I met Barbara for lunch on Monday. We used to have lunch together when we were both doing the Monday morning creative writing course. I started a year before she did, but it was she who introduced me to the afternoon group, so when we were both doing both sessions, we would have lunch together in town in between. It was a semi-regular thing two years ago, but she missed the morning class last year, and I’m not going this year because it’s a repeat of the one I did four years ago. Time rolls and passes and life moves on. Doubly so, because I first knew her thirty years ago when I was in my first job. When we met up at writing three years ago, she recognised me, although I didn’t recognise her till she said her name.
She was something of a confidante for me two years ago, she was one of the first people in the real world who I spoke to about my dissatisfaction with my marriage – this time around, anyway. There are people I’ve spoken to in previous crises. I even pointed her to my blog once, though she found it rather disturbing and I don’t think she read it much.
Anyway, I met her for lunch on Monday, not really having seen much of her for two years, and I found myself being very happy and animated with her, which struck me as strange because that wasn’t really how I was feeling, or had been feeling. We had lunch and caught up and talked about days when we were young and I first knew Hubby, about how he and I got together, about other people we both used to know and about all the times in between. Then we went to the group, and afterwards walked up the road together to the junction where I needed to go to the left and she to the right.
‘Would you like to come home with me and share a home-cooked Chinese?’ She asked. ‘You can walk with me now and we’ll give you a lift back later’.
It was kind, but I smiled and said no thank you, I had things to do, which I did. Maybe another time. But it was nice of her anyway. And in the evening I booked my train and hotel for Brussels, I’m going early on Saturday and coming home late on Tuesday, to maximise the time I have there.
I dreamt – I think it was a dream, because I can’t remember who I was talking to or what the context was – that I was telling someone, a woman, why it is that I can’t write any more. Or I can’t write at the moment. Maybe one day. When life isn’t the way it is now.
I heard a quote on the radio – I think it could have been Dickens, as both ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ and ‘Our Mutual Friend’ are running at the moment –on the lines of: I don’t worry about the things I can’t change, because what’s the point of worrying if I can’t change them? And I don’t worry about the things I can change, because I can change them, so I don’t need to worry.
Well, that’s very neat, but it misses a whole universe of points. For a start, how do you know which ones you can change and which you can’t? And how to decide which actions will change them in which directions, and how to go about performing those actions? And the really big one, what will the outcomes be of your action or inaction? Which of those directions are better to go in, and what will happen when you get there? Life is never predictable, and the future is a mystery.
Every disappointment, every rejection, kills off a little bit of hope, a particular, specific hope. A future pathway. But maybe that wasn’t the right way to go, not a good way, maybe all sorts of pitfalls lay in that path. It’s impossible to know where that path was leading, but now you have to turn away from that one and find another. ‘But there’s no need for turning back/Cause all roads lead to where I stand/And I believe I’ll walk them all/No matter what I may have planned’. That’s from ‘Crossroads’ by Don McLean, and Barbara quoted it in a piece she read at the group a few weeks ago, about her Christian faith. But now I’ve written the words, it occurs to me that they don’t make logical sense – ‘we’ll walk them all’? But if they’ve led here, we’ve either already walked them or not, and anyway, we can’t walk them all. We may have a choice of the road we walk in the future, but it’s only one road, not all simultaneously.
Sorry, got a bit carried away there.

What I wanted to say about hope is, you have to detach the little, disappointed hopes from a larger hope, that although the past is closed, the future is open, and none of us know truly where it’s leading. Standing in the Crystal Space, where all the nodes of Cause and Effect meet and lead out into the future, like Don McLean’s crossroads. And although you lose the little hopes, you can hang on to the big Hope that what comes next might be better or will at least lead you down some interesting paths. That is a completely unspecific, inchoate Hope, not a neatly defined future, but an indeterminate one, just to know that what will be will be and life is an adventure. The most exciting and interesting things that have ever happened to me have mostly come out of the blue, when I’ve least expected them. And every path that seems to have led to a dead end brings you somewhere, to a new starting place for the next journey.