I have just turned seventy, and the time feels right to set myself a few challenges and resist the urge to slip into a complacent old age. So, I’m writing a blog to record one year of my life. Why? Why not? I’ve always loved a project.
I’m not of the Tik Tok generation but I do have a love of words to record, recount and reflect on things that happen around me. As Virginia Woolf famously observed, ‘nothing has happened until it has been described’. So write it down I will, in a bid to capture some of the excitement of becoming a septuagenarian with so much left to do. Three score years and ten! How did that happen?
If All Time Is Eternally Present: Looking forward but also looking back.
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps in time future. T.S Eliot Four Quartets
One of the things that happens as you age is time collapses in on itself. In my childhood I lived in the present. Everything was exciting, new, vivid and intense. In youth and early adulthood I lived in the moment but spent a lot of time thinking about who I wanted to be… where I wanted to go – projecting forward, it shaped the way I lived in the present. But now… I can be walking down a street and have multiple experiences, layered memories triggered by a smell, building, or the demeanour or face of a passerby. Other things can tug you back to the past… a photograph… a book, a song. By recording daily life for a year, I’ll be reflecting on past experiences, trying to make sense of them. Gore Vidal wrote in his memoir Palimpsest– a memoir is how you remember your own life… through a thousand associations. He recommended:
‘Record daily life so it can record memory, in the hope that the resulting narratives, impressions, sentences should make a pattern not visible (to me) now’
A note on the title – Sisyphus’s Sister …
In Greek mythology Sisyphus offended the gods and was condemned to toil. Every day he pushed an enormous boulder up a steep hill. At the end of the day, it came crashing down to the bottom and the next morning he had to start all over again.
I don’t think I have offended the gods but, as a metaphor, the never-ending Sisyphean task has long resonated for me, particularly as the mother of a son with an extra chromosome and a learning disability.
Over a period of fifty years, plus, I have been pushing the boulder up the hill when it comes to trying to secure him a good life. A full life. A healthy life A purposeful life. Just a life that so many of us simply take for granted.
Don’t get me wrong we have great times and the son’s life is full of fun and laughter. He’s a character who enhances many lives. He has a good life, but we’ve had to work hard to make that happen.
Sadly, half a decade later it continues to be an uphill struggle. It feels like a never-ending task. just like Sisyphus, (but his female counter part), I keep on pushing that boulder up the hill. And I am not alone, there are so many families with a learning-disabled member who are in a similar position, battling every day with that boulder. As Colin Farrell the Hollywood actor recently said of his son Patrick, who has Angel Man’s syndrome, “I want the world to treat him with kindness and respect.” Something we all aspire too.
You might have your own Sisyphean struggles. Keeping healthy and well. Finding a job you like. Struggling to keep an important relationship together. Battling against the weeds and the insects and slugs in your garden or on your allotment. All of us have one sort of thankless task or other… we are all rolling a boulder up the hill to some extent.
I wanted to write about my life. Like all of us my life is both ordinary, and extraordinarily unique. We are all ‘living history’, as the saying goes and the sociologist in me wants to explore how we are shaped by the world we live in and the people around us.
I want the blog to provide me with a focus and discipline to actually do some writing. I could win a gold medal in procrastination. It was ever thus. If I had important exams, I would find myself repotting the indoor plants rather than revise. Today, despite this inner compulsion to write it all down, I will scrub floors, do some French on Duo Lingo, go for a walk – to clear my head. Anything to avoid sitting down and writing.
Because I am writing about other people, this blog is semi anonymous to protect the confidentiality and privacy of some of those nearest and dearest to me. They are such a central part in my own story, but it is my story, not theirs.
The memoirist and novelist Sue Kidd writes:
Writing …is ‘a dance between being true to my need to write authentically and my responsibility to those around me not to cross over into their private hearts and extract something that does not belong to me’.
Here goes…..off into unchartered territories.. who knows where we are going to end up.. I certainly don’t!