It’s a Victorian maxim “ If at first you don’t succeed,
try – try – try again.” And I used to fold my lips against it, wondering – so when do you say “Can’t be done.” In what context ? But time is a wonderful thing if you let it be and learn from it. And I now see that, what I perceived as an admonition to make greater effort, is also a way of understanding how much longer things can take, than you expect.
I don’t think I can write this week.
I could make a list of everything that has been going on – just a few but ongoing in a way which makes you feel tired just thinking about it.. And I refuse to write a list of moans. One of the seductions of every kind of personal column is that you dump in it – and unless you have insights to offer about that dumping, there is no point. We all have worries and problems – and the last x months have been my very late coming of age.
Not only did I learn that a problem doesn’t have to be big to be bad news, it just has to be intractable, I learnt that a couple of people I had really thought were friends, weren’t friends in my terms. They couldn’t deal with anything that was bothering me and frankly they didn’t care to try. They were perfectly pleasant and emotionally unavailable. That made me think. Was this a bad patch for them too or had I got what I thought of as a relationship all wrong ? And was so pushed into some fairly heavy duty emotional reckoning with myself. That may have been where I was then – but it is not where I am now.
And two or three people of whom I had no expectations at all came through gangbusters – kind and patient and generous in ways I least expected.
And I was perilously short in quick fix department. I needed to be patient with them, they needed to be patient with me and I needed to be patient with myself. Hence the title … I had to try again.
If I never see another picture of feral faced Russell Brand, it will be too soon. We used to say cruelly “Only a mother could love it – and she’d have to be paid.” But I have met some terrific men of varying ages and backgrounds and thought all over again., how the simple things, those phrases that were the sort of compost of my youth – things like please and thank you and bless you and how kind still cross the gap
where I am always being told the gap is unbridgeable.
There are all sorts of aspects of modern life I could and can live without – I so admired a well known actor saying the other day “ – and because I have never got on social media, I don’t waste a minute of my time curating a fake perfect life.” Hurray ! It is such a temptation – but then as I say to myself – be tempted, don’t fall. Live the life you’ve got not the life you will never have.
The beastly things that have gone wrong might be susceptible to a magic wand – bu there isn’t one in my kit. And my concept of time has changed – I have to be in it, not outside measuring what it should be, what it should bring.
Last week Carly and I cleared out the science cupboard from school that lives in my kitchen and is full of china at the top and other cooking implements at the bottom. We washed and dusted and washed some more. When you open the cupboard now, you feel a sense of accomplishment and it twinkles at you. I’ve been trying to get round to that for months. You see ? If at first …
Except mine is much prettier and less twee!
