730 things — Day 82 of 365

All through last month — May — the numbers of my 730 things year were pleasingly in step with the calendar numbers. Yesterday, Day 81 fell on the 31st, as Day 80 fell on the 30th and Day 79 fell on the 29th etc.

But today, as we go into June, the ways part; Day 82 falls on the 1st.

I'm interested in the moments when ways part. 

For most of my life, until the last few years, I was very close to my mother and we were the best of friends, spending countless hours talking together and living in complete harmony.

Our family's life was divided between Hertfordshire (and later Essex) and Yorkshire, and we constantly travelled up and down the A1 (later the M1 and the A1M).

I remember a very vivid moment on the journey down from Yorkshire. I and my children and their father had been camping up near Hebden Bridge, while my mother had been staying at my parents' cottage at Coniston Cold. On the same morning, we packed up and drove down to Hastings while she drove down the same road back to Much Hadham. We set off together, and kept one another loosely in view along the A21.

My husband and my mother both really loved their cars. Ours was a Volvo — a great big sturdy machine — and hers was a jaunty little Renault 5 in a sunshine yellow, a car she'd longed for and finally managed to bag. Their cars were kind of iconic, representing them as individuals, speaking of how they saw their identity. I think this is true of many people with their cars.

So we drove down the A1 until the point where the A14 branches off at the turning to Royston — I think that's where it was in those days, or maybe the later point where you can get off onto the A10 signed to Hertford. But somewhere around there we reached the roundabout where our road continued south to Sussex while hers branched east to Hertfordshire. We were travelling along close behind, and she glanced in her rear view mirror, and as we came to the roundabout she lifted her hand from the wheel and waved, knowing I would be looking, knowing I would see. The turn-off came and the boxy little sunshine yellow car peeled off, and was lost from view. I remember grief and loss moving through me like a sea, the understanding that so it would be, one day. She would lift her hand and wave goodbye, then her little yellow car would peel off and be lost from view.

Of course, it wasn't like that in the end. There is mental illness in our family, and events I can't really discuss came to pass; distances grew, wedges were driven between people, barbed wire rolled out. There were interventions. I travelled with her most of the way, but not right to the end. The last I saw of her was not her hand waving goodbye, but a photograph emailed to somebody other than me. There were years of sweetness but the dregs were bitter indeed.

That day, watching her little yellow car peel off and take its own way home, made clear to me in one vivid flash that everything ends. Every relationship, every set of circumstances. In my life, things I thought would be for ever have not been so. The great rocks on which I built — the church, marriage and family life, professional development — they turned out to be just sandcastles after all; something one incoming wave could wash away.

When that happens, there is so much to process. There is grief and trauma, bewilderment and pain. You lose part of yourself, too, part of what made you strong and gave you hope; you move forward impaired.

And it really does help a massive amount if you don't have a stuff mountain to ship and store and curate and re-house and think what to do with next.

As I considered these things over the unfolding years, I came to write a book about the importance of living simply. It's gone out of print now — e-books keep back lists alive for ever, but the design layout of that particular book meant it could only ever be in paperback; so that too, like all things, had its day and passed. You can still pick up secondhand copies here and there. 

And then I came to see that, in order to touch the possibility of living simply, there's a preliminary step without which you can't get there — and that's relinquishment. 

Relinquishment is the prerequisite of practicing simplicity. You have to learn how to let go. So I wrote about that, here.

Sometimes life intervenes in a large and surprising incursion, and lifts what you were carrying right out of your hands without seeking permission. Oh! And suddenly it's gone. In my years of working in hospice and with people in bereavement, I met several women who had longed for their husbands' retirement years when at last their men would lay down professional obligations and they would have some years of leisure to enjoy — but the retirement came and the men died suddenly and the women were left alone, their families grown and gone, no one to travel with them. It caused deep misery.  In the same way, redundancies and diagnoses of terminal illness can arrive in your life; suddenly there it is — a reminder that nothing stays the same.

But for the most part, relinquishment is practised in small incremental steps; learning how to live with open hands, how to let go, one thing at a time. Or, in the case of this year for me, two things at a time.

And today, a black fleece top that was good in all respects except that it was fractionally too small.

And a black fleece gilet that had nothing wrong with it at all, but I didn't need it because I wear the waistcoats Alice knitted me, which rendered it superfluous.

So we parted company.