Category: reverb

I wrote a little yesterday about how some projects have to be carried over from year to year; they are just too big to be fitted neatly into an arbitrary twelve-month period.

Lessons, in my experience, are like that but even more so. They aren’t like projects. You can’t stick a cover on them and pronounce them done, because it always turns out that there’s more to learn.

There are different levels of learning. There’s understanding the theory. There’s knowing how to carry out the practice. There’s the slogging away without being able to see any change or development. There’s the moment of revelation when you finally get what everyone’s been trying to explain to you all the while you’ve been learning this. There’s the moment of revelation when you finally get it, and understand how much more you have to learn, that everything that you’ve learned up to this point is – not wrong, but incomplete, a sketch map that’s got you this far, but isn’t actually the landscape itself.

I started learning the biggest lesson of 2016 in 2015, if not in 2012. And my goodness, it’s a big one. I haven’t finished learning it yet. In fact, I’ve barely started.

In 2012, I learned what burnout felt like. Full ahead. Hitting the wall.

In 2015, I remembered what burnout felt like. Full ahead. Hitting the wall.

In 2016, I started wondering whether it was possible to get out of the cycle; wondering if there was an alternative to either working full-tilt or being embedded in the wall. Wondering if I could stop a stage or two earlier, before I hit the wall.

Wondering if I’d got things wrong altogether. Wondering if it was really about work after all. Wondering if I was, after all, a decent human being even if I wasn’t knee-deep in some project to change the world.

In 2017, I plan to explore different ways of interacting with work, with activism, with writing, with church, with all the other things that request my time, my involvement, my effort.

What’s in the air? Moisture. Cold mist rising from the river and the ground in the morning; warmer, damp fog suffused with orange light from the street lamps at night. It’s colder this year than it has been since we moved to Cambridge.

What’s in the air? Music. This evening we sang You’ll Never Walk Alone in memory of Eric Roberts, and the sound went up to all the high corners and floated back to us. It was the right song at the right moment.

What’s in the air? Uncertainty. I am waiting for X to be resolved before I can do Y. X stands for all sorts of things, and so does Y. This sounds familiar. All last year we were waiting for votes to happen so we knew what was going to happen next. That sounds familiar, too. Now we’re waiting to see what will happen after some more votes. It’s all up in the air.

Having said that, in 2016 I did get fed up with waiting for other people to make things happen. I did make some things happen myself. In 2017 I might do the same again. Or – because some of the things I’m thinking about feel slightly terrifying and too huge to fit into a year – I might set some things up to make some things happen a little bit further down the line. Without waiting for anybody to vote on anything.

I’ve taken far more photos this year than I thought I had. What I hadn’t done, up until yesterday, was to tidy them up and upload them anywhere. This one dates from February. I think I’d just missed a train and so wandered around with my camera until the platform was announced for the next one.

This structure is a giant birdcage. It stands outside King’s Cross station, on the north-west side. The picture shows the very top; about half-way down there’s a crossbar from which a swing hangs. It’s a good swing, wide enough for an adult to sit comfortably, and it lets you get really high. Yes, I’ve tried. Of course I’ve tried.

It was possible, fortunately, to get the moon in the middle of the top circle without having to stand in the middle of the road.

Is this picture representative? Not statistically, certainly: the majority of my photographs this year have come from walks beside the Cam. But there do seem to have been a lot of these clear skies – or perhaps I’ve just been looking up at them more; I’ve been paying much more attention to what the moon has been doing; and I do spend a lot of time on trains into and out of King’s Cross.

And the lovely thing about the birdcage is that the bars are wide enough apart that you can just step between them, and perhaps that’s a clue, too.

After a week of beautiful, watered-gold sunlight, today has been grey. I went looking for light at the Fitzwilliam Museum instead. I found it in the ‘Colour’ exhibition – the brilliance of illuminated manuscripts – and in the French impressionists gallery (I’ve lived in Cambridge for well over two years now, and I’m still not accustomed to the idea that I can ride my bike into town and go and look at a Seurat or a Cézanne, just like that) and in the foyer.

I’ve been paying more attention to sunlight this year. At work, I moved from the fourth floor – above the canopy of the plane trees – to the second. After a month in the middle of the room I moved again, to sit next the window, to a desk that faced the other way. I bought a daylight simulation lamp for use at work, to complement the one that I have at home.

My body humours me, but it isn’t fooled. Switching the light on will improve my mood almost instantly, but I’m still exhausted at the end of the day. This week of annual leave has been a relief, allowing me to sleep until well after sunrise, to submit to the rhythm that I can never quite conquer. It’s a joy to be wakened by the light.

Light is in short supply this month, and yet – the light that I have been granted has been particularly lovely. Low, slanting sunlight; crisp starlight; the light stolen by artists and captured in gold leaf and crushed lapis lazuli. All mine, for the looking.