Rambling thoughts and small steps

 Strangely for me I am up, dressed, have eaten breakfast and am sitting at my laptop by 9am.

Getting up has been an effort just lately, well I say just lately, I guess it all started with having a university student home with me for so many months, I slipped easily into his patterns and since he has returned to uni I can still see few reasons for getting up at a reasonable hour.

Today I had to take the car for an MOT and was actually so early the garage hadn’t opened when I arrived just after 8.

As I walked back home in the glorious glow of the early morning sun, I pondered my life, as you do when you have the chance to be self-indulgent. I am listening to Sally Field’s memoir on Audible at the moment and so often what I’m reading/listening to influences my mood – currently introspection.

It was “going to school” time and many children passed me along the familiar streets, they were walking to the same school I had attended so many years ago.

I don’t suppose I realised then that I would be here once again at this stage of my life, I’m not really sure what my plans were at that age.

I’m not sure what my plans are NOW. I seem to be drifting in these strange times. The mood of the whole world is squashed by a pandemic and add the layers of grief at losing my dad recently coupled with the general malaise I feel at this time of year as we approach the anniversary of Andrew’s death it’s no wonder I have so many mornings when I struggle to escape the warmth of the winter duvet.

My mum phones me often and I reassure her that it’s alright to not get much done each day, take time to cry and just remember. So why am I so hard on myself?

Mostly I feel very cheated at all that’s been taken away from me over the past ten years, as much as anything I am grieving for the plans that haven’t come to fruition this year. Not that I ever had a clear idea what those plans were but they involved travelling and meeting new people, sparkle and adventure!

Have I written all this before or does it just sound familiar because these thoughts have been reverberating around my head for so long?

I want some structure, purpose and fun in my life, I miss my old life up North where all these elements fitted together in some kind of harmony. Now I am like a Strictly dancer in a fancy ballgown and high heels trying to move to a Latin rhythm where I don’t know the steps. I’m wearing the wrong outfit and I severely wobble in high heels – a legacy of chemotherapy that I know I’ve written about before.

I do have some tentative plans that I’m hesitant to expose on here, although there is much that I will inevitably write down one day.

Ah writing – that solace for my soul – when was the last time I wrote this blog? My words have dried up on paper even if the rambling in my head continues.

And yet each time I feel my fingers clicking out that rhythmic beat on the keyboard I know these are the dance steps I must continually practice, this is the melody running through my life as ideas flow from my brain to my fingers, words that become strangely coherent as I tease them from the depths, well at less I hope so!

So where does that leave me today, just before 10am? There are things I need to do, good deeds to tick off my list. There are always things to sort out and tidy up.

And I’ll breathe and take small steps into an unknown future, in the end that is all any of us can do in a world that has gone mad - for today that will be enough.