Dear friend,
Chiara and I had a swift morning coffee and a light breakfast before taking the car to our nearest upmarket supermarket. We crawled through hot spots at crossroads and traffic lights, pootling along at a sedate twenty miles an hour through places teeming with memory.
We revisit familiar stories.
Chiara, brand new in London, fresh from Chieri: horrified by the edge of Finsbury Park. Calling home and pretending all was fine when it wasn’t. Watching the pulsing blue flash of the patrol cars light up broken iron fencing and uniformed police taping off the park.
A stabbing.
Sitting here now, I remember a cricket match with the kids from my form group. They set up camp together and blasted out K-pop on my Bluetooth speaker, while their parents and I drank coffee and chatted in the sun.
It was the only way you could meet at that time of the pandemic, in an open space. The kids were turning 11 when the first lockdown hit.
Amy was there with her mum.
We had no idea what was coming.
That I’d be writing to you about Amy.
And her being gone from the physical world.
Here’s something that swam into view today.
When you get into positive psychology, you open a door.
You catch a promise of something new you might explore, become.
We’re told we can be anything we can imagine ourselves to be.
With a bit of application.
You get to imagining a future, more perfected version of yourself that you’ll be when you get there.
But when you get there,
It will be you.
The foolish, fumbling one.
The one laughing at the absurdity and the beauty.
Just you.
All that can be,
Is you.
Each of us,
Is like that.
At the deepest level.
When we got back from shopping, we started to clean for Christmas. I began with the doors and windows facing the garden. I made myself giggle with the phrase “cleaning for Jesus,” but the thing I missed for years and years is what that word Christ means.
It’s an honorific.
Someone who knows themselves as one with the source, not as a theoretical possibility—but as a state of being.
To be Christian is to aspire to the same.
At least that’s how I look at it.
The energy feels a lot clearer in the house. It surprises me how I can go for so long without seeing that things need a freshen-up.
Carl Jung taught us to pay loving attention to matter. When you care for and love physical things—even pots and pans—they tend to co-operate more with you.
It’s a safe bet to be loving as best you can in any given moment anyway.
Kind.
Forgiving.
Appreciating what’s here now.
Writing new stories.
I’d like to thank you for reading along with me this year.
The writing has become a thread that weaves through my day. Thank you for all your encouraging messages, for the comments, and the likes.
And thanks for reading without clicking or whatever—just dropping by or dipping in.
This year’s helped me to develop more courage in my writing.
That will be a guiding principle for the year to come.
We all need courage.
Thanks for encouraging me.
Till tomorrow,
Love,
Mikey