averilburystedmunds: Beginnings and Endings.

Festive Fun

It is January 2^nd and I am alone all day after spending lots of time with my local daughter, two grand-daughters and one wife-of-grand-daughter over Christmas and then for lunch on New Year’s Day when a hungover friend and her daughter were also there to enrich the meal with truly magnificent Yorkshire Puddings! A superb meal, as it happens, the like of which I used to cook myself but no longer do since I have become a Cook-follower and stopped any thought of actual cooking myself, or catering or feeding others from my kitchen! This chosen non-culinary course affords me much gratification and enables me to spin the stamina a little further every day, energy having become a rare and valuable commodity!

It is the time of year for talk of New Year Resolutions and my present welcome quietude enables me to think about resolutions and my intention to make none. New Year Resolutions are for those

Robert Frost

younger than I; for those earnestly wanting to lose weight; stop smoking; go to the gym more often; give up alcohol, etc Pondering this I am reminded of the blessings of growing old. Gone are the unrealistic, possibly unreachable hopes/ dreams/ aspirations/ resolutions. I no longer want to slim, quit smoking, follow this or that trend. Chiefly, these illusions cluster together on a multi-factorial road not taken! Thank you Robert Frost for painting that particular image in

The Road Not Taken!

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence

Two roads diverged in a wood and I-

I took the one less travelled by

And that has made all the difference.

Though whether that makes much difference, I doubt, beyond the surface satisfaction of not having to try to do that which no longer interests me. Another grateful nod to the philosophy of ageing; one really does not have to do anything much which does not interest or appeal! No wonder that the upper slopes of ageing, despite the obvious drawbacks, can be tranquil and satisfying.

It is from the above musings that the words Beginnings and Endings have emerged into focus. For almost a year my acquaintance with Bury St Edmunds has begun and grown, the beginning last February, certainly obscured by a persistent feeling of bewilderment and an almost physical feeling of a lack of mooring. I felt slightly, but unmistakably, adrift. So many of my lovely family giving cheerful and valuable help during the early weeks while I tried hard to help sort out, to decide what I might keep but also what I could, and must, give away or sell. My present apartment is perhaps one quarter the size of my Bruges flat and my

View of my Kentish garden

earlier Kentish house and I had a persistent sensation of mental claustrophobia as books were stacked on the floor, and excess furniture and other belongings piled up, lending a sales-room atmosphere to the every-day. I was pleased to have arrived here, hugely grateful for all the help received but I missed Bruges more than I had anticipated and it took an astonishing length of time and continuing effort before I began to feel that this was home. It was not the facing up to giving away items I had loved for forty years or more; I could do that. The challenge was finding places, people, charities to whom precious objects should be given. It all seemed an enormous, sustained effort, bigger than the actual move! There was a giant chessboard before me with no clearly defined rules or routes.

Some of the Abbey ruins in the Abbey Gardens where
my daily walk occurs.

Eventually, gradually, slowly, all was done and I began to build a life; I felt positive about doing that and positive about my new flat but I didn’t find that spontaneous feeling of joy always present in Beloved Brugge. I recently found a quote from T. S. Eliot which I like.

Little Gidding.

“For last year's words belong to last year's language

And next year's words await another voice.

And to make an end is to make a beginning."

View from the Bonifacius Bridge in Bruges.

It occurs to me now that leaving Bruges [which I didn’t want to do] was an ending, not only to a well-loved location and home, but to that natural stage of growing older, gladly accepted in its comfortable inevitability. I suddenly felt significantly older around a year ago, without any medical reason to account for that, and my decision to move back here, made alone, was the right one; I wanted to be nearer to family, an inchoate feeling at first but gradually came the realisation that it was because of my emerging but unexpected vulnerability. Not quite recognised or acknowledged but intuited. No one can know the future but then again, no one is helpless in the face of any problem whether defined or vague. I decided not to wait, passively, but to create change by design; engineer an ending, unwelcome though that might be! The sense of moving in to action a response to what was a sensation both indistinct and uneasy, rather energised me and it may have been then that the possibility of another beginning in my life began to take shape. As Maya Angelou wrote in

A mature Maya Angelou.

On the Pulse of Morning

“The horizon leans forward

Offering you space to place

new steps of change.”

And so, to live in Bury near my daughter and grand-daughter, and a beginning to the next phase of life. I am growing accustomed to walking more slowly and clumsily; with a walking pole without which I already feel lost; to slower reactions, both physical and mental; to the occasional memory lapse. But the phrase, "Could be worse" comes to mind quite frequently and I am blessed with an iron will which takes me through the beautiful Abbey Gardens on an early morning walk each day and sees me through two separate hours of personal training each week designed to help my balance, keep me relatively flexible and generally delay, if possible, further depredation. Yes indeed; could be worse!