On a rainy Tuesday morning I’ve been thinking about the life story I wrote on here over sixteen episodes a few months ago, and why I didn’t finish it. Why I brought it to an end without writing about anything that had happened over the last twenty years. In the years since I became fifty.
It’s not as if I didn’t enjoy a lot about those years. They included, after all, the two best things I worked on in my whole life: running A Sense of Place with Sarah; then being one of the Granby 4 Streets people. Both written about at the time, of course, as was a lot of the other work I was glad to have got involved in back then around Liverpool. But not to be written about any more, I’ve decided. Because I’ve let go of working now.
Even though the life story wasn’t all about work, I always had a life beyond it obviously, I do think my wanting to write the story at all was part of a letting go that took me a long, long time. That letting go of work, the past and of stories of my life I didn’t want to be stuck with telling and retelling for the remainder of my time on Earth.
So it was that when the story reached me at fifty, I found I’d said enough to let the whole lot go, even the years not yet written about.
Though I qualified that a bit at the time by saying I might return and tell some stories of those missing years one day, I now know I won’t. Being more sure than ever that I finished my looking back by writing that life story. Meaning the time when those missing stories might have got themselves told has passed.
And I’m glad. Glad to have let go and to have now moved onto some different sort of stories in the blog posts I’ve been writing recently. These short stories of now. Even though some of them, like this are quiet little tales of no great consequence , I’m happy here. Now the past is over.