Early to bed

 

Subject: Early to bed.

When you get older, life is a question of running repairs, the pills, the need to exercise, the need to drink gallons of water and consume only the right kind of food. The list goes on and on as we become obsessed, checking our blood pressure or having blood tests for cholesterol, cancer, and signs of Alzheimer's which I suppose will manifest itself when I forget to take my pills. For many silence and loneliness are the silent killers, when we start to become introspective and dwell on what might have been. The noise of parties, the exploratory attempt to attract attention, the need to be understood and valued are now water under the bridge and we miss the opportunity to be able to make it happen anymore. Our isolation is much like being camped on a round-a-bout in the midst of ever moving traffic each driver concentrating on their own journey as you lie unseen and it's not that you feel exasperated at being left out since experience tells you that each person has their own baggage, their own feeling of being left out even within their own circle.

A good nights sleep is a blessing.  Untroubled by scary dreams the only worry, which bin to put out, the rest of the time is yours. Time doesn't hang heavily rather its amazing where the hours go. The days slither into some kind of truncated weekend and the weekend, no longer bordered by the thought of work has only a tinge of being different now the football has lost much of its relevance, played to an empty stadium.

As winter draws in and the light dies, bedtime comes earlier and earlier, and a book at bedtime becomes a pleasure of anticipation as you snuggle under the duvet. Alternately there's Netflix with its plethora of foreign, 'who done it' films, set in cities and societies different to our own, each with a different tempo,  accentuated by the rhythm of the language and dialog plus the intensity of the emotion which is expressed by each language in a different way. The staccato, matter of fact Nordic, the babble of the Italian or the caustic indifference of the French, each creates the audio scene without which the story is unhinged. I watched a film the other day dubbed into English which was awful because the voices didn't match the tempo  of the scene. I suppose it's still better than the stunted predictability of the John Wayne traditional Western but I would rather read a book and let my imagination define the character.  It's here that the book is at it's most rewarding. It's a partnership between the writer and the reader, the story is embellished by the reader buying into the plot and making acquaintance with each person mentioned in this concocted real life fiction, fiction which then becomes real in our own imagination.

We are after all reflective creatures. Our images of what's around us is based not on the reality of what we see moment by moment but rather an approximation of what we have seen before and memorised. Life is an approximation, a matter of getting as close to the fiction in our minds as to who we are and what we intend to do.  Everything is make do, it's the accommodation we make for constant failure, the shifts our mind accepts when not achieving its goal, quickly reestablishing itself by creating new ones. Life is a montage, like clips of film joined to create a sequence which becomes a story but ever so dependent on which clip is chosen to follow which. The bits and pieces which we experienced but threw away for something else, the unfinished experiences which might if we had thought about it more led to a totally different outcome. Conveniently we  ditch the 'what ifs', we pragmatically defend our course of action by telling ourselves it was the best option at the time but it was an option and we could have taken a different route, maybe for the better, maybe for the worse.

The distancing that defective memory brings, is natures way of making things opaque, it  softens reality and makes it all seem just ok. Just ok is enough, it gets us through the gaps which we know are there but would only damage or dampen the story, after all we are, in our own lives, the originators of 'fake news'.