FIRST FOOTING
I prepare to step cautiously into 2011. Just another year, I tell myself. Nothing more than a convenient bundling up of time instituted by the Great and the Good so as to control and monitor us, we, the great unwashed, the more efficiently.
But for all that days are where we live. They come, they wake us / Time and time over... Where can we live but days? Here I am now about to thread my way through another serpentine sequence of these days. What must I do at this point prior to stepping forward in order to optimise a little gentle, quiet hope and obviate the persistent whisper of dread?
After decades of entertaining the intellectual conceit that there is no such thing as time – the past is gone into the ephemeral dream of what might have been; the future exists only as an ephemeral dream of what might be; the present is merely the nexus between the two - I have to learn to live within that nexus. Memory and speculation must become solely the means whereby I feed my imagination and fuel my creativity; the present must become the place within which, from one moment to the next, I practice living.
Well, I can try. All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
:::
Here’s some hope. Zoe's and Russell’s daughter, my granddaughter Kitty.
...
Kitty with Maisie
Kitty with Emma
...
The kids at Christmas.
...
And here I am, looking appropriately cautious at the edge of 2011.
