Oceanic feeling and olives

a pocket of observations #2

This week I’m coming to you from Cyprus, where I’m consuming ungodly amounts of halloumi, olives, and tzatziki.

In soft focus

Oceanic feeling

I wish I could say I learnt this phrase from studying psychology or philosophy, but in fact, I learnt it from the prettier Jesus herself, Lorde. The psychological term ‘oceanic feeling’ was coined by Romain Rolland in a 1927 letter to Sigmund Freud, and it refers to the sense of feeling deeply interconnected to the natural world and recognising the vastness of it. In her 2021 song Oceanic Feeling, Lorde expresses her need for peace and connection to nature on her journey for self-discovery.

There is something about being in the presence of the ocean that makes all my ambitions melt into the background. Each summer, the sun comes back up, and I forget what I had been worrying about over the winter. I no longer have any aim to change the world or become the next Louis Theroux. Instead, all I want to do is charge myself up on solar power while I disappear into an enchanting story or mindlessly dedicate hours to my newest hobby that I am extremely amateur at; the current obsession is watercolour. It’s the same sensation I feel when I go on a hiking trip or see a starry sky. I’m suddenly filled with the urge to throw my phone away and be completely and utterly unreachable. From reading about oceanic feeling, I understand that being immersed in the natural world reminds us how boundless the universe is in the face of the pressures brought by modern society. It’s the cliché nothing matters, we live on a floating rock.

I also went snorkelling for the first time since I was a child today. For one reason or another, I became scared of what was lurking on the seabed; placing my face onto the water surface and looking down into the vastness would fill me with panic and a sense of claustrophobia. I decided I needed to get over this if I ever wanted to witness the beauty of the ocean with my own two eyes. Today I saw only a few fish, but this was more than enough for my exposure therapy. I was in awe of what lay beneath me and filled with amazement for the natural world, dare I say, it was an oceanic feeling.

To summarise, I’m never going on LinkedIn again - until I return to the UK and feel an overwhelming amount of stress about where Louis Theroux was at this point in his career and where I am.

Passing Scenes

• Is anybody born liking olives?

I used to consider liking olives as THE indicator of maturity. I would try them from time to time when they were offered to me, but I despised them. They were too bitter and tangy, and I simply couldn’t understand the appeal until this year. It all started with this beautifully green olive that I tried at a tapas bar in Valencia. From then everything changed. I was actively eating the olives brought out as an aperitif. Each one I tried, I liked a little more than the last, and now in Cyprus, I’m practically bathing in them. But does anybody love olives at first sight? Or is it like coffee or wine, where you have to trick yourself into appreciating the flavours to complete the conversion into adulthood?

• People I saw at the beach

One of my most loved pastimes is creating little life stories for people I spot out and about. So here is a collection of people I saw at the beach today and their life story according to me.

o A sixty-year-old bleach blonde diva sunbathing in a sparkly turquoise bikini. She is married to a leather-clad punk with a motorbike and used to drive band tour buses. She is retired now but performs rock classics at the local tourist bar every weekend and has lived in Cyprus for the past ten years because she can’t stand the English weather. Sunbathing is her religion.

o An elderly couple who were splashing each other in the water like children. They were childhood sweethearts, born and raised in Cyprus, but the man whom I’m going to call Andreas went to serve his time in the military, and the woman, Christina, moved to London with her family. They fell out of touch and both married other people. Christina’s husband died young of an unexpected heart attack, and her children all grew up and moved out, so she decided it was time to return to her village in Cyprus. Andreas and his wife began to argue about the little things, and soon enough they realised the love that was once there had vanished. They divorced. At the age of sixty, Andreas and Christina bump into each other again in their village bar. They recognise each other instantly and decide to have a glass of wine and catch up on the past forty years.

o A young family from New Zealand. The parents met at university and had two daughters. They moved to Europe a couple of years ago for the dad’s work. He’s a software engineer. First, he worked in Poland, but they couldn’t get the hang of the language, so they moved to the UK. London seemed too expensive, so they went to Kent, a suburb where the girls can both have their own bedroom, and they can afford to take holidays in the sun every summer. As much as they enjoy the pubs and the sarcasm in England, they’re hoping to move back to New Zealand by the time the girls go to high school to be closer to their elderly grandparents.

Pressed between pages

Books I've read as of late.

I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron

Nora Ephron is funny. She writes, and I laugh. I read a couple of these essays with my friend Anat in the park while we were sunbathing, and we were killing ourselves laughing. Namely, over the essay about hating purses, because like Nora, both Anat and I have insanely disorganised handbags. Currently, my handbag has a few cashew nuts floating around from a bag that burst open about six months ago; there is a pool of black gems from the collage I was making with the four-year-old I used to babysit; and approximately five lip balms, half of which don’t have lids. I am also completely unable to have more than one handbag on the go at a time. I’ve tried varying my bags and matching them to my outfits before, but my keys were constantly missing, and I could never find a piece of gum when I desperately needed it. I Feel Bad About My Neck is down-to-earth, relatable, witty, and has golden nuggets of wisdom waiting to surprise you at the end of each essay. More than a few of the essays talk about ageing in some way or another, whether that’s in terms of vanity, children leaving home, or health issues. What I appreciated most about Nora’s writing is that she doesn’t sugarcoat any of it. She clearly states that ageing means you aren’t what you once were, in terms of sharpness and physical health, but there is still some beauty in it, and consider the alternative.

What I highlighted:

• Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death. (Serial Monogamy: A Memoir)

• Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. (Blind as a Bat)

• I should point out that I don’t normally use the word “amortize” unless I’m trying to prove that something I can’t really afford is not just a bargain but practically free. (Moving On)

• What failure of imagination had caused me to forget that life was full of other possibilities, including the possibility that eventually I would fall in love again. (Moving On)

• I can’t understand why anyone would write fiction when what actually happens is so amazing. (The Story of My Life in 3,500 Words or Less)

• When I was a child, nearly every book I read sent me into rapture. […] I wanted to be Ozma, and Jo March, and Anne Frank, and Nancy Drew, and Eloise, and Anne of Green Gables – and in my imagination, at least, I could be. (On Rapture)

• Denial has been a way of life for me for many years. (Considering the Alternative)

Sugar, baby by Celine Saintclaire

I spotted this book on the table display in Waterstones and was immediately captivated. The baby-pink cover, featuring an ornate hand mirror and cigarette stubs, combined with the title "Sugar, baby”, practically forced me to pick it up and scan the blurb. I adore books that give me a key into another world, one that is wildly different from my own. Sugar, baby did just that. It follows the journey of 21-year-old Agnes, a mixed-race, working-class woman. Living with her extremely religious mother and working as a cleaner for the elite, she is lured into the glamorous world of sugar babies. It’s an interesting commentary on class, race, beauty, and religious guilt within the sphere of high-class escorts.

What I highlighted

• She’s well-meaning, just has a poor attention span (felt relatable)

• An attractive, Russell-Group-educated white woman who reneged on her dreams of academic or artistic stardom, defected to suburban motherhood and now focuses the entirety of her mental prowess on her children’s extracurricular activities and the latest in health-food fads.

• Money makes everything soft, I think.

• They’re professional models, after all. Their bodies aren’t private property in the same way that an average person’s is. They’re used to being looked at, to being naked, to having their hair and limbs moved around by strangers.

• She has a face that especially suits smiling.

• Perhaps religion is a way of punishing oneself, a manifestation of the shame built into the human experience.

Other articles and essays that got my brain cogs turning

• Inside America’s Death Chambers by Elizabeth Bruenig (The Atlantic)

Bruenig discusses her years of witnessing executions, building relationships with those on death row, and the urgent need for mercy within the US prison system.

• Good vibrations from The Pursuit of Happiness

On the magic of pop music from the 1960s and its never-ending relevance.

• What happens to tennis balls when they die? from Rabbit Cavern

A long but strangely fascinating read on the history of sports balls. I swear it’s more interesting than it seems. Did you know that old tennis balls are now being used as nests for harvest mice?

• The fight against the climate is a lost cause if we ignore the oceans, by Ian Urbina (The Observer)

Since my lifelong idol and inspiration, David Attenborough, released his latest documentary film, Ocean, I’ve been spending much thought on the importance of oceans and marine life. In this piece, Urbina makes it clear that we can’t keep taking advantage of the ocean and demonstrates how human activity is destroying the planet’s largest ecosystem. Just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

Do you like olives?

Until the next glimpse <3