July began somewhere above Europe.
At 30,000 feet, most of the aircraft was asleep. I wasn't. Flying has become something very different for me over the years, and so I did what I often do when my mind becomes too loud. I opened my journal and began to write.
Sometimes putting a pen on paper gives the mind somewhere else to go.
We were travelling to a tiny village in eastern Poland, not far from the Ukrainian border. Beyond Lublin there would be another two hours by road, through countryside I had never seen before.
I had been thinking about what I wanted from this trip. It wasn't really the obvious things.
I wanted to see the old lady hanging her washing outside. Small roadside chapels. Grass moving in the wind. Fields disappearing towards the horizon. The ordinary things that people drive past because they are trying to get somewhere else.
Perhaps I needed ordinary things.
Life at home had felt increasingly complicated, and I had reached something of a crossroads. Poland gave me the opportunity to stand outside my own life for a few days and look back at it from somewhere else.
At the family home, life seemed to move differently.
There was a closeness to the land — an understanding of crops, weather, wildlife and seasons. Things were repaired rather than replaced. Family conversations mattered. There was little need to impress anybody.
These were people whose lives and families had passed through occupation, communism, rationing and extraordinarily difficult times, yet there was huge warmth around the table.
I wrote something in my journal while I was there:
Richness is not found in wanting more, but needing less.
I think that may be one of the things Poland came to remind me.
It had been a long, hot summer at home. The grass has lost its normal deep green and the evenings seemed almost endless. There was something nostalgic about it — the kind of summer that reminded me of being younger, when time somehow moved more slowly. Perhaps that was why the simplicity I found in rural Poland affected me as much as it did.
