A Letter to...Myself Thirty Years From Now

Why is your heart fluttering so? What are you afraid of? Heart flutters, as you should by now realise, are a predicament of age; it's not the same bird you knew from youth fluttering against its cage.
No, it's an entirely different and more beautiful sounding bird. Finally, more at peace within itself, that on occasion will make its presence felt so that you appreciate its mechanism and which would look like a fine time piece if snapped open: all tiny cogs and wheels interlocking and tripping over one another to enable the sweetest music to play, though to your untrained ear it might sound like dull, and sometimes rapid or irregular, thuds.
Whatever happened to that ear? You used to have one, as in twin appendages, for rhythm and music. When did it died?
I can tell you why: because you let it. You stopped listening for the pitches of life that very few others heard. And with it the impetus, the delight in movement alone, for movement's sake died also. By slow degrees the body's dance was lost, as was its natural grace and fluidity. You let it grow tired at too young an age.
That was your fatal error.
Thinking that you could get that same energy back whenever you wanted; that the motivation to do so would be there. Because thirty years ago, if you remember, you were overly focussed on the expansion of the mind and so the body, although not neglected, was less attended to, which is why it's in the state it is. And your mind for all its learning and intellectual leanings is not as sharp either; its astuteness has dimmed somewhat, though its ability to fixate is just as potent.
All this I feel I can say with some assurance. But if I'm proved wrong, I've not wasted my breath. It means somewhere between the writing of this letter and your reading of it you took a turn, and not just about your living room with a book in hand as you were doing at thirty-six and could have continued doing, and made alterations. This then will be a 'what could have been', which both you and I are revisiting because once written you will forget it until thirty years on when I open and re-read this letter. Ah, memory! How it floods back!
Breathe...read on. There's more...
There's still time if habit won. And no, you're not the same now as you were then. Nobody is. Nobody would be.
What were our parents like at sixty-six? That's how you hoped to be – as mellowed as them, and more relaxed and practical with it. But our experiences and interactions with the world are not theirs, so if that has not come to pass then don't be too self-critical. You are you, even if that's not how you set out to be. There is goodness and darkness in all; we are shaped by triumphs and losses, brought low or raised high.
You, I, could have done many things better: been more rational, less moral, less sensitive and more adaptive to environments, people and circumstances, but you met such trials as best you could, often with doubt and trepidation, though occasionally with impulsiveness that you regretted later. You frequently chose the forks in the road that did not serve you but served others. You might think that wise or foolish now. I cannot comment either on those decisions I know of or those I know nothing about. And I advise you to let them go if you haven't already. Don't waste further time analysing what has passed, or wondering what might yet come.
Live!
These are the years to do just that.

Originally penned and submitted to The Guardian  for their A Letter to... feature,  September 2017.

Picture credit: A Girl Feeding a Bird in a Cage, Jacob Maris

Dog Child

Literature abounds with dogs. Greyfriar's Bobby, Jock of the Bushveld, Red Dog, Rudyard Kipling's Dog Stories, The Incredible Journey, though that had a Siamese cat too, to name but a few. And then there's those who were companions to, like Tintin and his faithful dog Snowy or the fox terrier, Montmorency in Three Men and a Boat, but there are also more famous examples: Queen Victoria's Dash; Queen Elizabeth II's Susan, the first in a long line of corgis and dorgis; the politician Roy Hattersley's Buster who gained notoriety for killing a goose in a Royal park; and the poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Flush, whom Virginia Woolf penned a ingenious biography of.
I don't intend to write a biographical account, as the novelist Elizabeth von Armin did, of my extraordinary life and dogs, because my life (thus far) has been unremarkable and without the milestones that most adults in their late-thirties have achieved (or failed at or had difficulties in): partners, children, fulfilling career and the like, so very dull indeed, but dogs I can remark upon, though none were ever truly mine.
They were the family's - belonging to the master of the house or to a unit, that being either my father or my grandfathers. Our dogs mainly looked to the men, except when it came to anything concerning food where the women were chief of that domain: the kitchen and satisfying the household's stomachs. Strange, that the dogs all picked up on that pecking order, not that the men had dominance overall, it was just how duties, for the most part, were divided. Where they naturally fell, but even then borders were regularly or occasionally crossed. My maternal grandfather made the morning cup of tea, baked bread and vacuum-cleaned, as well brewed beer and grew tomatoes and runner beans. And yet, Sam dog, my maternal grandparents' golden lab would fetch his tin of Chum and present it to my grandmother, before trying anyone else who could manage a tin opener.
Dogs have an uncanny ability to read and ingratiate their owners, and the owners either don't realise they're doing it or submit, meekly. You're part of the pack, though the dog is usually the Leader; you might think you are and the dog might let you think that, but in your heart you know you're not, because dogs lie close to our human hearts as if that organ were a cosy fire they were warming themselves by.
A home is not a home without a dog, preferably one dozing with one eye closed, the other half-open and listening out for a turn of a key and returning footsteps. Most dogs greet, unlike cats, and know before you do when you're about to arrive. The welcome you receive is pure joy, occasionally overdone as in you might be bowled over, literally to the floor, and licked clean, but it is, I believe, a show of genuine affection, though it can get wearisome, once through the door, if said dog continues to bounce at your heels or tug your trouser leg.
The Master coming home signalled Mini Cheddars or bread-sticks (I got some Cheddars and a sip, just a sip, of low-alcoholic beer), just as much as visiting a pub meant pilfered crisps under the table or a bit of sausage if a sausage was being had. I was, of course, allowed a Coke and to eat crisps or my scampi and chips at the table.
Dogs know. No other domesticated animal beats their extraordinary senses, nor powers of persuasion (well, children possibly), although I know in that regard I'm biased having grown up around them. I'm sure I thought I was a canine at some point, or at the very least that I had an unusually furry older brother who was once mortal but cursed at birth as in the fairy tales I was exceedingly fond of; or I thought I'd wake up one day and find he was wearing clothes like a character from Wind of the Willows or Beatrix Potter. I was an imaginative child and dogs were playmates who proved far more agreeable than cousins.
The fact of the matter was that I was an only. And when you're an only dogs make excellent familiars. The dog is always there to practise your reading to or listen to secrets; to watch cartoons with or share a game in the garden, so that it becomes unclear as to whom is the faithful shadow.

Picture credit: Jennie, Higglety Pigglety Pop! by Maurice Sendak

Slippery to Grasp

A lucky escape or another catastrophic error? Both. Neither. Catastrophic is too strong a word, and that situation has passed, relatively recently in my present, but a little over a year ago at your time of reading. Although I hope due to my prophetic tendency I'm not now facing or have been through a similar scenario and am yet again tormenting myself about my ungovernable urge to speak honestly and my inability to make a decision, any decision, when put under pressure.
I only crumble, however, when a choice is before me and the decision to be reached pertains to me and not to others. Considering others is actually easier, not exactly a piece of cake but it changes the angle at which you look at what's on offer. When there's nothing or nobody to take into account apart from your own preference it's extremely hard, particularly if only some of your conditions are met e.g. location, environment etc., and if the unknown or the sameness releases fear and allows unresolved issues to resurface, so that instead of being open you meet it with stubbornness; more wilful stubbornness than is appropriate to the circumstance.
There is nowhere to go from that. Unless you can push through. I've done both with varying successes and disasters over the years. There have been times I've been relieved when a situation that I've wanted out of has been brought to a natural close; natural in the sense that I hadn't had to confront it, though it may have adversely affected others. When I've drawn the line then the extrication itself has been almost as unbearable as the scene I've wanted to escape from, not because in exercising my rights I was doing anything wrong, but because in doing so I felt I was letting people down. Leaving, though staying wouldn't improve my position. If I remained, from duty or guilt, nothing would alter: not my feelings and not the place, and the same stress symptoms would occur.
Whatever I've done has never really worked out to my advantage, and I don't seem to have learned much because I'm still repeating when I should (by now) know better. But then on that, I'm not even clear. I don't trust my own judgement, especially if I'm overwhelmed and the space for clear-thinking is not forthcoming. Yet, when an event has occurred and died it can also be hard to look back on with any deeper or new understanding. Sometimes that doesn't happen at all. It just sinks, barely retained when at the time it felt so critical. Grows so diminished that it results in confusion if you make any attempt to recall it. If you manage to, for the sake of others, you find you can't explain what happened or justify your reasons for doing what you did. None of what you felt then: the mental turmoil, the emotional distress, matters.
Those 'in the moment' emotions aren't long-lasting. By the following week they will have paled and the nervous energy will have exited, though you might reflect for weeks, months over the decision taken, if not the detail of how it came about. Did you make it even, if it was yours to make in full command? Or did the words just pop out of your mouth? It's not a sense of regret that resides with you as you know the end result wouldn't change if exactly the same set of circumstances arose: you would make the same choices, but if one tiny detail had been different you might have chosen differently, perhaps more wisely, and been able to see the picture for what it truly was rather than what you thought it might entail.
In being backwards-looking, you're able to appreciate your fears yet berate your stupidity for letting them once again get the better of you, though you know at some point another attempt will be made; and you're still not completely convinced (now there's distance between you and it) that you were 'in the right', because did you not act instinctively rather than rationally? Should you begin to question your perception of events as they unfold and your reactions to, as well as your misgivings, both then and later?
A depression of spirits descends as if you've failed some sort of test for the umpteenth time, which due to your inability to grasp has now slipped even farther away, whereupon Hamlet interjects: Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.

Picture credit: A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach, 1885, Stanhope Alexander Forbes

Heavenly Constructs

People's ideas of Heaven interest me, whether they be of a faith-based view or fantasy-like, similar to a utopian design. None exist in actuality, that we know of, that proof attests to, and when we do get to know we can't once we get there report back, and if, by some miracle, we do, then those living need to remember not to disbelieve but not to believe that when their time comes it will be as their loved one said it would, because this place, space, whenever it is, if you believe it exists, may only appear as you want it to, so that everyone doing whatever it is they do over there will experience it differently i.e. nobody will see it with the same pair of eyes.
Of course, we have that here too, to a lesser degree, where that difference is largely reserved to the trivial: how we interpret colour and the ugliness or attractiveness of something: a person, a building, a landscape, rather than the actual form it takes. We generally tend to agree, for example, that a neoclassic building is neoclassic and not some Grecian or Gothic affair, whereas some imagined heavens allow just that. Anything goes, as they say, so two people can stand before the same structure which one will see as Romanesque and the other as a glittering tower of glass. In other words, these perceptual differences in these imagined heavens are far from subtle, and yet are not, in the works I've come across, compared: a character does not ask another if what they're seeing is the same, because it's either assumed that it is, or if one does have a semi-awareness that it's not (and which the narrative makes clear) it doesn't matter. It doesn't alter the fact of their being there if they do not share the same vision.
Often, the heavens described aren't too dissimilar to life on earth, except there might be more freedoms in connection with physicality and time and manifesting dreams. For the main protagonist, recently crossed over to this new plane, it's a continuation of life and a Disneyland; or reversely, they might be tied up with the past and existing in a void, very much alone, replaying events at will and at random. That the protagonist is there and realises it (or lets on to the reader) somewhere in the narrative seems to be main crux of these fictional ideals, and the rest we are left either to enjoy or question.
Imaginary heavens or conversations with a fictionalised version of a god-figure must, I can only assume, offer some comfort then, as well as amusement, and regardless of your religious convictions because I imagine if you were offended you wouldn't be drawn to such material, unless you wanted (and some people do) to be offended. Humans are perverse in that regard, usually so as to take the moral high ground and to dismiss that which others have a belief in or are entertained by.
Our curiosity, it seems about this unknown place, will never be satisfied, and will always be preached and written of, held up as part of organised religion or as a sort of playground. Maybe we are duping ourselves (and disbelieving, far-too-rational types would say we were) but the damage whilst living, if there is any, is little, not in just supposing a heaven of some description exists. Please do not imagine I am giving credence to a Paradise which is reached at a cost of innocent lives. That's a subverted interpretation by Man, which has as with Scripture been corrupted and caused skirmishes. Organised religion, or anything with a following, can bring out the best and worst of human nature. Although, perhaps that's not the fault of a doctrine, just human behaviour and its extremities.
Would Heaven be any more tolerant? Ideas of generally lead us to think this way – that peace reigns and love has conquered any separatist attitudes – despite their being no certainties that a heavenly existence (if that's the right term) is peace-loving, or even that there is eternal life.
Heavens constructed, by you alone or populated by fiction with or without the influence of faith-based teachings, expand on and perpetuate its mystery – it can appear to you as you want it to and you can be, do anything you like with added abilities. The limitations in your being and to your thinking removed, thereby increasing the appeal of its Creation.

Picture credit: LEGOLAND Minilands (London), Wikimedia Commons