Tag: Mortality

The Divine Art of Being

Photo by Wendelin Jacober on Pexels.com

I seldom tackle The Big Subjects on this blog: I really don’t feel at all equipped to do so – there is nothing I can add to the discussion – never-the-less, my world is currently in the midst of one of those periods where the man with the scythe is back from vacation and going flat out to impress his employer.  Death is surrounding me.  My contemporaries are falling off the wheel with the alacrity of a three-legged hamster.  Either The Grim Reaper is getting better at his job or we’re forgetting that the whole point of life is to keep him out of it for as long as possible.

Nobody, but nobody, wants to think about dying, and the closer that you get to it, the less you want it on your mind.  The inevitability of it is oppressive and the only way to cope with it is to wipe it from your mind.  Deal with the day you are in, ignore the day you might not make: it will get along perfectly well without you.  Mortality is a concept that can only be fully understood by the immortal.  As a mortal, you deal with it by pretending that it does not exist: you create an afterlife, you invent reincarnation, you imagine ghosts… There is a kind of logic to the planet as a media on which we can all leave a mark.  We can all leave an echo.  Perhaps we do leave some kind of fingerprint after we have gone.  The battle is to not let death define you.  It would be so easy to spend the closing decades of your life running away from something that is inescapable.  We all die.  I’m not suggesting that you ignore it, just that you stick your tongue out and tell it that you’re not interested right now…

Personally I would be happy to put it off for as long as possible, but I do know people who have given up everything they enjoy in life in order to prolong it and I’m not sure that I could face what might well begin to feel like eternity without coffee, chocolate and whisky.  My loved ones are my life.  My grandchildren bring me more joy than I can begin to express.  The ability to get around and enjoy life out in the world is one that I treasure.  The thrill of seeing spring’s first snowdrop, first butterfly, first nest-building bird is undiminished by age.  Who could fail to find the spirits lifted by a field full of spring-legged lambs?  Life has to be about life.

So, I try to eat sensibly, I try to drink responsibly, I swim, I go to the gym, I plod through my 10,000 steps a day (unless, of course, it’s too hot, too cold, too wet, too windy or the armchair is too sticky) I embrace life in every way that I can.  I avoid politics like the plague (no-one will ever have their opinion changed by a valid argument) and politicians like the plague dogs they unquestionably are.  It is my aim to evade death by thinking about it as little as is humanly possible.  I can’t deny death, but I can try to refuse it immediate access.  I might be surrounded by it, but I will make like Michael Caine in Zulu, and everyone knows that the last thing that Death wants is a Zulu spear up the backside…

You stepped out into nothing, you didn’t fear a fall
You did it with your eyes closed, you didn’t care at all
And when I’m not here like the ending of this play
You can tell them in all righteousness I’m the one that got away… The Divine Art of Being – Lonely Robot (John Mitchell)

Being Canute

Whilst my grasp of technology is pretty much ok for a man of my age, my willingness to utilise it is very much less so.  I have access to millions (probably billions – I can’t be sure and I can find no incentive to check) of songs on the various streaming services, but I still choose to listen, constantly, to CD’s and I continue to add to my collection weekly.  We have various TV streaming services, but when I do watch TV, I watch the terrestrial broadcasts based on ‘what’s on’, and when I find a new series that I enjoy, I tune in at the same time each week to watch the next episode.  TV is one of the few things I never binge on.  I have been playing with computers since the days of MS-DOS, but I feel no compulsion to ‘fiddle’ these days.  As long as they continue to do what I need them to do, I leave them to it.  I am peculiarly inept at ‘computer games’, constantly going left when I should go right, up when I should go down, forever shooting myself in the foot, so I make no more than an occasional foray into Football Manager, in which I inevitably get sacked half way through my first season having overseen a player revolt and a plummet to a league position from which the only way is up.  By and large, I don’t seek solutions until I’ve got problems.

I have mentioned before – far too often for comfort I fear – the march of the new that is taking place just behind our back hedge and today, as the sun was shining, I looked out with more than my usual attention to the comings and goings in the building site which has become the backdrop to every writing session, and I grasped, quite suddenly, the stark contrast between what I would like to hang onto and what I am so patently about to lose.  My own world is shrinking and the outside world is encroaching – literally banging on my back gate – and there is nothing to be done.  People need homes and here they are.

The photograph at the top of this page is one of a glorious sunset I witnessed over the top of my laptop perhaps two years ago.  It does not do the scene justice – I am no photo-journalist – but it does perhaps illustrate the magnitude of what I previously had to look out on.  These photographs are of my little garden now when viewed from ground level – e.g. when making coffee or raiding the biscuit barrel…

…whilst these are views from my office window.

To the right you can see some of the 100+ houses that have been built to date. The rest of the 350+ are still to come…

The question is what do I do now?  Do I resist?  Do I grow my hedge and narrow my horizons down to my own three fences, or do I embrace the change that I can do nothing to halt, enjoy the spectacle and, when the time comes, broaden my outlook and become part of the new before it has the opportunity to consume me?  For years we have lived with a picture postcard view of England’s green and pleasant, but also the worry of what they might do with it.  We no longer have that worry.  We have certainty, and the reality – almost certainly – will be nothing like as dire as the fear of what might have been.

Mortality has pressed a little heavier on me this year – anyone of a similar age will understand this – the world, and more importantly the people within it, are changing.  It is an ongoing process that could, and probably should, never be turned back.  I am on the beach.  I can be Canute or I can don a sunhat and paddle.  Here’s to getting my feet wet…