Saturday

I’m not working at the moment, I don’t have a lot of commitments, yet, but I still wake up on a Saturday feeling different. It still signifies the end of the week, and still offers a sense of possibility and opportunity. I always get excited when Spring arrives, and the days get longer; that rhythm keeps me going every year but even without a working week I can still sense the change of circadian rhythm at the weekend. Isn’t that funny, and yet lovely?

My One Wild and Precious Life

I’ve been clearing out my poor, tired and overburdened laptop this week. Amongst the old job applications (hundreds), half-started books (quite a few of those too) and the tax returns I found a couple of poems that I had copied off the net, full of the sort of wisdom and clarity that I am constantly looking for in my daily life.

I heard the first one when I was listening to Poetry Please, a BBC Radio 4 programme devoted to listeners’ poetry requests, one miserable February Sunday shortly after I split up with my ex. As usual I was feeling horribly lonely, horribly conflicted about the decisions I’d made: to leave him, to leave our lovely home and live in my cold, unlovely rented flat, and to go back into an office job in publishing, an industry that had made me ill once before and was doing the same again. There I was, making a cup of tea to keep warm, trying to stave off the Sunday blues with a piece of cake and a book, when the poem was read out. Usually I switched the programme off as soon as I heard the presenter’s voice, the mere thought of soft-spoken poetry enough to depress me further but that afternoon it was on for company and I let it wash over me. But for some reason I heard the last lines:

‘It’s simple, isn’t it?

Never say the yes

you don’t mean, but the no

you always meant, say that,

even if it’s too late,

even if it kills you.’

I turned the volume up then, to catch the name of the writer. It was Carol Rumens and, instead of going back to my book in the other room, I looked up her poem, googling the scrap I’d heard. It is called ‘A Woman of a Certain Age’, its voice that of an older woman, looking back on her life, regretfully. The first line is:

‘This must have been my life

but I never lived it.’

On that cold Sunday, I copied and pasted this poem into my computer. Because that’s how I always felt with my ex, as if I wasn’t living my life. And yes, ‘saying the no I always meant’ was killing him, and me, but saying yes had been worse. The ‘little white lie’ of the poem ‘whitened to twenty years’; mine, that I had been happy when I knew I wasn’t, had whitened to only ten and yes, perhaps it was too late, perhaps I would never find out what ‘happy’ was but I couldn’t say yes to the unhappy any more. Even on a winter Sunday, when nothing in my life seemed to be working, I hung onto the lines of this, hung onto my need for self-honesty, however painful.

I don’t remember where I came across the second, ‘A Summer Day‘ by Mary Oliver, but its last lines have been living in my head ever since I did:

‘Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life?’

I’m sure that description of life, of both its brevity and its beauty, is the reason I left my last job, the reason I went to Spain, the reason I am looking for the right work now, not just a job. It’s impossible, of course, to live at such intensity every day but it doesn’t hurt to be reminded: we have only one life, and it is precious, wild and ours. And since it is ours, it is up to us, no one else, to decide how to spend it.

PS

There always has to be a PS, or several, if it’s going to be a proper letter. I have just weighed myself for the first time in four months and discovered that I am 1/2 stone heavier than I was when I left so I’d just like to add that as well as sorting out my job, my house and my love life this year I now also need to sort out my weight…

Missing the Post

I’ve been back from Spain for almost four weeks and, apart from missing the blue skies (though the Granadinos are missing those too; it’s been raining since I left), coffee served in perfect small glasses instead of big cardboard cups and the chance to practise my Spanish every day, I’ve also been missing my blog. Or rather blogging.

When I was younger, I used to write letters all the time. At one point in my teens I had seven different penpals, from my cousin to a man I’d once met at a party. The latter lived a mere two miles away from me but, for some reason, we chose never to meet again, preferring instead to write to each other. We did so for three years.

Years later, having lived in France and the States, in an age before email and cheap international phone calls, letters were the only way to keep in contact with distant friends. And whether writing to that not-very-distant teenager, when I was all of sixteen, about why I thought grey was a terrible colour to wear, or to my academic friends about the progression of my no-longer-academic career, my love of letters was driven by three constants: the joy of collecting stories from my life, the anticipation of telling them to my correspondent, an anticipation heightened by the somewhat anal habit of writing them down in a list and, finally, the pleasure of finding the time to sit down and write.

In an age without letters, in an age when correspondence is infinite and yet, somehow, imperfect, writing a blog is the closest equivalent I’ve found to writing a letter. I collect stories, I enjoy the prospect of telling others about them and then, usually late at night, when I can procrastinate no more, I finally allow myself the enjoyment of writing them down.

Since I’ve been back from Spain I’ve noticed that I’ve been storing up bits of information in my head, or one of my myriad Moleskine notebooks, but that I have nowhere to put them. So I’ve decided to start another blog, a blog from home not away. I’ve only ever managed to maintain one when travelling so I kept delaying the start of this, asking myself what on earth I could find to say about my life in N7.

But in some ways where I am now, and where I’d like to go next, is an equally unknown landscape. On January 1st, as usual, I made several resolutions. This year, I said to myself, I want to find soul-restoring not -destroying work (and soonish, if I’m not going to starve), drag my eighties throwback of a flat into the present without bankrupting myself and, hopefully, though I’m a lot less hopeful about this one since it makes stripping wallpaper seem almost delightful, start thinking about a new relationship. (Note I said ‘start thinking about’. Not ‘find’ or ‘start’ or even ‘think about’, nothing too definite. I can barely contemplate that one without feeling seasick.)

New work, new home, new love. Not much to ask for really. Wish me buen viaje!