Fighting Tiger

[Don't get confused - it's not a direct translation, but the alliteration fits.]

I’ve lived overseas (on and off) for about 5 years now and it has always been with the knowledge that distance makes it much harder to maintain contact with family and friends. Either you’re here or you’re there, and despite the best intentions and the latest in technology it’s almost impossible to maintain or grow a relationship in the same way that realtime and realspace allows. There’s something about biorhythms, a shared physical environment, eating and drinking together that will always be more valuable than endless Skype conversations and email lists.

It’s one of the reasons why, even today, organisations still spend huge amounts of money and burn fossil fuels to organise face-to-face meetings and why for the last two years Tim and I spent weeks of time on train trips between Berlin and Linz. Luckily of course, I’m finally living in Linz and the tension that resulted from never being quite at home has begun to ease.

Being in a long-distance [romantic] relationship within the confines of Europe has also obscured the many other long-distance relationships that have evolved: all the many across Australia, to those scattered in Finland and Brussels, Newcastle Upon Tyne, the Norwegian bits of the Arctic Circle, Biggleswade, Sheffield, Brighton, Dunedin, London and beyond. Of course, now with the move to Linz, those who made up my community in Berlin are now more people far afield. Within my head when I think of these friends I also think of the people I’ve met briefly, desired as friends but have never had a full chance to become friends with.

So lately, as annoyed emails have begun to arrive from those I’ve neglected I’m trying to work out how to maintain these relationships, how to provide intermittent meaningful connections that transcend Facebook messages and work for those who are far less digitally embedded than I am.

Letters and packages I guess. I managed to send one off to Berlin yesterday.

That’s what’s been bugging me for the last week or so. Today though my tyrannies of distance are familial. My father has finally asked for me to come back home and visit him, sooner rather than later. He turned 76 last week and he’s been ill for ages, so this isn’t such a surprise.

I can remember when he rang up to tell me he’d been diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis and that slowly, his lungs were scarring and being eaten away by a autoimmune response. I was in Helsinki at the time and even though my memory places me in the flat on Mechelininkatu I lived there in 2006. Somehow that timing feels wrong, maybe it was when I was back in 2008?

So for at least 3 years while I’ve been away there’s always been the knowledge that one day I’d have to go back home to hang out with Dad and not really know how long I’d be back in Adelaide for.

What’s amazing though is that for far longer than was expected, Dad’s lung capacity stayed strong. Based on advice from a doctor friend and responding to data from drug trials on rats, he started to take high levels of anti-oxidants and until recently his lungs were good. But at the end of last year he was hospitalised following a stomach flu and as seems to be the way, suddenly felt, I don’t know what. His age? Breathless?

Putting aside the fact that Dad is ill, I am looking forward to hanging out with him some more. As a child he preferred to teach me maths than play sports, but as I’ve grown older I realise how much he’s influenced me – to love science and to be more of an independent worker than an employee. Without a doubt, one of the reasons why I’m with Tim is that in many good ways he reminds me of my father.

So yeah, I don’t really know how to finish this post. I still need to work out the best tickets and how to fit this around work and how to manage being away from Linz  so soon after I arrived here.

Maybe it will give me more motivation to write postcards.