Glistening On The Surface Of The River

Life is a cabaret, old chum, sang Sally Bowles towards the end of a performance that had me gripped from start to finish. When she belted out, Start by admitting from cradle to tomb, it isn't that long a stay, her words were like an electrical current right into my cells. After the show, my friend and I walked from the theatre to Buckingham Place. It was two days since the Queen had died. Thousands of bouquets had been left outside the palace, in tribute to her.

I value the moments where I’m reminded life doesn’t last forever. Mini wake-up calls, they invite me to pause and reflect on how I’m living out my time here. Ninety-six, the age to which the Queen lived, is an impressively long innings. Yet I can still foresee all those years passing by fast. My own parents, now in their nineties, always tell me how busy they are, how their days race byAs I get older, time does feel like it’s speeding up. Those spacious days of childhood, when I didn’t even know what a to-do list was, are a distant dream. Earlier this week, my three-year-old, a winter solstice baby, longingly asked, ‘Is it my birthday tomorrow?’ I explained he’d have to wait another hundred or so days for it; a stretch of time too vast for him to fathom. Yet one that will, for me, no doubt flow away all too fast.

The days passing quickly is certainly preferable to boredom; to the slow drip of minutes and a longing for the hands on the clock to speed up and the day to be over. Luckily this happens to me only rarely. Last time was a year ago, during the ten days I was trapped at home with a mild case of Covid and a toddler, watching the final days of summer from my window.

Even though speed is preferable to boredom, it unsettles me when the weeks and months start to blur into one, and I’m left thinking, where on earth did all that time go? Of course, it went into many things, including working, running a home, a family, a life. And of course, having structure and routine in our lives is, in many ways, both grounding and comforting. Plus, should we choose to place our presence fully into whatever it is we’re doing (how often I forget…), even in the mundanity of the washing up, we have the opportunity to connect with the magic embedded in even the most everyday of acts.

One way of slowing down time is to make space for the things that stand out from our day-to-day routine and that enliven us: those things it’s all too easy to persuade ourselves are too time-consuming, too expensive, not worth the bother, and that we’re perfectly fine without them.

Yet they are what almost invariably give me a massive injection of joy, and are what I’ll remember in the months and even years to come. (Rather than what I ate for dinner last night.) This year’s ones include, along with that electrifying performance of Cabaret, the August day I spent at a writing workshop in a beautiful thirteenth-century church in Kent, eating delicious homemade cakes and meeting a wonderful group of strangers, as well as the two days in spring when I escaped London to study with my yoga teacher and reconnect with friends I’d not seen since before the pandemic. All these experiences were so rich, I didn’t want to miss a single moment of them (even to go to the loo!). They are the gems from my year, glistening like the sparkle of refracted light on the surface of a fast-flowing river.

As we head into the final one hundred days of 2022, is there something you’re longing to make space for? Perhaps it’s something you’ve been meaning to do for a while? As always, I love to know what’s going on in your world.