Last year (2019) I decided, at long last, to refurbish and old-age-proof my neglected ground-floor flat. It took months, working with Lisa, an efficient project manager, to plan and schedule the work. We decided that, as this was a large building project, I would move out at the beginning of March 2020 just before work started and put most of my possessions in storage. How was I, or any of us, to know there would be a pandemic?
I’m now living in unfamiliar surroundings: a small, admittedly attractive, one-room garden flat. I’m following official guidelines and only leaving here briefly: once a day for exercise. As I’m well past 70 years of age (How did that happen?) I’ve even arranged for Lisa to bring groceries to me.
An old, primary-school friend wrote to ask how I was coping with lock-down. I sent her what I considered to be an unemotional, factual account of the first three months of this year. It was detailed but, I thought, upbeat.
Clearly though that’s not the way she read it. I shouldn’t have been surprised.
When we were in our 20s, living in different parts of the country, she and I habitually exchanged despairing letters about the difficulties we were facing. When we occasionally met, we overwhelmed each other with the weight of more depressive exchanges. Life was hard we agreed. These conversations did nothing to make either of us feel better about it. We drifted apart and I followed paths to a more positive outlook on life.
The first few words of her response, expressing dismay at what she’d read, left me feeling that she was carrying on from where we’d left off. She assumed that I must be overwhelmed by all the upheaval. Bracing, encouraging remarks came next. I stopped reading then, as if the words could bring my mood right down, as our mutually destructive exchanges used to do. I was right there in the past, back to my despairing self.
Then I realised that I was no longer that person. Over the years I’ve done my best to move away from such thinking and towards a more life affirming view of life and its challenges. These days my glass is half full.
I’m grateful to have found a pleasant sanctuary here in this garden flatlet; that I have time to indulge in creative activities and to cultivate useful habits for life in my newly refurbished flat when, eventually, I return to it.
Fortified by these thoughts I carried on reading her letter and was able to compose a friendly, glass half full reply in response to it.