Sometimes it feels too difficult to write this blog. I am tired and over-stretched. Events, major and minor, have been piling in over the last few weeks. Right now I have a swarm of half-formed thoughts buzzing at the edge of my mind, but I don’t have the energy, or the time – it’s five o’clock on Thursday afternoon, to engage properly with any of them.
I wonder if I’m not experiencing in microcosm what seems at present to be taking place in the world at large: a kind of generalised chaos and dysfunction. And if I am, how many other people are feeling the same way? While we are busy responding to what goes on in our tiny, personal orbits, who knows to what extent we are susceptible also to the greater currents that tug at us.
I’m noticing particularly that in my universe this seems to be a time of endings. I’m within a few days of concluding a project that has been running now for nearly four years, helping someone to tell the story of their life and the business they founded. Today also, I had the final call with a writer on whose journey, literal and metaphorical, I’ve accompanied them over the last eighteen months.
And in an ending of an altogether different magnitude, we lost a very close family member at the weekend after a more-than-decade-long battle with Parkinson’s; one she endured with a quite extraordinary degree of acceptance and fortitude. None of us know yet what this will mean to us in the longer term, how it may reshape the pattern of our lives. There is no change without loss, and loss itself is change.
At the same time, the imminent publication of a paperback will give the biography of my great-great-uncle a second lease of life. And in just over three weeks’ time we leave for France for two months, where we ourselves will gain a new lease of life in the sun; along with time to pick up the personal creative projects which have been gasping for breath in recent weeks.
For all these reasons the coming months feel like the turning of a page. So if – to fantasise for a moment and grant myself god-like agency – the tables were to be turned, and what happens in my microscopic life were to be mirrored on a global scale, what would it mean? A lessening of the political, financial, technological frenzy in whose grip we currently seem to be? A pause for more connection and reflection in society?
It’s in our nature to look for causes and effects, for patterns that help us to give meaning to our lives and make sense of the world around us. I will be seventy-seven in September. Part of me says: relax, you’ve still got plenty of time to do all the things you want to do. But somewhere else, in some deeper place, there’s a more urgent voice saying: pay good attention to those patterns and don’t waste a second of the time available to you. Also, make sure that everything you do from here on is entirely congruent with who you believe you are and what you value.
This blog, I have realised lately, is fundamental to that call. It asks for discipline and rewards me with rhythm and continuity and a sense of accomplishment. It grounds me and encourages me to seek those very connections and patterns that seem, in the moment of writing, to make sense of things.
Furthermore, I have the notion that you, good readers who tolerate my ruminations, are here with me in the chaos. I don’t know you all, but I am certain I wouldn’t be writing this without you. For that I am more grateful than you can know.
A Few Kind Words 