This State of Independence

Five to nine in the morning. I sit in a cafe looking out of the window at the rain. A slow drizzle floats endlessly down, warm and quiet. Outside it smelt of green things and growth, inside it is coffee mixed with deodorant from the business people surrounding me. The quiet clink and hiss from the counter mixes with the surrounding conversation. They talk in upbeat words like return on investment, niche markets and publicly perceived image. I have no public image today, it is my day off, I just sit quietly and write.

For a long time now I have thought that I do not have a work ethic, that somehow I was born without that compulsory requirement to modern society. But sitting here it occurs to me that I do, it is just not the same one that I am surrounded by.

Money. As deals are made and game plans play out, the underlying theme here is money. Making money and then making more money. All of it to buy things. I don’t want things, I am as happy here with a seven dollar coffee and scone as I would be looking at a shiny new Porsche outside my house. Time is what is important to me. I work to make time to do things, not to buy things.

My whole life has been an attempt to work as little as possible to make myself as much time as possible. I might just use that time to sit and look at the rain, but to me that is what is important no matter how much of a waste it would seem to those around me if they only knew my thoughts. They might say they are working now to make money so that they will have time in the future. But who knows what the future will bring, I would rather have my time now especially as I do not believe that after a lifetime devoted to making money you can suddenly stop, retiring as it is usually called and is the death of a lot of people. No I enjoy what I have now, little as it may be it is much much more than I should think those around me have. Far from being one of life’s losers I have just realised that I am very lucky to be this way.

No wonder people think I live on a different planet . . . I do.

Life is never dull when you make time for a cup of coffee . . .

Solitude and Loneliness

I drove home yesterday saying these two words to myself, thinking about them. They mean nothing if you say them quickly, you have to draw the words out as you speak stretching the vowels out like an endless Sunday afternoon.

At first they seemed to mean the same thing - being alone, and they do, physically but the difference is emotional. In solitude are happy to be alone, if you are not, then loneliness creeps in. Having lived on my own for 35 years I have been both. It didn’t matter where I was - I have been lonely amongst friends at a crowded dinner table, the conversation whirling around me like a hurricane with me at it’s still centre insulated from from it all. I have also found a peaceful sense of solitude in the centre of a city, just sitting watching the crowds mill around me. The same in the countryside, where I lived. On a quiet evening I would often take a bottle or two of beer and drive out to a spot at the edge of the hills at dusk. From there I could look out over the Lothian countryside and beyond to the Firth of Forth. As the darkness crept in and the lights came on I would sit, sometimes in solitude, sometimes in loneliness but always at peace with the world around me.

Those days are long gone now. The world turns ever changing and I change with it. The difference at least for me, from those days is of course an emotional one - love. Since I fell in love and we got married the loneliness has gone. I can be anywhere in the world, in a crowded airport, or on an isolated empty beach and there will always be someone else with me, there is a connection between us that is independent of physical space. It breaks occasionally when we fall out with each other and then that aching emptiness that is loneliness for me seeps back but that is rare and part of being in love, reminding me that love is something you do as well as what you feel.

Solitude. Loneliness. Peaceful, beautiful words that connect with what is deep within me.

The Ghost of Syd Barrett

Of all the things endangered by modern society, silence must be the most at risk. I have noticed it more lately, silence is the space between things like the white paper that surrounds the black lettering, defining it. I love to sit quietly somewhere and just listen. Sound surrounds me - call it what you will, noise, music, speech it is all there like a shell surrounding my silence. Yet as I sit I gradually hear the silent spaces between the sounds, the shell is not as impenetrable as it seems. Silence is not nothing though, it has a sound all of it’s own, a kind of hum that is probably just my ears but I like to think of as the sound of the world, the sound of life underlying everything else. Sometimes it almost has a texture about it, soft like water and if I could learn to immerse myself there I could move through the world unnoticed.

Of course I am one of the worst offenders against silence. In the presence of others I talk incessantly. It is just nervousness of course, my way of coping in the presence of other people. “ I know you are all better than me” I am saying, “proper grown-up people, but please like me” I find it annoying that I do it, so it must be intensly irritating to those around me I know but I am trying to stop, to listen . . .

( ps the best way to hear silence as I do is to listen to the beginning of Shine on you crazy diamond by Pink Floyd, the very beginning note is the sound I hear when there is nothing else there)

Winter Sunshine

I feel the Sun most in the Wintertime. When the Sun is low in the sky and the shadows are long and cold so that walking through them is like walking through another world. A world of fairies dancing on your grave and years passing by in a day. Coming out of the shadows the Sun welcomes me back wrapping me in it’s warmth like the softest of soft blankets. So soft that I can feel it but when I try to touch it it is not there. The warmth seeps through me comfortingly alive pushing the chill ahead of it and out out with a shiver . . .

Agent Z put his head in his hands, would this man never stop wittering on ? Two days now they had been together on surveillance and not once had he stopped talking rubbish. If it wasn’t that he needed this job he would have put a bullet through his forehead days ago, just to get some peace. Shaking his head at the thought he took few deliberate breaths in an effort to calm himself . . .

What do you think? I say glancing down at my youngest, but he seems to have his head in his hands and is shaking it slowly from side to side.

And what is reality anyway . . .

The Christmas Fridge

I may not be religious but I do celebrate Christmas. Along with the New Year it is a mid winter festival, but whereas I find new year a time to look back upon the year that has been and plan for the year to come, Christmas is the time to celebrate now - the present moment. 

The world is such a beautiful place and we are so lucky to be here that it is good just to pause for a moment during life's bustle and enjoy it. And strangely enough I notice most when I look in the fridge. It is at this time of year that the family comes together and we all help prepare for the celebration. As we do so the fridge fills with extraordinary things like actors waiting in the wings for their appearance. As the meal begins we will all be lost in each others' company, it is that memory of the fridge that reminds me of what we have here, all of us, together.

My teenagers also spend a large percentage of their time looking in the fridge, but I am not sure they see it the same way I do . . .

In the Autumn sunshine with Glen Campbell

Saturday 4.49pm

I am very tired.

Nicola broke her ankle three weeks ago now, but it feels like three months. It has been tough on her, she has not slept well because of the pain and can hardly walk let alone drive which for an independent person is incredibly frustrating. I have seen people scooting about on crutches before but little realised how difficult it really is, suddenly having to use muscles in unaccustomed ways and of course with both hands on the crutches you cannot carry anything and end up relying completely on those around you. The children have been great, but there is only so much they can do and so I have been plunged suddenly into trying to do all the things Nicola usually does whilst working full time. Family life goes on and any woman reading this will say "welcome to our world" and I would agree with you, having done the housewife and mother bit for three years when our youngest was little I already know what it is like. But I had more time then, and it does not make it any easier being suddenly plunged into it. Now there are more jobs to be done than there is time available and I rush from one thing to the next and the next and the next . . . . from the moment I awake until I go to bed . . .

But today was different.

While washing the dishes I was making some soup (Beetroot and Cumin). I was peeling the roasted beets, Whichita Lineman was playing in the background and glancing up I caught sight of the Autumn sunshine coming low through the window. As these three things came together, in that moment, I knew that although life may be tough sometimes there is nowhere else in the world that I want to be.




Contentment - it lies within the small things in life, put them together and they add up to so much more . . . .