Spring into spring

Spring is here, and we have had glorious sunshine, warm sunshine too, enough to warrant summer dresses and sandals, but we’ve had snow as well; we have had it all this April. But snow apart, it has been pretty good weather, there is a drought so the snow and rain has actually been welcome; spring always heralds an invigorating urge to tidy up and organise your home and your life. For one thing, the days are longer and warmer, the curtains and windows stay open longer so all the mess that has accumulated over the long dark winter is now more visible, and dustier. It is time to pack away those bulky winter garments and I suppose the process of dragging things in and out of storage acts as a catalyst to general spring cleaning. Things are moved about, dust is exposed, walls look drearier, in need of a lick of paint and so forth.

It is so easy to get carried away with housekeeping and homemaking. It is all for a good cause though, spring is a magical time; the sky is bluer, flowers explode everywhere, cherry blossoms even start to trend on social media, everyone seems totally enamoured by them, myself included. My favourite aspect of spring is the start of the longer days, leading to long summer evenings, absolutely magical. This combination once led me to feel with my entire being one lunchtime at work that it is a great time to be alive. It was a powerful feeling of genuine contentment and gratitude to nature for the gift of the sun. I haven’t felt that satisfaction in a long time sadly, not just with the weather but with life generally.

I do suppose it is possible to feel at one with the universe on cold, grey, hazy autumn days if everything else is as it should be. Likewise, I know it is possible to feel glum in the sun if the warm weather is the only thing that seems to be going right. In fact, there is every danger of feeling totally dejected having to observe everyone else seemingly grabbing life with both hands while you seem stuck in a rot. But the difference between licking wounds in spring is optimistically the hope of new beginnings and looking forward to a long eventful summer of new promise.

Limbo like me...

Keeping true to its name, it has been swings and roundabouts. It’s been the pits for a long while and as every cloud has a silver lining, things should be brightening up a bit now. Admittedly, things are looking a lot rosier but I think I am at limbo stage again, waiting, not so much with baited breadth this time but for time to pass and events to unfold.  It’s almost like waiting for the holidays to start so the festivities can commence, guaranteed festivities no less. Yes, the future looks bright, so why is my heart not doing quiet summersaults when I think about it?

Perhaps the means haven’t justified the end; not that the means have been that bad to be honest. And if the end turns out to be what I hope it to be, the most difficulty parts of the journey would soon evaporate and be just all be a hazy memory. It has definitely been a character building rite of passage, lessons to keep one grounded; so that you don’t easily forget.

It’s the pits

It’s been a long long time I have felt this defeated. I feel well and truly licked, totally out of it, completely overwhelmed and just plain pants. I can muster a smile and carry on conversations, but at various intervals in the day, I just want to burst into tears and curl up into a ball in a dark room somewhere, with “do not disturb” plastered all over the door.

Usually, when I feel this way, I get some comfort from the fact that its hormones, it’s a cyclical thing and it will pass as soon as nature takes its course, but it doesn’t seem like it this time and there have been no weird and wacky happenings to testify the goodness and kindness and generosity of the universe.  Boo hiss at it all.

It must be emotional fatigue, I need a break and I haven’t had one in a long time; I need a change, a really good belly laugh and not just for a couple hours. I need for the future to look bright, more bearable even; I need more stability, more security but is that asking for a lot?

My mom recently said recounted what she was told by some doctor; he said that whilst the human body can survive a week without food, 3 days without water, 3 minutes, or something like that without air, it can only muster a few seconds without hope. This makes sense because how can you live if there is nothing to live for? I suppose this is why suicide victims take that leap, literarily. The cynic in me thinks that there are few people who are totally hopeless but for the majority of us, hope is dangled in front of us, just to keep us alive until the poor human body physically gives up or we realise indeed that we are never going to touch that bright light that shimmers ever so slightly out of our reach. This is all very positive for a lovely spring afternoon. I sigh!

Lose a pair, gain a pair

Last summer, or two summers ago, I joined the crowds of sun worshipers and got myself a couple of sunglasses; they were the kinds of glasses that everyone else was wearing and I got a pretty decent deal for two pairs instead of a single one, I could interchange them I thought, two is always better than one isn’t it. As it turns out, I didn’t interchange them much, I wore only one of the pairs; it happened to be the convenient to do, and it served me well, not just in the summer either, the winter sun can also be quite harsh.

As the summer wore on, so did the reasonably priced accessory and it soon fell apart. Shame that, I was getting really used to it. Where is the other pair I wondered, I searched everywhere, all the places I thought I would leave a pair of glasses. It didn’t help that I had moved over the summer and most things were not where they should be.  I eventually resigned myself to get another pair, or two, the days were getting longer and the sun was out in force.

I have a pair of hair pins I use in my hair on bad hair days which is practically every day, I leave them on my dresser with the rest of my cosmetics but this day, I could not find them anywhere. The kids are often in my room and my younger son is like a magpie, anything shiny and/or metallic gets taken away in his beak to his nest of wonders. I’d ask him if he took them but he was at school and I needed them now. I concluded that the hair pins will eventually show up but to solve the problem at hand, I decided I would get another pair from the bunch the original pair came from.

I opened the top draw looking for the rest of the bobbins, what’s in the grey plastic bag I wonder, I picked it up and dipped into it and surprise, surprise, the second pair of glasses were pulled out. They were still brand new as I hadn’t worn them since the day they were bought. Fancy that I thought, just when I least expected it, a brand new pair of decent looking sunglasses! And it was perfect timing too as it was a brilliantly sunny day. I also found the extra pair of hair pins I was looking for, result.

On the brink

It just seems that everything is just about to happen, but it isn’t happening just quite yet. On all fronts, there seems to be a tentative pause; it’s like a bit of a tease, so close but yet, not quite there. It is truly frustrating. Is it better than a pregnant pause I wonder? Rather than a restless feeling, it’s more a numbness which I think I actually prefer because it is generally calmer. This I take it is another lesson in patience, one I am exhaustively fed up of!

Thankfully, when all else fails, I have my music to soothe me. I would really rather have my solitude but that is one more thing on the brink and not quite all there, not yet though I can but taste it.

Setting fire to rain

That’s Adel’s gift to 2011 and certainly one of my favourite of her songs. Though I like the song for the emotion in it, I interpret the phrase entirely differently; for me it means doing the impossible. You cannot set fire to the water, never mind droplets of water falling from the sky, where do you start. 

The year has finally kicked off and there are a lot of decisions to be made as a result of imminent opportunities. It is the making of decisions and managing feelings and expectations that has led me to feel that I am setting fire to rain. I don’t want to lose this opportunity as the saying “opportunity knocks but once”, looms ominously at the back of my mind. The thing is, I actually don’t believe that you only have one shot, I do think opportunity comes pretty often but we are not always in a position to act on it; we would be lucky to even recognise it; another saying declares that “Opportunities always look bigger going than coming” which explains why we don’t always see it or perhaps see it all too clearly in hindsight. Perhaps they are often disguised as problems, and any wise man worth his salt knows that for every problem there is an opportunity.

It seems like the opposite is the case here, the taking of this opportunity comes with its problems. The biggest problem of all is the risk of missing out on it. If opportunities look bigger going than coming, then I will be trounced by this one leaving; it is as clear as day to anyone  the magnitude of this one a-coming.

Hitting a blank

The calm before the storm maybe? It’s been quiet, calm, uninspiring and altogether dull, like coming to a decided stop at a block wall that cannot be navigated or moved. Normally, this sort of lull is weathered uneventfully, not necessarily easily; but something seems to be amiss this time, something making it all very uneasy and pregnant with anxiety. It’s as though when the lull eventually breaks, there will be a great big explosion, splattering messy goo everywhere. Or to put it in context, it’s like a writer with a deadline but plagued with writers block or an expectant mother in her final trimester, with just days to go before the birth. There isn’t much you can do but wait for events to unfold, the length of wait is completely unknown and the outcome even more mysterious. It is a maddening interlude because there is no way around it, this big blank block wall.

Whatever happens though, it is understood that the time will pass and there will be actions to follow outcomes. The thing is, when things start to happen, it is all go and you forget how fretful the relatively short wait was. With the new mother, there are sleepless nights to look forward to; it is much the same with the writer. But as demanding as things get, you never miss the quiet lull, and all the activity usually means progress. Still, looking at the solid, blank block wall is maddening, surely nothing a good book, good music, or lunch with a friend cannot cure I should think.