Oh, the relentless ongoingness of life. Day after day, all these hours, minutes seconds. No respite except sleep. I nodded off on the sofa, my head lolling forward, and woke with a start, falling off some pavement, to see my neighbour walking by in a blue tee shirt. Oh and the guilt the guilt for feeling like this when life is short and precious, and I know and fully subscribe to all the live in the moment, live every day as if it were your last philosophies. And sometimes I am closer to that ideal, sometimes further away.
It's the same felt experience as the 'boredom' of my childhood. A feeling of lethargy and longing (but for what?) that would take me shuffling to my mother moaning 'I'm bored. I don't know what to do'. My mother would always say the same things 'how on earth can you be bored? You've got a cupboard full of lovely toys, shelves and shelves of books, a wonderful big garden, records to play, paper to write or draw on....' etc etc. That's probably where the guilt started. How indeed could I be bored? How ungrateful I was for all the gifts life had bestowed on me. I think then, as a child, the missing gift, and what I really wanted when I went shuffling to my mother, was her company, her attention, like Jake's recurrent 'play wi' me Daddy' in Bleasdale's Jake's Progress.
This afternoon, alone in the house for a few hours, I could of course be writing, could be listening to music or an interesting talk or programme from the internet, could be going for a walk in the rain, could be cleaning the bedroom, or hoovering the stairs, could be reading, could be doing some more work on my interview presentation. And on and on... Instead I feel lost and alone. Have lost access to my own inner resources somehow, my ability to be the parent who would 'play wi' me', or listen to me, or sit me on her knee and cuddle me. I know all this, am apparently, and at times am actually, able to apply these insights helpfully. So it is a matter for boundless patience, repeated forgiveness, to understand that again and again I return to this lost place, and feel myself drowning in minutes and hours, long for the oblivion of bedtime, the comfort and respite of sleep.
What's missing in my life at the moment is of course a job. And here comes the guilt again - oh the envy of my freedom experienced by the employed, oh the apparent boundlessness of the delight of our retired friends in their entirely work-free lives. But for me too much unstructured time has always spelt trouble. When I gave up work in the '80s 'to write', I swiftly fell into depression. There is a fine balance for me in the matter of busy-ness and writing; I need neither too much (like my last job) nor too little (like now). I need to feel the rhythm of activity and rest, of stimulation and assimilation, go and stop. And some of it does need to come from outside myself, be imposed, contracted, like work. I struggle to build substitute structures to my time in a non-work setting (like now).
2 comments:
Speaking as one who is probably going to be taking the rest of her life off, I reckon it must be difficult to be in the between stage - waiting for new work, so it's difficult to inhabit this unstructured space, as you would surely do, in time, if you knew that this was to be a permanent state of affairs.
I would say it's quite an achievement to allow oneself simply to be in the moment, without guilt.
Oh god, I remember Jake's progress - every so often his play wi' me daddy comes back to me, apropos of I don't know what.
I get into those kind of days sometimes, even though there are so many things I want and need to do, even love to do. Structure can be important, like the days I go to the studio to work, which I miss in the summer when I take a break. On the other hand I like to be free of this structure at times. Muddled creatures that we are. But we must forgive ourselves for this and not beat ourselves up, I tell myself, and just enjoy the opportunity to do nothing.
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