I used to yearn for company, filling the yearn hours with distractions, music, audio stories, sweeping the floor, talking to the geraniums. The latter, allowing this for some time, like almost 3 years, have now, I notice, gone quiet. It is their winter, their rest time and my random chitchat irritates. We are resting, they say, turning their backs on me. We manage this alone and in silence. Try it, it is restful. Okay I say, their message clear. I will try, and I do and they are right. I move through my lovely home hearing only the rain, the rise of the gale, big waves of cloudwater on their crests, hear the deafening crashsplash against my windows. In the quiet times, I hear the sparrows ribbon in for seed, 50 or more of them and all at once, all easily startled. I hear geese honk their wobbly way between the fingers of the gale, wings tipping, holding place against the sudden blasts of 71mph strength. I hear the drip, drip of the leak into my leak bucket, the crackle of wood burning and feel the hug of warmth. I notice the click and thrum to life of a gas burner, the ping of a microwave, times up, the voices of brave walkers coming from where? Who knows in this capricious and shifting wind?

Silence is never silence. Everything is always in motion, even if I am not although there’s always the jingfangle of my mind and that rarely stills at all. Even in sleep I am painting pictures, fighting fears, et lala, just like everyone else. As sleep slides away, that’s when the picture becomes itself, an order to the jingfangle to settle in place. By the time I have descended the stairs, new thoughts of daylight and downstairsment take over because I am, in truth, moving from one world to another. The night may begin with the present but doesn’t the minx just flip back through a million pages as sleep velvets in, taking me back to the backside of life as much as to the seaside laughter days and why the hellikins isn’t there a filter process? It seems to me that inner work is required and I do have a guide to inner work me, not by supplying a filter for the night hooligans but more to help me reset my reset button. My inner talk requires a good hot wash cycle, I knew that, know that. How I define myself decides my beliefs. At least I think that’s right and I meet and talk with many folk who tell me they talk themselves down all the time, and, although this knowledge is mildly reassuring, in that I am no freakling, it also isn’t reassuring at all because how does anybody rise above their defining beliefs of the past, a past which is a gazillion miles away and of no relevance to this new day?

Nowadays I have much time for reflection, something in the past I had to do whilst having a pee, the only time free from the demands of others. This is normal, at least it is for mothers and partners. I have no idea about men and reflectioning, how they do it and if they ever do do it. As I sit here watching hefty African rain soak the parched garden and drip most musically from the thatched overhang, I am reflecting thus:-

I did not fail. I made more mistakes than most, perhaps, and certainly more than I am happy with, not that I can recall them all and there’s a thank goodness in that. On the other side of that announcement I pause. Had I not made those mistakes, had I been the perfect daughter, wife, mother, business partner etcetera, what would I have learned? My ability to adapt (from Mull to Africa, from cold to ferocious heat, for example) might not exist at all, or at least not as dynamically as it does. It takes me 4 minutes, tops, to be ready when someone offers an adventure. I can cook a delicious meal from almost nothing. I am a woman of variables, variety and curiosity. These I learned from that past of mine, from the unfairs, the boo-hoos, the disappointments, the mistakes made by myself, by others, the skinny trappings in cold times. What would I have learned had everything been just as I wanted, needed, and all of the time? Absolutely nothing beyond the holding on to that ease and that sounds like a disappearing person to me, one who cannot, will not adapt to change and who, eventually, gets left behind by Life herself.

I am not afraid. I am afraid of everything, but, on reflection, I wish to face my fear, to allow it, to question the relevance of it in the now, in the new me and that’s what I do as a woman alone for the first time ever. I notice my spine straighten in a soft defiance as I write these words and it smiles me. There is no need for nobody to change, only me, and softly softly. I have no-one to fight anymore, only myself and that sounds like a right waste of time and energy so I won’t.

I need to be the best. At what? Best over everyone else? The word is well over-used, best seller, best at this, best at that, best within a small catch of time until someone else bests you. Pshaw to that. But I do wish to be the best me I can be and that demands a set of boundaries and parameters and a hot inner wash. Who do I want myself to be if nobody is looking? What are my ethics and are they well exercised? How others see me is a care that belongs in the past, something my mum dinned into me because she cared a lot about appearance, a practise full of hypocrisy at times or so I believed. As I rub out my ever-faint pencil past, I thank all who taught me, who fought me, who sought me out. You all created a shape that worked back then but now I have a new pencil, sharp and pointy and I hold it with my letting go fingers, ready to create a new picture.