January 2019

My ageing mother

I spend a great deal of time at home. Which is to say, I spend even more time at home than I used to, and it is a trend to be discouraged. I find it harder than ever to leave the house, and not because I have nothing to do or have any kind of social phobia. But since my mother came to live nearby, I am around to answer the phone in case of need: a habit, which started about three years ago when my father got frail, has hardened.

That’s a pity, since I’ve always found it so hard to motivate myself anyway, that any added disincentive is unhelpful. I just have to remember to go out, make myself less available, less amenable to answering the phone when I have to work.

But that is harder to do than it sounds. I accede the general principle when offered it, but find that it must warp to take in a new reality: My mum is unwell. She tells me often that she feels tired, and complains of various recurring problems, all of which have been investigated and remedied as far as possible. None of it really helps, unfortunately, to answer a situation which could be described quite simply, as, “Getting old, and hate it.” And I wonder at our tendency to prize life almost for the sake of it, instead of looking more closely at its quality…

I am so grateful for my mother’s continuing presence. She has had no choice but to rely on me, which she finds hard. And I have had no choice but to grow up a bit more, be patient, and accommodating – but not too much – and willing, but not too willing. Which I also find hard, but liberating too: it is rare that something upsets me, these days. From learning to accept the inevitability of ageing and its effects, I have learned many intangible lessons that it might otherwise take lifetimes to acquire.

Yesterday, Mum was taken into hospital, a decision made urgently necessary because of a combination of her limitations and mine: she now needs support to walk, which I cannot give her, and because an accident at home would spell disaster, we cannot easily experiment with other options like zimmers and walking sticks. So together we are still learning about compromise, and about accepting oneself despite obvious frustrations. It might be that hospital is the best place for Mum at the moment. I’ll keep you posted.

Thanks for listening.

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Unreasonable expectations?

I watched the crowds of travellers at Gatwick airport with disbelief: lines and lines of people waiting patiently to board flights that would take them on holidays to the sun, or to see Santa and his reindeer. If that was me, and I was cornered on the floor of an airport lounge waiting for a miracle that never came, I would probably go home. For thousands of holiday makers, that was not the reality, as delays caused by drones overhead, stretched into hours and days.

We put up with all manner of indignities and disappointments in the hope of something better, which on the one hand, is reassuring: it is good to be stoic, and to stay optimistic. But I can’t help wondering why we are so willing to believe in the fantasy of better, if only we will fly away somewhere else; and I’m surprised that more people didn’t conclude from the delays that they would be happier at home, with their perhaps rather muted family celebrations. Surely home cannot have become so objectionable that we would rather spend days sleeping on a floor, than go back to our usual comforts. Is the fascination of elsewhere so gripping?

Or have our expectations grown too great? I recognise that Christmas and New Year are family time, and that we want to be together and do something special. There is, equally, intense pressure on us to do that and be that, and to buy our way to that special place we call happiness.

Even so, flying away in the depths of winter somehow goes against my grain, when all I really want to do is hibernate. And surely, instead of being encouraged to jet to the sun on 21^st December, we should remember that winter weather is unpredictable and that snow, ice and dark nights make travelling more hazardous. In other words, it might be better for us all, if we could surrender to the seasonal wisdom that says, now is a time for resting and doing less.

As for demonising members of the public for supposedly disrupting air traffic, are we really ready to vilify unknown others because they inconvenienced our holiday plans? We are encouraged to believe that the consumer is king, and that, if we only want a thing enough, we should have it. But I do not believe that anyone’s life deserves to be ruined because our seasonal expectations took a dip.

We all say we wish we didn’t have to work so hard, and that the demands of the commute are intense. Yet when we have the chance to do nothing – and a seasonal break over winter is the perfect excuse – we itch to be elsewhere. Just sayin’…

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Reasons to be cheerful.

Perhaps our future prospects fill us with gloom and we have a lot to feel gloomy about: the likelihood of losing our place within the European Community, despite, apparently, more and more people expressing doubts about that. (The European view appears to be that we as ‘a nation’ appear determined to rush to the cliff edge and tumble over it, though there are ways to avoid that. The consensus appears to be that we have lost our senses.) Will that cause hyper-inflation? A rush on medicines or petrol rationing? Who knows.

There are also worries about the state of the USA, the dominance of China, the situation in Syria and Palestine, the environment, the economy, and many others…

But in the midst of all the problems, I can see that there are reasons to be cheerful. So if you need reasons to be cheerful, here are a handful to ponder.

~ All of life progresses in small steps. Therefore every step forward is progress. One piece of litter bagged, one journey walked, one shopping bag re-used, one environmental product purchased, one purchase not made, a letter written, a visit made and enjoyed, and idea captured on the page, a good photograph. All such things as these make a difference.

~ These days, when we want to eat, we can, if we choose, reduce that process to about ten minutes. Meals come in all shapes, sizes and packages, for which I am grateful. We can’t recall how hard it was in the middle ages to procure enough to eat before actually wasting away. The lengthy processes of finding food, cleaning it, preparing, cooking and serving it was so protracted that those who ate regularly – a privileged minority – employed whole retinues to perform all the different tasks of food preparation, while the rest of us lived on a mess of small porridge leavened with the occasional apple or piece of turbot caught illegally from the Friar’s ponds and very likely eaten raw. We are very fortunate indeed that food is easy to come by.

~ In the UK we can still express our opinions freely without an oppressive degree of state control. Reading John Simpson’s three volumes of autobiography is a sobering reminder that innocent, kind, intelligent, brave people – often young people and students – die for the causes of freedom of association and freedom of speech. They do not deserve to die, and we would do well to remember what a precious gift it is, to live in a part of the world where expressing a view will not lead to arrest, detention without trial or summary execution.

~ Happiness is worth fighting for.

~ We can have fun, therefore I think that is what I will do, this year. Have fun, and thank my lucky stars that I still have the health to enjoy it.

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Not making New Year Resolutions

Phew! What a relief. No New Year Resolutions for me.

I think that, on balance, I have enough to get on with, without feeling guilty that, yet again, I have made – several – promises and didn’t keep them. At the start of any year, who needs that kind of pressure? In fact, making any promise to do or not to do, so often feels like a taunt, an invitation to stray. So now I save my headspace for things I want to get done: phone that friend, go shopping, go for a walk, do some work. Just do it.

Perhaps because the New Year is so close to my birthday, when I was younger, the New Year was an almost sacrosanct time for starting over, beginning again, doing better… But by whose measure should that be judged? My own view of what I was doing, was – and too often still is – inclined to disappointment and perfectionism. Which is to say, that I too often failed to notice the many small-step achievements that inch me from A to B, and castigated myself too readily for not reaching the stars when I said I would.

Perhaps now is not quite the right time to arrive at the stars. Or perhaps, I would be better to realise that I get to the stars one small step at a time; doing a small thing towards a big aim is so much better than doing nothing at all.

So progress in small steps is the order of the day, and thankfulness that I usually manage to do – most of – what I plan to do. Which sounds far more sustainable than a bunch of promises to myself that I know, almost even before I make them, I will feel guilty about.

There is no substitute for the small determination that takes us an inch forward at a time.

Thanks for reading, and Happy New Year 2019. May all our dreams come true.

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