by Dawn French
‘You are never more essentially yourself, than when you are still’
Eckhart Tolle
There’s no doubt that if you can find a few minutes to leave space where words usually live, thoughts can come and inhabit that same place. Of course, it’s not always totally silent. Our world isn’t.
But I am silent. So then not only can I think, but I can also listen. And not not not talk.
Oh, it’s such a fantastic rest.
And it’s such a release to let my heart unpeel, and to sit quietly with my sadnesses and my joys, uninterrupted by the loud squawking need for instant reactivity. I don’t know about you, but I am always feeling the need to react immediately to everything. We are all so impatient, my blood boils over the tiniest little wait. I have forgotten somehow that I am utterly entitled to some peace and calm because without it, I will boil over.
The absolute best thing about lying down and looking up is that if you can gently moderate your breathing and clear your mind of silly insistent petty stuff, those terrier thoughts that constantly nip at your brain, you can view the real world from the underneath, so to speak. As if you’re at the bottom of the ocean where, even if there’s a ferocious storm up above, all is muted and calm on the sea bed.
Now, don’t mistake this quiet for air and light and froth only. Silence is potent and can be muscular. I have found strength in silent moments to sit down hard on any angers or hatreds or jealousies. I have confronted some demons there and I have managed to process my difficult stuff through the filters of the silence. It really is powerful, and I can’t be without it, because, the truth is, my inner compass is only activated when I give it the time and the quiet. It’s a delicate mechanism that can’t work well when jolted about.
Of course, the true balance happens when there is a lovely noisy life as well as a lovely quiet life. Some of the noise is utter joy, like when your kids laugh till they fart, or when you’re ALL singing along to Adele in the car, or when someone is frothing milk for your coffee, or when THAT person’s footfall is on your stairs.
Noise is good.
Silence is gooder.
That’s all.
Now is the chance to write THAT letter. The one you’ve been meaning to write. You know the one, and you know who it’s to. If you’re struggling, it might start with one of the following …
• I’m so sorry about …
• I want to say thank you for …
• I really want to know what happened …
• I really want to tell you what happened …
• I am writing to ask your forgiveness …
• Please help me to understand …
• I’ve always wanted to tell you …
• I’m writing to ask you to return my …
• I’ve been thinking …
• This is the most difficult letter I’ve ever had to write …
(When you’re finished, keep it safe. For Now.)
DON’T pour in tea without the milk first or you get a ginger husband.
DON’T go out with wet hair.
DON’T swim within eight hours of eating.
DON’T keep your coat on indoors or you won’t feel the benefit.
DON’T take sweets from strangers.
DON’T move without stretching first.
DON’T wake me up before you go go.
DON’T lick a cat’s bottom.
Take another photo of yourself as you are right now
.
The dog days of Summer.
What ARE they? Is it when dogs are so hot they collapse on the ground? Kind of.
Dog days. The sultry part of the Summer, supposed to occur during the period that Sirius, the Dog Star, rises at the same time as the sun: now often reckoned to be from July 3rd – August 11th. A period marked by lethargy, inactivity or indolence.
For me, Summer really begins in the last two weeks of June when the suddenly very green full-grown grass in fields is instantly mottled with tons of colour from all the wild flowers. Daisies and buttercups and poppies and forget-me-nots. Above these are the butterflies teasing the flowers and above these are the midges and mayflies showing off their impressive synchronized dance displays. Poor ol’ mayflies, I wonder if they know they only live for a day or so? Maybe they do, and maybe that’s why their dance is so very urgent. They are born, they grow, they mate, they dance, they die, all inside forty-eight hours. Quick little happy lives, which have been lived at this jolly speed for millions of years. Natural history tells us that mayflies flitted around the ears of dinosaurs, no doubt showing them the exact same moves they show us today. Short lives, long history.
There are bees and birds and blossom. There are strawberries and cream, and elderflower and clover and dragonflies and mackerel and blue skies and wispy clouds. And most of all, in those long hot days there is gladness.
The bald fact is that we don’t survive without light. It warms our brittle British bones and feeds our skin some vital Vitamin D goodness. So, thank you, sun, for coming to visit us in the dog days, and try not to listen when we gripe on about how sweaty, sluggish and uncomfortable we are. That’s how we show our happy. The constant whinge is our version of gratitude.
Summer feels like totally the present to me. The absolute now, in a way that other seasons don’t. Perhaps it’s because our remembrance of the endless summers of childhood is so delightful that we constantly want to summon it. When Summer comes around we imbue it with memories of long days when time stood still and tea time was a week away. Did being smaller make time seem bigger? It was huge and soft and forever and limitless.
Did I ever give a moment’s thought then to being ‘beach body ready’? No, thank God. I had my body and I was ready to take it to the beach. I didn’t give a monkey’s about how it would be regarded by anyone else. I had no idea what shame or embarrassment were. Or waxing or shaving or varnishing. I wanted the warm sand between my toes and to feel the bite of hot golden sun on my shoulders making lines where my straps were. I wanted to catch my breath as I ran into the icy Cornish water then squeal with pleasure as my flesh gradually became as cold. All of my energy went into defeating giant waves, punching them into submission. Occasionally, I would lose and be dragged under and tumbled around inside a cleverer wave than me, reminding me who was ultimately in charge. A couple of times, I genuinely wondered if I would get out, get up, get through, and when I eventually emerged gasping and spluttering and nearly dead, I pretended I’d done it on purpose and that it was thrilling. No way would I ever let my brother know I had almost drowned. Now, THAT would constitute real shame.
I remember being so tired after long beach days full of fresh air and salt that I fell asleep with my forehead in my spaghetti hoops, and couldn’t have been happier.
It’s that essential warmth and easy responsibility-free contentment that we try repeatedly to recapture as we grow up. We long for one more snatch of it.
The Summer of our lives is for me the ages twenty-five to fifty years. The growing-up years. You can no longer claim youth as your excuse for making mistakes, you have to own the fact that you might just be an idiot sometimes.
As I write, my own two daughters are twenty-five. Their twenty-five seems completely different to my memory of mine, but I guess every generation says the same thing. Why are we given to believing that we somehow had it harder? We didn’t. We had it different. I think that probably my life was slower and considerably less cluttered or noisy. The constant pinging and yakking of phones and social media and online everything played no part in my twenties. I would have been the first to submit to it, I’m sure.
No, MY twenties were all about trying to be seriously in love. By seriously I mean that I was most definitely on the lookout for a permanent mate. I was done with the awkward and strange world of dating, I wanted someone to grow alongside.
‘Someone to hold you too close
Someone to hurt you too deep
Someone to sit in your chair
&nb
sp; And ruin your sleep
And make you aware of being alive.’
I was also in love with all things Stephen Sondheim, as you can see, and like all good FagHags, I desperately wished his lyrics applied to me. They didn’t. They applied to dysfunctional middle-aged, sophisticated New Yorkers. I so wished I was that …
In my twenties and thirties, I was someone fully immersed in the burgeoning eighties comedy scene in London, without even knowing that’s what it was. A series of happy accidents took Fatty and me right into the heart of a buzzing movement: the ‘alternative’ circuit. Again, I was pretty much clueless that we were at the eye of that particular cultural storm. We were motivated mainly by lager, laughs and lust. I started to realize it was becoming de rigueur amongst the glitterati to turn up at the Comic Strip (which was then a strip joint in Soho) to watch our shows when the likes of Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson and Robin Williams put in appearances. When Michael Palin later turned up, and came backstage to talk to us in the dressing room as if we were equals, it blew my tiny star-struck mind.
It was also at the Comic Strip that I met my first husband, who came to watch one night. Jennifer met Ade there too, although it would be a while before they officially got together. All of us at the Comic Strip were pretty much the same age, and when Jennifer and I joined the line-up, very few of us had any real responsibilities. We could fly off to Australia for the Adelaide Festival, we could move to Hope Cove in Devon for eight weeks of filming or we could take the first available cheap flight to anywhere (Malta in the end) to write. Utter freedom.
When you are devoid of responsibilities in this way, of course, you don’t even know it. Good in a way, because that in itself would be a responsibility. For me though, a person who takes my commitments and obligations very seriously, too seriously, it might have been handy to have known at the time just how halcyon those days were. Those lighter days when the biggest dilemma was whether you would have enough dosh to pay your next rent, and the worst thing that would happen even then, would be that you had to sleep on a mate’s sofa for a couple of weeks, and that in itself was a laugh, so … not that bad really. When all you owned were two suitcases of clothes and shoes and a couple of embarrassing soft toys brought from your childhood bedroom under the premise of being ‘lucky’ or ‘a collection’. Oh and a few albums including Lionel Bart’s Oliver! and the hits of Herb Alpert nicked from the parents’ collection. The most prized and therefore most scratched album was of course Tapestry by Carole King. I was convinced every song was my signature tune. How did she know me so well?! How did she know that I wanted so much to ‘feel like a natural woman’? And, incidentally … how DOES that feel?
I went from flat-sharing and all the concomitant joys and horrors of that, to …
Actually, excuse me a moment, just want to fact-check those memories …
FLAT-SHARING IN MY TWENTIES
Joys
larks with Jennifer
toga parties
being democratic
Horrors
mouldy quiche
mouldy soup
other people’s hair
other people’s boyfriends
other people’s sex noises
cleaning rota
ghosts
constant door slams
other people’s feet
waiting cross-legged for fuggy bathroom
other people’s music
divvying up bills
arguments about smoking
mess
other people
being democratic
Oh yeah, it was QUITE good fun. SOMETIMES.
Once, when I shared a house with Fatty and several others, we had a break-in and the police came to look round. We waited downstairs while they hunted about for evidence. When they came to talk to us, they said that all was pretty much in order except obvious stuff that was missing like the telly, etc., but they were particularly dismayed by the awful state the thieves had left the attic bedroom in – a disgusting mess of emptied-out drawers and dirty laundry all over the place, uncalled for and disrespectful. Abusive. We didn’t tell them that was the only room the burglars HADN’T disturbed. That was Jennifer’s room, pretty much as it always was …
I hasten to add that she is no longer the chaos monkey she was back then. Quite the opposite in fact. Somewhere in her thirties, she discovered power hoses and her messy world became a cleaner, more ordered one almost overnight. She was different then. As was I.
When I say ‘different’, do I mean simply ‘younger’? She is still essentially the person I met when I was nineteen, and so am I, but now we’re both miles further down the road of working out who we truly are. I don’t think I made many decisions in my twenties and thirties that had a grown-up, proper authentic me at the helm. Everything I decided to do came from a fairly narrow set of options that, back then, I considered to be a huge world-is-my-oyster of choices. I basically chose between the A or B that was on offer. I was fortunate that those As and Bs were fairly exciting, and led me to some interesting places, but when I reflect on those years now, I wasn’t truly navigating, I was attempting to steer as best I could in a fast-flowing river, which was taking me wherever IT was going.
Big, huge decisions sort of made themselves and then I lived them. Decisions like who to marry and what job to do and whether to make a family of our own and where to live and who to take care of all kind of tumbled down the slippy banks into my youthful river, and swept me along.
At twenty-five I was still a kid at heart, but with independence and a bit of dosh and the seeds of a future career. I didn’t really give a monkey’s about any of it because there were lager and laughs and lust and the sun was shining and I was twenty-five.
By the time I was thirty, quite a lot had changed. I didn’t pay rent any more. I paid a mortgage. I was a married person with someone else’s well-being to put before mine, and a whole new family of in-laws to pay attention to. New people, with a different accent, background, colour to me. A big gang of people, ever lovin’, ever-expandin’, who welcomed me into a world of ackee and saltfish, curry goat and rice ’n’ peas. (I later attempted my own version, rice ’n’ pies, not so good).
I was suddenly a person who travelled for work, and I was involved in something called ‘a company’, which meant I had legal responsibilities, whatever they might be. I still didn’t really take that much seriously because thirty is quite close to twenty-five, isn’t it …? I was still practically twenty-five …
One night, I went to bed and when I woke up the next morning, I was forty. Literally, by the time I woke up. I’m not called Dawn for nuttin’ … I was born right then, at dawn.
I had a young daughter, a busy husband, a crammed work-life and a giant millstone of a mortgage. Time seemed to have retreated under a rock, nowhere to be seen.
Lots of people helped me to get loads done …
Someone helped me by picking my kid up from school and making her tea until I could get home.
Someone helped me by changing our beds each week and keeping the house tidy.
Someone helped me by sorting out my diary and checking I was where I was supposed to be.
Someone helped me by sorting out all my work commitments and checking the deals.
Someone helped my to organize all my finances properly and pay the right taxes.
Someone helped me to keep a car on the road … and on … and on …
Someone.
Someone.
Someone.
And somewhere along the fast-flowing river, ten years whizzed by and someone … was present in my life but it was hardly me, I was always disappearing around the next bend, way way ahead.
Lucky me to have the first-world problem that is a happy, busy, well-supported life, I know, but still it wouldn’t have hurt to stop for a minute and drink it all in. Now I’m left with a blur, and some photographs as evidence.
Something I really did learn about in this very creatively ferti
le part of my life was friendship. I lost a couple of beloveds to cancer, accidents and Aids, and I learnt that however fast or mindlessly I was living it, life is inestimable, and just living it isn’t enough, I needed to ATTEND to it. I was on the front foot at all times, and as we know, any time spent on one foot is unstable time. I needed to plant both feet on the floor every now and again, so that I could feel exactly that – surefooted.
It was ALWAYS friends who reminded me of this, my closest inner circle of trusted darlins, the ones I could hear anything from, however difficult. Likewise, it was in this period of my life that I started a quiet, subtle cull.
Don’t worry, I didn’t murder anyone. Though … I was sorely tempted on occasion, believe me.
Turning forty served to remind me that time marches on, and when I organized my fortieth birthday party, I had the very sobering experience of having to draw up the list of guests for the party. We were limited for space so I knew that some difficult choices had to be made. At the time, I considered cancelling the whole damn thing for fear of offending. Offending who? People I hadn’t seen very much of? People I perhaps had drifted from? People I perhaps couldn’t remain close to for various reasons? People who were bad for me? People I was bad for?
We all have these trying moments in our lives, usually in the form of weddings, anniversaries, christenings and birthdays. The high days and holidays. This is when we have to work out what we really feel about those around us. I HATED the seeming brutality of the choosing. It’s far easier to bumble along happily in life not ever having to confront challenging social decisions, inviting everyone to everything, but then you can’t ever have a moment where those gathered around you are ALL those you truly love and it’s in these rare moments that real nourishment occurs. For everyone. It’s also totally lovely to know that you are part of someone else’s inner circle too; it’s the ultimate acknowledgment of the love you share and the history of that, the gradual building it has taken for the foundations to be so solid.
