Tag: Guests

Welcome to the Guesthouse

This piece was first posted as the MindLetter for Welcome Week from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy. You can subscribe by emailing mindfulness@ed.ac.uk. 

They’re here! 

Music thumps joyfully from open windows. Cars filled with suitcases and duvets have descended on Newington. On the Meadows, small gaggles peer at iPhones. ‘I have no idea where we are,’ says a girl in a cropped top, braving an Edinburgh autumn. ‘I think Marchmont is this way.’  

If it is you with the iPhone, the duvet, the joy: you have travelled a long road to get here. Over the past six months, your education was profoundly disrupted. Your plans were so thrown into the air, you may have thought twice about coming to university at all. Perhaps you were one of many thousands whose grades were affected by the A Level debacle, and you tossed and turned for sleepless nights before your place here was confirmed. And – bigger, deeper, more visceral than these – you or your family may have been unwell, and suffered great losses.  

Welcome. We’re so glad to see you.  

If it is you, returning, with your University of Edinburgh hoodie that says ‘I’ve been here before’, and your vocabulary that is fluent in King’s Buildings, EUSA, and George Square: things are going to be a little different this year. You learned a lot, in spring and summer, about yourself and how you work. Lockdown may have suited you: with less travel time and social pressure, it may have given you a strange and unlikely freedom. Or it may have pushed you to your limits. Perhaps loved ones felt far way, and ennui, procrastination, and imposter syndrome flourished in isolation.  

Welcome back. Let’s be COVID-weary together.  

The word ‘welcome’ derives from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘wilcuma’, which means desired guest. Every summer, the guesthouse of the University empties, shuffles around the room allocations, and prepares to refill. To feed the hungry minds about to descend, we re-plan lectures, rebuild bookings systems, catch up on new research, tot up finance, rethink courses, streamline admin chains. We brush off old ideas and assess them for waterproofing. At some point, exhausted, we take a holiday. And then we cancel the autoreply, and open the front doors. 

This year we have done much more than that. Our staff and students have responded to the COVID crisis with extraordinary dedication and perseverance, often during considerable personal struggle. They have thought out, in microscopic detail, every implication of what it means to run a hybrid class, and have a certain flow of people through a particular corridor, and determine that those living, working, and studying in our buildings will be safe, and ensure that amidst the greatest public health challenge in a century, ideas, debate, and excellence can thrive.  

This is because you are desired guests. You come under our roof, for a year or three, and we give you a home base to venture into new worlds: Shakespeare, the Scottish philosophers, the poverty of historicism, nanotechnologies, postcolonialism, the best of the worst political orders, the ethical turn in anthropology, biomarkers for dementia, the quirks of the quark, and, just maybe, emerging zoonotic diseases.  

You will talk, and write, and argue, and forge intellectual alliances. Your presence is very much desired – in part, because we know that you are with us only for a short time. While you are here, we want to give you opportunities of mind that you will carry with you when you go, that will nourish your curiosity in dark times, and expand your sense of what’s possible in the good.  

And – here is something else about guests. Sometimes they are unexpected.

‘This being human is a guesthouse,’ wrote the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi: 

Every morning a new arrival. 

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor. 

It happened in the thirteenth century, and, particularly in these new circumstances, it may happen now. You open your suitcase when you arrive or come back, and discover that nestled alongside your Tefal pan and Bluetooth speaker, there is trepidation; loneliness; doubt, and self-doubt; there are a million questions, rolling through your mind like beads from a broken string.  

And if you are the steward of the guesthouse, with your pre-recorded lectures, and vast spreadsheet of contingency plans, and dizzying list of Zoom links, and fluorescent ‘keep your distance’ signs flashing before your eyes when you close them to sleep at night – you may be disappointed, weary, self-critical.  

Guest and steward alike may wonder: how do I respond to these guests? 

This is what Rumi suggested: 

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight. 

Now, neither ResLife nor the Estates Furniture Store will be thrilled if guests start flinging furniture around. But sometimes, Rumi seems to say, there are some really fine sofas waiting in the wings – and things get uncomfortable first. The chair breaks beneath you, and those beads from the broken string turn up in your socks.  

‘Be grateful for whoever comes,’ writes Rumi, ‘because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.’ 

The loneliness lurking in the suitcase, painful though it is, is doing something important. Things are, after all, not quite as you wished them to be. Acknowledge that; mourn it a little. Let it move through you, so that after a while, you can sit up, and blink, and start to sense this community as it is, alive and thrumming. Connection is in the fabric of a university; it has been carefully built, not just over a summer, not just to meet the challenges of COVID, but over decades and centuries. So don’t dwell in your loneliness for too long. You are our desired guest, and there is a seat at the table for you.  

And when you are the steward, and you are weary – your weariness is welcome. Make space for it. Lie low, where you can, and replenish; take a breathing space, over and over, if you need. Then, delight in the curiosity and energy of our guests. Alongside the tiredness, and the shiny fluorescent signs that say ‘keep your distance’, and the million questions rolling like beads all over the floor, we are so pleased to see them.  

Welcome, whatever you carry in your suitcase at the start of this semester. It’s going to be an adventure, and there will be some Fawlty Towers moments. But we have strong foundations, exceptional people, and great scenery. The front doors are open. See you soon.

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

The Tiger Who Came To Tea

This piece was first posted as the Mindfulness Virtual Drop-in from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy. 

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been struck by how many in our University community are currently guests or hosts. Vulnerable family members have moved in, or we have moved to be with them; friends are in the spare room, caught off guard by travel restrictions or closing borders. With the onset of online studying and meetings, even if there are no literal extra persons in your home, we are visiting each other in unusual ways. We become conscious of the artwork on the wall behind us; small children grumble in the background; and of all our fears right now, our greatest is that we will have to stand up unexpectedly on a call with our manager or tutor, revealing…pyjama bottoms.

As guests and hosts, with end-dates unknown, we are thinking more carefully than ever about how to sustain ourselves and those around us. As I steadily work through the soya milk I took, by special request, when I travelled to be with family in the south, I keep thinking about Judith Kerr’s 1968 illustrated book for children, The Tiger Who Came To Tea.

For those who didn’t grow up with this treasure, Sophie and her mum are sitting having tea when the doorbell rings. It can’t be the milkman or the grocer’s boy, says mum. Indeed not. It is an enormous tiger, in search of his own tea. In he comes to join them. He eats all the sandwiches and all the buns and biscuits on the table, and drinks all the tea and the milk. Then he eats everything in the kitchen, drinks every last pint of dad’s beer, and even drains the taps. Off he goes eventually, sated – but now there is no water left for Sophie’s bath, mum has nothing to cook for supper, and hungry dad’s arrival is impending.

I’m thinking about The Tiger Who Came To Tea partly because the world it conjures up – a world where the milkman and the grocer’s boy come to the house – seems to have reignited afresh, as those with underlying health conditions self-isolate, online supermarket delivery slots remain elusive, and vegetable-box sellers, milk producers, and bakers ramp up their provision.

But I’m also thinking about it because it invokes the physical, social, and psychological guests, hosts, and hungers of this pandemic.

The extra hungry bodies in the house, who may ask politely, and be beloved – in Kerr’s illustrations, Sophie curls up with the tiger, stroking his tail, and playing with his whiskers – but will nonetheless clean you out of house and home. If you are living on the breadline, the clue in that word: the real chance that you will run out of food. The fear that you are the tiger, and that you are burdening others. The sense that there is a tiger at the door, who will take everything you offer and more, draining your very taps, until you have nothing left to give. The sense that however much you try to nourish yourself in this time, it’s not enough, and that nothing can give you what you most need.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ says Sophie’s mum, when the tiger has finally gone; and that can be exactly how we feel.

How might the story end? In The Tiger Who Came To Tea, Sophie’s dad comes home, and Sophie and her mum tell him what happened. They go to a café for supper, and the next morning, Sophie and her mum go shopping. They fill the house up with food again, and Sophie buys a tin of tiger food, too, just in case.

I like this ending for two reasons. I like it first because it begins with people talking to each other about what has happened to them. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ said Sophie’s mum – and yet she does: the first thing to do is just to talk about it.

The second reason I like this ending is that it’s not just one deed that saves the day. It’s multiple deeds, triaged. First, people gather round. They tell the truth of what is here, and what has happened. Then, together, they attend to what is needed right now: they are hungry, and must eat. Next, they prepare themselves for the hunger that may lie ahead. And finally, they bolster themselves against what made them hungry: not with a gun, or a trap, but by preparing to feed the hungry tiger, should he return – with tiger food, and not their own sandwiches.

It can be difficult to talk about our hungers. We may feel ashamed, or think that nothing can be done. But the response to the pandemic – the hundreds of thousands signing up as NHS volunteers; the flood of Whatsapps and text messages from neighbours, colleagues, friends – has shown us that we are not alone. We can talk to each other about what we need, whether it means turning to the person next to us, picking up the phone, or writing. In so doing, we treat our hungers and fears as honoured guests. We nourish ourselves, so that we are full enough to feed another.

In the spirit of this, for this week’s practice I invite you to try a body scan, by Melanie Fennell. The body scan attends to each part of the body in turn, from the tips of the toes to the top of the head. It listens to everything, and neglects nothing. By gently acknowledging what is here, the body scan creates a wise foundation for observing what is really needed. And then, perhaps, you might like to talk about it – with your family, a friend, or just with yourself, in a diary or on a walk.

May you and your tigers keep safe and well over the next week.

I leave you with a poem, The Guest House, by Rumi.

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

 

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.