I used to be fit...

The tyranny of our lives' past tense.

When I was training for my one-and-only London Marathon, I would think nothing of donning my shorts on a Sunday morning and embarking on a fourteen-mile training run. Those were strangely blissful mornings.

Now, fifteen years, one knee operation, and a slightly dicky heart later, I’d struggle to run a quarter of a mile!

There’s something about those rear-view mirror words — “used to”, or many verbs in the past tense — which can be negative, disheartening; often they carry with them layers of regret, perhaps of missed opportunities or the knowledge that like-for-like repetition of ‘the best stuff’ is no longer possible. Statement such as “I used to run fourteen miles” are now almost meaningless. Not only that, but the joy such events may have gifted — e.g. the ‘blissful mornings’ — can start to leach away as our emotional recall of them weakens (even if our sentimental attachment doesn’t). It’s a ‘double-whammy’, this getting older and the inevitable increase in events and experiences we now preface with “used to”.

Its partner-in-crime is, of course, a reduction in instances of “I will”: “I will go on holiday to Italy” - but now I can say I did that, so tick; “I will get married / have children” - tick; “I will write my first book” - tick (if we’re lucky). Traditionally, we tend to think of a ‘bucket list’ as being those things we’d like to do in the future, not realising that we’ve been building an inverse list our entire lives: all that we ever did also consigned to ‘a bucket’, though clearly one of a different register.

If only to make our existence feel ‘worthwhile’, we should always hope that our ‘used bucket’ contains its fair share of positive experiences. My marathon was one such — though oddly enough I remember the training more fondly than the race itself.

In that context, what about that future tense “I will”? When — and to what extent — do we merely start paying lip service to it? And if we do, what does that say about us: that we’re happy to exist on past glories? That there is nothing else we aspire to achieve? For example, “I want to go back to Barcelona” is a perfectly valid wish: but do I say that because I really intend to do so, or because, instinctively, I know I’m never likely to and therefore it’s a bucket list ‘free hit’? If the latter, then the statement is vacuous.

As our future temporally shortens (as it inevitably must) so the ‘future tense’ in our life must surely become more important, essential to hold on to. You might argue that, when we’re younger, “I will” can be used to preface a whole raft of pipe dreams, half-baked ideas, innocent desires. As we age — and as ‘used to’ starts to gain the upper hand — we should invest so much more into our shrinking catalogue of “I will” entries. We need to mean what we say.

Is this conundrum any different for a writer? [Apologies for the circuitous route to get here, but I wanted to lay the groundwork...!] Well ‘yes’ and ‘no’. ‘No’ in the sense that we should, like anyone else, be selective and serious about the “I will”s to which we put our name. I confess that right now (in terms of a conventional ‘bucket list’) I wiped mine clean some time ago — to the extent that there may only be one thing residing on it at the moment: to visit Scotland’s Western Isles.

But what about the less ‘mainstream’, those craft-related ambitions which apply to a writer? (Or a painter, a sculptor, a musician etc. etc.)

Generically I have no issue. “To keep writing” (‘until the light goes out’ indeed!) has been front and centre for some years now; but I suggest ‘keeping going’ is woefully inadequate as a future-facing ambition. It lacks specificity as much as it lacks meaningful commitment. Surely we should aspire to those incarnations of “I will” that will inspire us, allow us to differentiate past from future, stretch boundaries — or, even better, cross boundaries! Some of that differentiation, stretching, inspiration, must come from breaking new ground. Writing another novel — whilst a laudable goal — risks being nothing more than turning the same old handle unless there is something ‘new’ about it (and that’s ‘new’ for us as an individual writer, rather than ‘new’ in the universal scheme of things).

I am working on the first re-draft of a ‘new’ novel that I hope to finish at some point this year. Yes, it’s a little different from my previous work, but I am not convinced it is ‘new’ enough given the analysis above. Other than that, I have no ‘live’ writing projects of my own. Zero. My “I will” bucket list has also been ‘wiped clean’.

There are two ways to look at that I suppose: negatively, in that I have nothing to work on; or positively, in that I could work on anything. As far as my writing is concerned, I’m striving to avoid wallowing in “used to”, and trying really hard to crystallise “I will”.

Future tense, not past — because that defines what happens next.

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