31-Dec-2021
It's been a busy month.
We've been busy with many really nice things: Spending time with family; having the kind of Christmas I used to have as a child (roast dinner, Christmas pudding, festive-themed television, iced cake...); trying to grab some time, amid the uncertain weather and limited daylight of winter, to explore more of Nottinghamshire and environs (I'm really enjoying doing this); eating our way around more of England's superb cheeses...
We've also been busy with some not so nice things: Trying to administer our health records here and in Malaysia; dealing with the vagaries of various strained delivery services; keeping on top of covid developments and regulations (or lack of them -- England is so bizarrely laid-back about this Omicron wave -- 189,213 cases in the UK yesterday, yet we have no new restrictions on this side of the borders...).
Whatever the source of the busy-ness, its result is that there are many activities I'm struggling to keep up with at the moment, so I'm feeling a little out of kilter.
And, once again, planning is off, and waiting and seeing is the order of the day. We're due to head to the Isle of Man in mid-February. Whether that will happen, and what will be possible after that -- well, we've no idea.
I wrote the year's retrospective a few weeks ago, so I won't revamp that.
But a last-day-of-the-year review of 2021's posting activity is both indicative and sobering:
-- Just 107 entries on Purple Tern (as opposed to 171 last year, and 183 the year before);
-- A massively decreased crop of photos (you have to go right back to 2009 to find a thinner year...);
-- A meagre year on Vintage Travel, too (I've still not found my feet with this blog, and somehow even remembering travel has been a source of sadness lately).
On the other hand, it's been a bumper year on The Velvet Cushion, with 75 posts (three times last year's output). (This month we've had some more thoughts on travel; an eclectic movie post; and a discussion of the complex and moving Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien.)
Admittedly, the VC posts of late have been a tiny bit rough around the edges. Nevertheless, I'm quite proud of this chronicle of the year's intellectual journey. I noted once in my diary that I had a tendency to treat books (and films) like fast food -- finishing them in a hurry, at most jotting down a few sketchy reactions, and then rushing on to the next thing. By processing the material I've read and watched more fully in blog posts (publicly accountable in a way that private diaries aren't), it seems to me as though I gain so much more.
All good. Except this wasn't, of course, what I hoped for from retirement... So a lot of what I wrote in last year's December review still stands, with dark and light mindsets still fighting it out in my head and in the way I experience things.
I'm often struck by the wisdom of Maria Popova. I just love what she says here in a meditation on Carl Jung: "There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives. And this is why each and every one of them, even the most seemingly actualized, trembles with a staggering degree of doubt and confusion. Uncertainty is the price of beauty, and integrity the only compass for the territory of uncertainty that constitutes the landmass of any given life. And so the best we can do is walk step by next intuitively right step until one day, pausing to catch our breath, we turn around and gasp at a path. If we have been lucky enough, if we have been willing enough to face the uncertainty, it is our own singular path, unplotted by our anxious younger selves, untrodden by anyone else."
She explains how the recovery community has a shorthand for keeping this idea at the forefront during times of turmoil: "Do the next right thing," they say.
But this idea can also be found in the writing of Carl Jung, according to Popova. He once advised a woman who had asked for guidance: "If you want to go your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other. If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious. Then it is naturally no help at all to speculate about how you ought to live. And then you know, too, that you cannot know it, but quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what this is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate."
I find it comforting, in these times -- which have been bizarre for so long, and still are so very weird -- to think that all I have to do is put one foot in front of the other, keep doing the "next and most necessary thing", and not worry about it too much...
So, goodbye, 2021... I have not loved you, but you have been part of my own unique journey.