remember that it is all temporary

This morning K got up early (a momentous event on any occasion) and brought me tea and toast in bed, then he somehow arranged the bedroom so that when I got up there was a large pyramid of hitherto unseen presents awaiting me in front of the door. I didn’t have time to open them all before he had to leave for work, but for some reason when I was hugging him my thanks, I was suddenly overcome by a horrible, dry sadness. I think it was perhaps a combination of his kindness, of which a small part of me still feels totally undeserving and as though I’m about to be “found out” at any given moment, and the thought of people who are no longer around to give me presents, coupled with a good dash of emotional exhaustion from The Novel. Sometimes it’s hard, writing so many sadnesses, to not let them spill over into your own life. And birthdays always make me think of the past – not in a serene, reflecting sort of way, but a childish and jealous way which wants everything and everyone back – which is why I haven’t liked them for a long time.
But I didn’t want to ruin all of his preparations, so when he saw that my eyes were damp, I told him it was happiness, and hugged him harder.
Sometimes, sharing sadness is appropriate, but sometimes it is selfish and silly. Especially since, like all the wisest kings, I know that this, too, shall pass, given a few cups of tea and a good dose of perspective.

edit: feeling better already!

Anne Atkins on thought for the day!
It is all temporary! Must remember, it is all temporary! She can’t go on speaking must longer! She simply can’t!

I am so exhausted that I am either going to drop down dead or fall asleep at my desk within the next 30 mins or so.
But it’s alright, I know this feeling is only temporary. I know that because, as I said, I am either going to die or fall asleep within the next 30 minutes, and once that happens the feeling that it is going to happen imminently will, necessarily, desist.

I’ll just have to try and make sure I have time to wipe the slobber off my cheek before the meeting at four. And/ or attend to the rigour mortis.

When I first came to Japan I thought that the cherry blossoms were very pretty, and that was that. Slowly I’ve learnt to appreciate them the way the Japanese do: they are not just pretty, they are fleeting; finite flashes of startling beauty which remind us of the transcience of everything else.

I got an email this morning from a Korean monk I met at the Hiroshima memorial park for the anniversary last year. How funny, the way people drift in and out of your life. We swapped email addresses but neither of us had ever used them until today. He wrote
“Here, all everywhere has in blossom a cherry,a peach,a pear-—-.
That is wonderful moment!”

And he’s right. It is.

More death back home. Another car crash. The woman who has lost her two sons has now lost her son in law as well. As my mum said, it seems incredible that so much sorrow and pain could take place in just one family.
Please, go and do something with the people you care about, right now. And drive safely.

Today I opened my letterbox and found a letter. On 6th October this woman’s youngest son died in a motorcycle accident in Germany. Some years ago her eldest son had been killed in a mountain climbing accident.

“I can’t really believe that life has dealt me this double-whammy – two sons killed in tragic accidents. No doubt my fault for encouraging them all to follow their dreams but I would do it all again because it is what I believe in. You follow your dream Maddy, and get the book into print.”

I felt humbled and ashamed, by her faith in me, and by my attitude to this life, this only life, whose preciousness so often escapes my attention.

I will get that book into print.

If a woman of such dignity and grief posted such a letter to your door, would you also feel ashamed?

And if so, what are you going to do about it?

Friday’s Woman’s Hour featured a graphic designer, same age as me, reading an extract from her blog in Beirut. I was chopping vegetables at the time, but after the first few lines I put the knife down and just stood there, perfectly, still, listening.

I’ve just been onto the Radio 4 website to find the link.

War is temporary; peace also seems to be so.

We must work harder.

We must stop chopping vegetables in our safe kitchens, just for a second, and think about the bigger picture of the world we allow to unfold around us.

This article made me feel cold all the way through. Even if you find yourself in favour of the death penalty in certain cases, surely you find Bush’s gung-ho attitude to it appalling?

It is all temporary, except, of course, for death, which cannot be undone if innocence is proven 15 years after the event. God forbid I ever find myself in the clutches of the American justice system.

Yesterday was an odd day.

I spent my morning walk looking for a suitable place to write the name of a dead man I never met in chalk in order to maybe bring the smallest of smiles to someone, also unknown to me, amidst the empty retching of loss.

Then I went to work and spent a few hours teaching my favourite laughing, squeeling, squelching elementary school kids how to (more or less) play cricket with baseball bats and wickets made of carefully balanced PET bottles.

The contrast, between Grief, which knows nothing of Youth, and Youth, which of Grief knows nothing, kept snapping round my ankles.

I went back to the office strangely drained.

I don’t know why this stranger’s loss stuck in my throat all day like a gorse bush. God knows there are too many losses out there. Mathematics may have found a way to count them, but humans haven’t.

I thought about my own childhood. I wondered when exactly I had stopped being a squeeling squelching child. I felt angry, irrationaly, at my past and wondered what other me there might have been waiting to emerge if only life, its extinguishing, hadn’t intervened so early on.

But it doesn’t pay to think along those lines.

“Love yourself. There is no other choice”.

Just don’t love yourself so blindly that you forget that love can only really be understood in the context of its being doomed from the very beginning.

On a lighter note, a stranger left strawberries on my doorstep last night :)

I was moaning to daichi about global warming and the fact that people (myself included) aren’t doing enough to stop it. As we talked I became aware how terrified I am of the thought of humanity dying out forever. Not just civilisations, like the egyptians or the greeks, but everyone everywhere, with no one left to decipher our texts or work out what on earth microwave ovens were and why we used them. No one left, and no possibility of anyone ever coming again. It gave me a very cold feeling on the inside, the way I imagine most people feel about their own death. I’ve reconciled myself to the thought of my own death and no longer view it with the all-consumning fear I used to get when I thought about it. But somehow the thought of all humanity dying out forever seemed beyond even the possibilty of comfort or comprehension.

Then, a few days later, on a bus on the way to the great wall of China, we got talking about physics and I realised that global warming or no global warming, humanity does have a time limit, and it expires with the expiring of our sun. Somehow, the mathmatical certainty of our planet’s destruction seemed to assuage the fear of it in me. I don’t really understand how, and it’s going to take a little more time before I can think of it with the same calm contemplation with which I view my own miniscule death, but I think I’m on my way to understanding – or at least appreciating – that “temporary” works on all scales, not only my own individual one.

And now I’m off to drink my jasmine tea before it gets cold. The second law of thermodynamics waits for no one. :)