Taking notice, observation, listening with ‘the third ear’ defines a large part of my working day. The forensic settings of prison, probation and policing are full of professionals like me all ‘taking notice’ in a hard-earned way. I seldom apply this way of being when not at work, unless that is when something really pulls me in, grabs my attention. It does not happen often. Whilst having lunch last week it did.
Having ordered, I gazed around the small tearoom and immediately noticed that a couple sitting opposite had the same diaries. I tried to dismiss the observation, reminding myself I was not at work and that the observed total match was of no relevance at all. Too late, I was already seduced. So not only did I look, but I also started to listen…..
Over the next 20 minutes, it became apparent that this couple were not only to share matching diaries for the remainder of the year but that much, if not all the year would be shared between them as well. Week by week, weekend by weekend, month by month, they planned and plotted their lives. Life. Their lives, I continued to hear, were planned moment by moment into a schedule of; walks, camping trips, festivals, long weekends away, weeks away and in August a whole month away. Oh, and the occasional mid-weekday off. The prospect of which seemed to excite them greatly. The planning also included modes of transport and where they would stay, B&B, hotels, tent and Airbnb.
I don’t think I acknowledged the arrival of my lunch so aghast was I that we had gone from Easter to Christmas and yes, next new year, all within thirty minutes or so. Maybe they were just free thinking? just having ideas? But no, just as I was preparing to leave, out came a laptop and the whole planned year started to be transferred from matching diaries into a calendar spreadsheet. As I left contemplating at least three different versions of what my afternoon may look like, in contrast, this couple had the whole of the year set in stone.
My lunch time experience stayed with me. The couple, their new paper diaries and the not so new laptop floating in and out of my mind for the remainder of the day.
Time, its planning and passing, also featured in a dream I had the same night. It was a fun dream, and I was sad when my waking up brought it to an end. In the dream I, along with all the other characters, was part of Mike Leigh’s 2010 film ‘Another Year’. There I was in every scene, written in and participating. I was very much at home in all the scenes as, for whatever reason, I always associate Mike’s films to be set in NW5, I don’t know if they are or not, but for me ‘Another Year’ fitted well into all I associate with NW5 and the fact that in real life, other years of my life, 14 of them in fact, were lived there.
In the film, Tom (Jim Broadbent), a geologist, and Gerri (the wonderful Ruth Sheen) a counsellor, are an older married couple who have a comfortable, loving relationship. The film observes them over the course of the four seasons of a year, surrounded by family and friends who mostly suffer some degree of unhappiness. Watching the film and observing my dream, the seasons were beautifully experienced by Tom and Gerri’s tending to their allotment. The seasonal fruit and veg of their toils moving us through another year of their lives and life itself.
In my real-life Kentish Town years, I didn’t have an allotment, but I did have Parliament Hill. As the years passed, season by season, I looked down from that awesome vantage point. The span of London made miniature by the hill’s height. Me, the season, London and all its people carried moment by moment, year by year through our lives.
The lives captured in ‘Another Year’ are skilfully revealed to us. One by one, except for Tom and Gerri, we learn of their life’s dreams and plans. Equally, we learn of their disappointments, dashed expectations, let-downs, trauma’s, the unexpected which comes knocking on all their doors and yes, we witness what the unplanned in its various guises visits upon them. The film’s theme, life’s passing of time, is also communicated in more subtle ways. Tom on a London building site examining layers of London clay, each sample holding centuries of London life. Gerri trying her best to get her new reluctant counselling client Janet (Imelda Staunton) to talk about the years that run through the core of her life. Occasions of birth and death are also weaved into the story.
Tom and Gerri are about the total opposite as you could get from their fellow characters and indeed from my real-life lunch time couple. Tom and Gerri, without any obvious planning, allowed themselves to be carried by the seasons of their allotment and the seasons of their life. In doing so, they brought to the world around them a sense of security, stability, steadfastness, and peace of mind. Tom and Gerri were at one with themselves and with life. For it seemed that they had learned the art of being in the moment, to have faith in the unknown, to be willingly accept experiences of not knowing and to find happiness in the mysteries of life including the unfathomable depths of messy humanity manifest in those they loved. Life without a diary or spreadsheet was a joy to behold.
I’m not sure when planning the life out of life became popular. I guess it’s been around as long as uncertainty and insecurity. Delusion also runs as a thread through time memorial and informs many if not all of acts of planning. A whole industry has developed to support it from ‘Filofax’ to my café couple’s shiny new diaries. Time planned it seems offers certainty and the secure base many crave. Time planned and planning time is popular.
What are we to make of this craving for certainty? The longing for a secure base I guess commences the moment we fall out of our mother’s womb. We yearn sometimes consciously, more often unconsciously, to get back into that symbiotic state. Impossible. It can take much to reach a realisation of that, not to mention an acceptance of that.
From the moment we fall out into the world we continue to fall into life. Many will recall the trauma they experienced witnessing those falling from the ‘Twin Towers’ on 9/11. Later, I worked with many who developed full PTSD having seen those incidents of falling. Yes, traumatic in itself but also because there is a personal identification. We may not have fallen from the ‘Twin Towers” but we all know what it is to fall and the not knowing if we will be held, rescued, or if the ground will save us. This example alone tells us something of the primitive that lurks behind the need to plan the life out of life.
I am reminded each day that life is bigger than myself. We say every morning in the Divine Office that God is a mighty God, that he holds the depths of the earth in his hands, that the mountains as well as the sea and the dry land is shaped by his hand. For me this is a daily reminder to surrender to the act of falling. It’s an invitation to bin the ‘to do’ list, and to know that falling into the present moment of not knowing is really all I can do. All I can know. It a most alarming and at the same time deeply comforting way to start each day.
Chögyam Trungpa, puts it much clearer than me or the Divine Office when he says, “The bad news is your falling through the air, noting to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there is no ground”.
I don’t know how the year will unfold for the couple in the café. Truth is, despite all their planning, all their attempts to put ground beneath their feet, neither do they. Fact is, time planned, more often than we would care to acknowledge, flies in the face of faith, strips life of its mystery and at its worse chokes the life out of life.
Br Stephen Morris fcc
