send me home with a stash of English muffins, Entenmann’s cookies, or a honey glazed ham in my carry-on. On our last visit together in New York right before she died, I remember her asking me to get her a chicken salad sandwich while she got her chemo infusion. I went to five different places near the clinic searching for the perfect chicken sandwich and came back with some Gourmet thing slathered in a Caesar-ish dressing and alfalfa sprouts. She took one disdained look at it and shoved it straight back into the bag. Who brings alfalfa sprouts to a chemo patient? As is so often the case in these moments, the gussied up sandwich was what I wanted to give her, not what she wanted to eat. A few weeks ago, I was travelling through a new and improved LaGuardia, and I felt a pang in my heart when I saw that her corn dog stand is gone. “I mean, the cheek of it. They were the best in the world.”

Somewhere between 40 and 45 it became painfully clear to me that much of my identity hinged on what I thought other people thought of me. And that many of my efforts at self betterment, this blog included, were in service of an imagined ideal. It’s an impossible way to live; it gets in the way of everything, not least, one’s ability to know and be themselves. Start where you are. Write about what you know. And the best advice of all, write like nobody’s reading. Thinking about what someone is thinking when they’re reading your work is the surest way to suck the life out of it, specifically your life. I love writing. And I needed to take a break from it this summer so I could remind myself who I am writing for.

The first time I heard of Wolfgang Tillmans was in my early 20s when I happened upon a photograph of his in Vogue. An editor had singled out “Sandcastle” as her favourite photograph, adding that it was the hopefulness of the image that she was most drawn to, “that we build them, even though we know the tide will wash them away.” There’s nothing remarkable about the image, but it’s what it represented to her that made it meaningful. It resonated with me and so I tore out the page and stuck it in a scrapbook. And up until recently, my only association with Tillmans was that one sandcastle and the uplifting ideas that came with it. I knew that he was enourmously prolific, and that his work was raw and real, but I hadn’t looked further than this one image. So, when I walked through The Tillmans show at the AGO recently, it came to me, somewhere between the black and white salacious club scenes and still lives of mangled crab legs that, “to look without fear” means to see the whole picture, better yet, to look beyond the picture and see that it’s rarely as frightening as we think it is. Just as significant as seeing the light, is seeing the shadows cast when something gets in its way. “I want to invite the audience to approach my work without fear but also to not be afraid of their own eyes and how they see,” says Tillmans. The show is a shining example of how seemingly unremarkable moments, when strung together over time, can tell a story that is as painful and complicated as it is beautiful and celebratory. His images, some 4 x 4 snap shots, are stuck to the walls with clear tape like one might see in a student dorm. It’s so crude and quotidian. So brilliant. The mundanity of it all. The gritty, tender, miraculous mundanity of it all.