I look up at the blue sky and breathe. Up here there is nothing below. Up here life is simple. People are kind to each other. Up here there is hope. There is no bad news, only good news. Up here even the bad news is good news because it tells us something about ourselves. Awakens us to the things we need to change. Up here we learn from our mistakes. We don’t just forget them and hope that they don’t happen again. Up here people smile at each other and say hello when they pass by. Up here you can be yourself, warts and all. No need for any excuses or the word ‘sorry’ that seems to be hard-wired into our consciousness from a young age. We say it so much. Sorry for the things we haven’t done. Sorry for the things we’ve yet to do. Sorry for the things we did. Sorry for your mistakes. Sorry for the things that weren’t our fault. Up here we take responsibility for ourselves and let others do the same. Up here we do things our own way. We don’t judge others based on our experience, because our experience is not their experience. It never was and never will be. We are different and there’s infinite magic to be found in that uniqueness if it’s allowed to live and breathe. Up here we are allowed to dream. Up here we can be actors, writers, and vagabonds. We can be whoever we want to be. We can stand on the pyramid stage at Glastonbury and sing our favourite song to a heaving throng. We can stand on the edge and look over and we can even jump into the abyss if it takes our fancy. Up here anything is possible because there’s no one to tell you that it’s not. There is no one to rein you in because they’re too busy minding your own business. Up here the only way is up.
It’s a novel concept this live and let live stuff, even more so now when personal freedom can no longer be taken as a given down below. Up here we are stoned immaculate. I look down and I wonder why so many people have given up and given in. They wander lonely as a cloud; shocked that anyone should question or think in a different way. I’ve always loved and thrived in the midst of difference. I search it out and get bored when it’s not around, the mundane conversations niggling at my brain. It’s rock and roll. Without the ability to push back, to question there would be none of this. There would be no hope. That’s why we go to rock concerts and football matches and whatever it is that we like to do. We go there to feel life pumping through us. It’s why we laugh and cry there. Often it seems more important than life itself. We get to leave for a little while. It allows us to step out of the world inhabited by those who want us to live within the constraints of the system. To live in constant fear of something better is to be dead already. What is life if it is not worth living and dying for? Ask Pearse and Connolly and the other devotees of blood sacrifice. If you can’t hold out the hope of freedom, then why live at all? Like life, death is everywhere. It’s always there, lurking in the background, an unwelcome guest waiting at the end of the table to tell us when it’s our turn. No vaccine will ever change that. It’s not going to go away. It comes to us all in the end. Perhaps we need that finality to give the whole drama that necessary bit of an edge. Even Keats might argue that there is no immortality. It’s hard to know what it’s all about, but one thing I know for certain is that I’m going to die trying to find out.
Meaning, freedom, connection, hope, and wisdom are five of the pillars I rely on. Sometimes you might have one in place if you’re lucky. To have all five lined up at once is to be up amongst the clouds looking down, blue sky all around. These foundations, they duck in and out, interchange, exist in isolation and together, but they never leave totally. For some reason, the flame has continued to flicker even during the toughest of times. That distant light at the end of the tunnel keeps us striving no matter what life throws at us unless it becomes too much. That choice, like anyone we make, has to be respected too. Maybe, just maybe death is the easy part. We might never know, and certainly, it’s never easy for those who are left behind trying to fill the gap created by the loss of a precious loved one. The sad vacuum gradually but never fully eroded by the good memories they left behind. I miss my mother. I miss my father. I miss my cousin David. I miss George and his Mickey Mouse watch. I miss my Grandfather who was the first to leave. I miss lots of special people who came into my life, who are still alive, but life moves on and you have to run with it even if it doesn’t seem to make any sense. I love them still and I always will. I worry most about being dead before I die. What if I stop asking questions and stop searching for the answers I have yet to find? It’s uncomfortable and it’s never easy but if I didn’t what then and even more importantly, what now?
After all, there is only now. Now is home, it’s where we always live. Right now, now is an uncomfortable place, uncertain and blinded by the darkness that surrounds us. We seem to be turning on each other. No middle ground. No understanding of what another might think and feel. No understanding of self in relation to the other. It’s everyone for themselves, or so it seems to me. But the middle ground is there still, waiting for a reason to kick in. It’s fascinating to watch both sides, they are just a reflection of each other that they cannot see. Celtic or Rangers, it depends on which side of Glasgow you were born, and next time you might even get to do it the other way around, green, white, and orange turning to red, white, and blue. The irony is lost in the midst of the hatred for what is different. Right now middle earth lives in the silence of those who know, but prefer not to say anything for being fearful of being shouted down, ostracized, sent to Coventry, and told that they are wrong. I’ve never been more uncertain of where all of this will take us. I don’t yearn for normal because I didn’t see the world as anything approaching normal before this happened. Instead what I saw was people running around like blue arsed flies trying to keep up with a world that has lost its sense of place. Why would we want to go back to that? Chasing things that we’ll never catch. Waiting to retire so that we can actually enjoy life when it’s almost over. Why not now? Fine if it was good to you, but it doesn’t look that way for a lot of people sitting in traffic scratching an itch that refuses to go away. They make it home, only to have to face another day that’s the same all over again. It can change, but only if we want it to. It means some adjustments. We don’t have to rip up the whole page. We need to be kinder to one another for a start and to learn to listen, to really listen, to step back and take a breath and to take back control. There has to be a better way. We might learn how precious real freedom is, not this pretend democracy hawked around by our precious political class who have the vision of a dead-end street. They know no different. Things have always been this way. They remain detached and separate from what people really need. We need to strip it all back and start again, to build from the bottom up and keep what’s good. But right now it looks like it will be the powers that be will lock the door and sadly the public who will be the ones that throw away the key. They are sleepwalking towards our destiny. The problem is that it will rise up to bite us all on the arse. These are the same people who speak of the collective good. The same ones who voted for freedom, compassion, and understanding in recent referendums and now suddenly want it crushed because the narrative doesn’t suit them. You can’t have choice one day and then deprive others of it the next. What about the collective bad? Discrimination is still spelled the same. Have they thought about that? Have they looked at the bigger picture? Have they looked beyond to how now might be when it becomes then?
There’s a freedom that comes with writing or whatever it is that makes you feel good, that separateness that accompanies the feeling of being in a safe place. For me, writing is to step outside the boundaries drawn by others in the external world and into the possibility of self. It’s one step beyond. No intruders. No wrongdoers. No certainty. There’s no one saying that it can’t be done. In here, everything and everyone is impossible. It’s the thoughts that come when the writer sits down and the words begin to flow. The empty page is no longer empty as it fills with ideas, places, characters, and the reality that comes through a life lived. There are the little things along the way that made a big impression and the people who left good and bad marks. Here is where I get to relive them, to breathe them out in safety. Here there is no way back. When it’s written, it’s written forever. There are no tender traps. It rails and it roars and it’s gentle when it needs to be. Whether anyone else reads it is immaterial. For me, it has been made real. The writer might never read it again, or they may read it a thousand times and change it until it’s nothing like when it began. In the early morning, I sit still and wait for the inspiration to come as I look towards the blue sky.
It’s up here I am free to do whatever I want any old time and I love it still.
