October soliloquy from an autumn child

Let me photograph you in this light
In case this is the last time
That we might be exactly like we were
Before we realised
We were sad of getting old
It made us restless

The dreams are strange.  They come in the night and wrest me from my peaceful slumber, they dance with me and push me around, and they take me on constant circles, revisiting the same old ground time after time after time. I'm not brilliantly well at present, I have no resilience, my confidence has been shot to absolute pieces.  Problems and issues, which a year ago I would smash out the ballpark for fun, now weigh heavily on me, and become exaggerated into mighty mountains within the confines of my mind.  At the age of 34, I seemed to be all over life.  At the age of 35, it all seems to have come crashing down from the inside.  What happened?  COVID, I suppose, changed everything.  Work pressures, home pressures, family pressures. And I think the eradication of so much in a social sense - be that watching the Gulls, meeting friends for a drink, shopping, and so on, has taken a substantial toll.

Thank goodness for English history, which has become my primary means of escapism during this whole sorry episode.  At least there's Simon Schama's inimitable A History of Britain DVDs, which I put on whenever there's a spare hour, and plenty of books to crack through.  There's a comfort that I've always found in studying our history - first of all, it reminds you of the hardships and battles that those before us had to fight, thus instantly connecting our struggles to the bigger picture; and secondly, it remains unchanged as the years draw ceaselessly on.  And I suppose that's comforting to me because I've realised that I'm getting older too, and that nothing is static, everything is always moving, evolving, becoming different.  And I'm not comfortable with that - as inevitable as it is, it scares me, and it makes me sad because I feel as though with every passing year, I'm losing my connection with my past, and with a lot of the people who are, or were, important to me.

I realised not too long ago that life is all about those people.  I don't know if I'm late arriving at that conclusion, or if I'm early for my age.  In Club 18-34 you live for yourself, your mind's busy grasping everything that life throws at you. It's a very exciting time, and I suppose that as you travel along your own road, you tend not to give too much thought to all the other drivers.  But then you realise - or at least I have - that without your fellow travellers, the road is barren and pointless.  So you make more frequent stops, you check in more with your friends, reconnect with the ones you haven't seen for ages, and try to reconcile your differences with the ones that have slipped away.  Then along comes COVID, and we're back to square one.  Nobody wants to go out anywhere because it's miserable.  You can't invite people over because it's no longer comfortable, or even permissible.  So what do you do?

The truth is that I'm tired of caring so much about things like this.  Absolutely, utterly tired of it.  I've tried so hard to make all kinds of things work this year, and I'm exhausted.  There have been some successes, of course - we finished the building project; I have a good core group of friends who are important to me; I think my marriage is in a good place.  But honestly - I'm all over the place at work; I can't deal with all the demands of family; and I miss too many people.  And I just don't have any answers to these problems at the moment.  So I'm trying to do what you're told to do; to be kind to myself, and take breaks, and go for walks, and get plenty of sleep, and so on.  Because I'm aware that I'm not firing on all cylinders right now, and I need to spend the remainder of autumn putting myself back together again. 

Autumn itself presents a dichotomy of joy and melancholy for me.  It's hands-down my favourite season, not because it brings a birthday, but because of the crisp clear mornings, the colours in the falling leaves, the early nights, the cosy house, the smell of stews, the thick jumpers, and the earthiness that speaks straight into my soul.  But these same aspects are also the ones that make me so very reflective - they always have done.  If spring and summer tune your senses to the optimism of the future, then autumn makes you look back, sometimes years, and offers the natural time to think, to remember, to grieve - and possibly also to atone and to forgive.  Autumn is the time when the bandages around my heart are liable to slip just a little bit, when ancient wounds unpick by a stitch or two, and when the questions of "why" and "what if" make their subtle creep out of the undergrowth and into the consciousness of the season.  It's not a great thing, but I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing either - I accept that I am a product of everything that has happened in my life, and with this version of self-awareness comes the memories.  It's just an inevitable part of me, so if you see me around town in a nice thick coat, kicking through the leaves and watching my breath dissipate in the morning air, be aware that my mind is likely to be nowhere near the rest of me.

So, here we are - late October 2020, Halloween on the way, Christmas inching into view.  And thank God for Christmas, for it's my sole aim at present.  At Christmas time we will make merry, we will watch the old familiar films, we will sing the timeless festive songs, we will breathe easier, we will love deeper, we will reconnect with each other, and we will reaffirm just how wonderful life really is.  In the meantime, I'm keeping my head firmly down as a means of pure self-preservation from the battering autumn winds and the driving autumn rain.  And I guess that's enough right now - the better dreams can happen another day.