Don't tell me that you understand

Don't tell me that you understand
Don't tell me that you know
Don't tell me that I will survive
How I will surely grow.

Don't tell me this is just a test
That I am truly blessed
That I am chosen for this task
Apart from all the rest

Don't come at me with answers
That can only come from me
Don't tell me how my grief will pass
That I will soon be free

Don't stand in pious judgment
Of the bounds I must untie
Don't tell me how to suffer
And don't tell me how to cry

My life is filled with selfishness
My pain is all I see
But I need you, I need your love
Unconditionally

Accept me in my ups and downs
I need someone to share
Just hold my hand and let me cry
And say "My Friend, I Care"

(anon)


I was inspired to republish this unattributed work by something I was given a few days ago

Pandora’s Perspective

I’m a big believer in the constancy of human nature; there are things we all have in common – needs that we all share.

We want to be loved. We want someone to love.

For me, these are fairly obvious and universal truisms.

Another is that when something bad happens or if we are afflicted by a terrible sadness, we rationalise and we personify – we create for ourselves a set of reasons and explanations for the thing that troubles us, and with it a sense of justification for our responses.

I have been reflecting on this since visiting my father in hospital over the Christmas period.

He’s in his mid/late 80s and has been unwell for several years. Heart attacks, strokes and various other illnesses that tend to hit the elderly.

He and I have had no relationship to speak of for many many years and I haven’t seen him or spoken to him for several years either.

Although he was a very attentive father when I was very young, from the age of about six or seven I felt him withdraw from my life incrementally. I could produce a very full list of reasons why I stopped trusting him a very long time ago.

On Christmas morning I found out he was in hospital again – a series of organ failures that the doctors won’t operate on because of how weak he is has meant he spent a lot of time in hospital in the latter part of 2010.

I decided to visit him. I went yesterday.

It was a car journey of about six hours, there and back, which gave me plenty of solitude and thinking time.

I realise that I have, metaphorically speaking, bundled my father and a whole heap of issues/problems/unpleasant memories into a box, and shut the lid tight.

Having no relationship with him for several years has left me the time and space to develop a significant relationship with the characterisation I have applied to him – the source of my many woes. Or one of them at least.

And this, in turn, has fed my justification for having no discernable relationship with him. If I am ever asked “why don’t you go and visit your father, after all he’s a frail old man?” I have been able to say that after many failed attempts to have any kind of relationship with him throughout my adult life I have come to the conclusion that there’s no point investing any more emotional capital in him.

This outlook has allowed me to build a pretty impressive wall between me and my feelings where he is concerned. So much so that I was able to very rationally say out loud “I wonder how it will feel when he dies?”

I also concluded that I would not attend his funeral, when the time comes.

Thing is, I’ve now taken the lid off the box haven’t I? And I’ve looked inside, taken the contents out and examined them.

I can’t put anything back in the box now. I’m committed to some sort of a relationship with him.

Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. I’m not looking for some Hollywood-esque reunion with him. That’s not what this is about at all.

It’s making me think about the way in which we, because I don’t think I’m the only person who does this, create a bogeyman that we can attribute our fears and weaknesses to, that we can direct our frustrations and anger toward.

It’s far easier to fight an external foe than wrestle with one’s self after all.

But easy shouldn’t be our prime motivation. Nothing worth having in life was easily come by.


Post-script: this was written as a stream-of-consciousness, following a poor night’s sleep brought on by a chest-infection and a high temperature. I’m sure it’s far from being well-written and although I considered waiting til I felt better, I decided it was more useful (for me, when I come to look at this again in the future) to write this while the thoughts outlined above were still fresh in my mind.

An update: Father dear father

So... after hearing he'd spent Christmas in hospital, I went to visit my father.

I'm still working out how I feel about it.

But I'm glad I went.

Father, dear father

I don’t have much of a relationship with my father.

I haven’t seen or spoken to him in years.

This is not the time or the place to count the ways in which I felt let down by him over the years.

I’ve felt I’ve been at a crossroads with him several times but about three or fours years ago began to realise that I actually had to make a choice – try, really try, to put the past behind me and rebuild – no build – a relationship with him. Or decide that I would not continue throwing my emotional energies into fruitless venture.

I chose the latter path.

Then, earlier this year, one of my siblings informed me that our father is in terminal decline with an illness the clinicians have concluded cannot be operated on due to his old age and frailty.

In conversation with that same sibling yesterday the conversation turned again to my father’s approaching end.

I’ve mused on all of this a lot today. Clearly not the first time I’ve done that.

I have often asked myself how I will feel when my father dies.

Today I began to appreciate the importance to me of that question. And another question came to mind – to what extent has my curiosity about how I will feel, what I will feel, become more important than the compassion I should probably be feeling toward my very ill father.

I can’t be sure, but I suspect that right now it’s become a little too important.

Dogs, dusk and happiness

I was asked recently, "are you happy?"

Not the first time I've been asked that. Not the first time I mused on the question before giving an answer.

Eventually I answered. But I haven't stopped rolling that question round and round in my head. While I've made a decision to stop over-analysing everything, I am also trying to be a little more reflective.

No, I'm not too sure how all that is going to fit together either. I'll get back to you on that some other time.

So, am I happy...?

I am not in pursuit of happiness. That much I know. I think it's a foolish goal to set myself - to be happy.

One can only be.

And if one experiences some happiness along with everything else, then that starts to sound like balance.

I'm in pursuit of balance.

I fall over a lot though.

This weekend I took a stroll on my own through some nearby woodland, just after dusk. OK, I wasn't exactly on my own - I had my dog to keep me company and stop me looking like a complete weirdo.

Have you ever noticed the way that in poor light if you stare directly at something you've seen out of the corner of your eye, it seems to disappear?

This happened a lot, not surprisingly, while walking in the fading light of the day.

It became a kind of metaphor for me, or more accurately for the way I have pursued 'happiness' in the past - like it was something you had to give 100% attention to in order to obtain, to possess.

Yet somehow the more I would focus on it the more elusive it would always become.

Once or twice while out on my walk I lost sight of the dog and got a little anxious - how on earth would I find her in the dark?

But when I stopped looking, there she would inevitably be, visible out of the corner of my eye.

And what's more, I didn't need to go looking for her - she always came looking for me.

Metaphorically speaking

Ever stared at something for so long you didn't realise you were still looking at it?

And then when you avert your gaze, the image of it stays with you. Often for long after it is no longer around.

Powerful stuff, metaphors.

A return journey

The view from my train window is obscured by heavy fog.

I am reminded of a day many years ago when a friend's grandfather took us fishing – two boys with fishing nets, scooping tiny fish from a canal. It was a foggy autumn morning. The sun was a sickly ball of yellow dim light, reminiscent of a pale full moon.

I think it happens to children at different stages of their development – they will one day notice something commonplace as though seeing it for the first time and the memory of that moment stays with them.

And so it was for me that day. I looked up and saw, as though for the first time, the sun enfeebled by the thick, thick fog that had draped itself across the sky.

And so it is for me today. And I am transported back in time.

I'm writing this while travelling by train to the city where I grew up and in which I lived until my teens.

If asked, I would probably describe the manner in which I left that city as a phased withdrawal. I moved elsewhere, and came back to visit friends and family increasingly infrequently. And although I once returned for about three months, over a period of four or so years my visits to that place fell to just once or twice a year.

The street where I grew up no longer exists. It was flattened as part of a housing estate clean-up project in the 1990s.

But I still dream about the places where I used to play as a child. The streets, the buildings, the gaps between buildings, disused factories, the railway yard. The view from my bedroom window, which faced due west and afforded me a mesmerising tableau, night after night, of the sun setting across a post-industrial landscape.

Scenes revisit me while I sleep, mocking me like a latter-day out-of-season Scrooge.

Much like the street, the view and the bedroom window, my childhood is long gone.

But the sun, of course, remains.

And this morning it is the very same sickly-looking yellow ball I remember from that one particular day so long ago.

I shall shortly be alighting from the train at a railway station where I last walked as a young man with his life before him, a head full of dreams but already by that stage a heart weighed down with disappointments.

What would I say to that young man, I wonder, if I bumped into him on the platform of the station? Which direction would I advise him to take? Would I tell him that never looking back over your shoulder isn't the panacea he will come to hope it is? Or would I let him find that out the hard way?