Staring into the headlights

Here's the most shocking thing arising from my traumatic last week...

Canoe Lake, Portsmouth c.1960s/70s

I have written/worked very little over these last nine days or so. But that’s understandable given my father’s recent death and the practical paraphernalia forced upon my consequent to that. Under such circumstances, lack of creativity is hardly something to beat myself up over. Indeed, the morsels I have written have been limited by theme as well as volume; my two Substack posts are evidence of that.

This is the third and final post (I hope!) driven by these recent events.

What it lays bare may — from a personal perspective — be the most significant thing I need to consider going forward. And the most shocking.

When clearing out the sheltered accommodation where my father had been living, I was asked how long he had been there. “Years” was the best I could manage at the time; “at least twenty”. A few days later I discovered that his residence in the flat was in fact a fair chunk longer than twenty years — but that wasn’t the most disturbing thing.

When he moved in, my father was just three years older than I am now.

That brought me up really short. I am all too aware of the dangers of comparing apples with pears, but even so… realising how close one might be to a similar fate is entirely sobering.

We live our lives with only one bookend in view — i.e. when we were born — and we navigate our journey by looking in the rear-view mirror. The only time-related currency we have is curated by memories, photographs, evidence of the things we did and when we did them. [A little like the image of Canoe Lake above where I often used to go as a young child.] And sadly — and perhaps inevitably — as we look back, all too often we forget to look forward and miss the scenery passing us by.

There is some comfort in the concrete in the past — and nothing but the nebulous in the future. And no matter how much we might try to engineer our relationship to time in some other way, I suspect it must always be so.

Which is what makes the revelation about my parents’ admission to their sheltered housing so shocking. Not only does it offer a glimpse into a potential future, it also ascribes a time parameter to it — and it forces a critical question: “what if that experience is awaiting me in three years, or five, or seven?” Having said that however, this is a question whose primary concern isn’t the nature of that potentially impending experience, but rather the space between now and then.

However big — or small — that gap may be, what am I going to do with it?

It’s all very easy and glib for people to say '“live for the moment”, but I venture to suggest that for the majority who declaim that it’s nothing but a cliché, a soundbite; that those who (quite rightly) espouse such a sentiment actually do nothing with it, and go about their lives as normal — after all, that second bookend is nowhere to be seen.

But I find myself wanting to process the gap into which I have been allowed insight, to stare it down, to turn it into something meaningful; if you like, to carve opportunity from it.

A concrete example. As some of you know, I’ve been toying with the notion of undertaking a ‘road-trip’ to Scotland in the spring; now I feel as if I must do it. From ‘nice idea’ to ‘imperative’.

And I’ve been berating myself for not writing enough, or not crafting the ‘right’ things in the ‘right’ way, or not pushing myself creatively, not being bold enough; and I’ve done so from the somewhat vacuous claim to “live for the moment”. But what if I look at things from the perspective of ‘filling a gap’ — or at least fitting as much in that gap as I possibly can? And to fill it with the most appropriate things too. Like a road-trip to Scotland.

So this is my immediate preoccupation. And I’m giving myself the next couple of days to cogitate, consider, contemplate — and probably lots of other verbs beginning with ‘c’..! Whether I come up with a new game-plan at the end of the process, who knows? After all, at one extreme I could decide I’m never going to write another word and dedicate myself to hedonism… though we all know that’s not going to happen!

Maybe nothing will change because I decide my current course is ‘adequate’, it ‘fits’ perfectly well. But I suspect not.

Indeed, I hope not…

---