Category: sunrise

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Sunday Morning

What have I done already today?

Tried to take a photo of the sunrise from my bedroom window. Opened the window to get a better view, and a credit card and train ticket fell out of my phone wallet onto the flat roof of the extension below. Fortunately, a few days ago I found in my bedroom a litter grabber which I bought when I was living in the flat and had a similar accident with something on the roof of the bay window. I couldn’t manage to pick the card up, but I did succeed in knocking it off onto the patio/gravel. Went downstairs in my dressing gown and opened the door, saw credit card immediately over by the garden table. Walked over gravel in bare feet and picked it up. Went back inside and picked gravel off my feet.

Checked the credit cards in my phone and realised my Barclaycard (the one I most often use) was missing. The last time I used it was in the knitting shop yesterday, where I went to buy some yarn for my weather blanket. I emptied my coat pockets and handbag but couldn’t find it, looked around all the obvious places, still no sign. Went back out into the garden, couldn’t see it anywhere on the gravel, peeped through a gap in the fence at next door’s patio but it wasn’t obviously there. It started to rain. I rummaged around in some plants/weeds (false valerian, which is pretty in small doses but grows like a weed) between the edge of my steps and the fence, and found my Barclaycard.

Went back inside, picked gravel off my feet again, went back to bed, and back to sleep, although it was nearly six o’clock by this time. Had a dream, which was very interesting when I woke up, but I’ve now forgotten. Woke up shortly before eight and got up. Fed cat, let her out. Did yoga/tai chi. Picked up clothes from bedroom floor, found a complete set of clean bed linen (including matching pillow cases) and had first attempt at changing the duvet cover.

Took washing basket downstairs and loaded the contents into the washing machine. Tried to pull out the dispenser drawer – which is filthy and I’ve been thinking for a while it needs cleaning – but it got stuck half way and then I couldn’t get it back in and couldn’t get it all the way out. I used to have a Persil ball but lost it somewhere, and bought a large bottle with another one, but lost that too, so I took a top from a fabric conditioner bottle, filled that and balanced it on the washing then switched on the machine. Had shower and washed hair. Made coffee.

Now here I am, still in my dressing gown (but clean), writing my blog and drinking coffee. I can’t remember what I was thinking about while I was doing my exercises, two hours ago, but I don’t suppose it was important.

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Tired

Why can cats sleep for so much of the time and I sleep for so little?

Why do I lie in bed for so long in the mornings even though I don’t get back to sleep and I know that lying awake in bed for two hours isn’t going to make me happier, in fact quite the reverse?

Yesterday morning I made up my mind that this morning I wouldn’t lie in bed, but would get up and go to the beach to watch the sunrise, and I could have done it, I was awake in plenty of time and it wasn’t raining, but still I didn’t, I just lay there thinking about it and then got up just before seven and did the usual stuff and felt angry with myself. Well, I did listen to half an hour of radio, but even after that, I still had plenty of time to get up and go if I’d made myself do it.

They say two hours of deep sleep is the minimum you need to stay healthy, and I’ve been getting an average of 90 minutes over the two years I’ve been able to monitor it My fit-bit broke towards the end of last year, and I’ve lost all that historical data, but I got a new one this month which shows my average overall sleep for the last few weeks is six and a half hours, including an hour and a half of deep sleep, which is about the same as it was before.

I am tired – permanently tired – is all I’m trying to say, but I think most people who know me understand that already, I’ve moaned enough about it down the years. I’m tired and I look through tired eyes, and I have no energy or enthusiasm to do anything at all, but I hate myself for sitting and doing nothing and I wonder, if this is the endgame of my life, what then? Of course, there’s no reason to assume that this is the ‘endgame’, but I can’t see the future, I don’t know what it holds or what it potentially could hold, or how I could influence it in any way, or how I would even want it to be if it’s not going to be more of the same. All that running away has brought me here – I don’t mean geographically (I’m happy with that) but psycho-emotionally, I am the same person I kept running away from. Geographically I think I’ve found as good a place as I could have hoped for, but on those other terms I am as stuck as ever I was. All those things that were going to make me a different person, change my feelings about myself and allow me to grasp my destiny – children, PhD, leaving my husband, travelling across Europe, writing a book, moving to the south coast – haven’t made a scrap of difference to the sense that I’m as much a disaster as I always was.

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Wishes and Banishments

Some years ago – when I was living in the flat in Bedford, between leaving Ex-Hubby and going to Europe – I gave some thought to what I wanted to banish from my life. I was quite cautious when making my choice, aware that wishes have to be thought through very, very carefully or they will almost certainly backfire, and I didn’t tell anyone, because I’m also aware that to do that is to jinx the process, but after ten years I guess it’s quite safe to share. It was a fairly long list, but I boiled it all down to two things: fear and loneliness. Note that I wasn’t wishing ‘for’ a lover, knowing that they often bring more trouble and heartache than they’re worth, but ‘against’ loneliness, and realising that if I could learn to manage that, it wouldn’t matter whether or not I was ‘with’ someone.

Where have I got to, roughly a decade later? I think I’ve handled the loneliness pretty well, not perhaps in the way I hoped for at the time, but that’s why I was cautious and non-specific. And as for fear, I’ve come to acknowledge that it too is just an inevitable part of life. What am I most afraid of? Disappointment, failure, rejection… which is odd, because I’m so used to all those things, shouldn’t that make me less afraid of them?

I don’t know where my mind is going this morning. I thought of this as a topic to write about a few days ago – probably when I was writing about love – and I thought I’d tackle it today because I couldn’t think of anything else.

I don’t think I’m afraid of death. There have been a very few occasions – mostly in 2017 – when I’ve gone to bed thinking that I might never wake up, and that is a very visceral fear – but if it comes to me again, I hope I will be able to see how irrational it is. My life will come to an end one day, that’s inevitable – why should I worry about what I might or might not do between now and then? I’ve got the rest of my life to sort that out, and if I don’t, well… it’s not going to be my problem anymore, is it?

Where am I now, in my life, staring at this screen, thinking about going downstairs and getting breakfast? I took some sunrise pictures outside my back door this morning when I got up. I found a photo of myself as a little girl a couple of days ago when I was looking for photos of snow in Dallas. That day I also put together the bits of my tapestry frame – a present from Ex-Hubby before he was even Hubby, about forty years ago. There’s an uncompleted tapestry on it – not quite that old, probably mid 1990s. Will I start it again, maybe even finish it? Will I take that off the frame and start something new?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT6mw4GaPYQ
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Shoulds

I can see from my window that it must have been a glorious sunrise, but even though I was awake in time – even though I was up in time – I didn’t go to the sea to watch it, and now I wish I had. Wait, didn’t I say a while back that I didn’t do regret? I think you’ll find I said that the only things I regret are the ones I don’t do, and I didn’t go to see the sunrise.

Yesterday was such a nice sunny day that I thought, I should really have taken my van out – I thought that at about half past eleven, when it was really too late, so I told myself that today I’d plan to go out and take a picnic, because if I tell myself in advance there’s a better chance that I’ll do it. But then yesterday evening and first thing this morning I looked at the weather forecast, and it said it was going to be cloudy, so I more or less convinced myself that that was a good enough excuse not to do anything about it, to stay home again listening to the radio and sorting out my weather blanket. Now I can see sunshine on the roofs opposite and a clear sky behind and I’m not so sure that that excuse is valid.

Taking the van out always feels like it’s going to be a chore, to make sure the battery doesn’t pack up and avoid getting a telling off from the guys at the garage. It’s taking up time that I could be spending sitting in the armchair crocheting. Because yesterday I finished the Christmas jumper – apart from annoying tasks like sewing in the ends, and I’m not seeing my daughter till Friday week, so there’s plenty of time to sort those out.

Now that shaft of bright sun has disappeared, and I can see that what looked like a ‘clear’ sky is actually a solid sheet of high, light cloud – but it still doesn’t look bad enough to use as an excuse. And it’s a month since I took it out – once a month over winter should be enough to keep it ticking over. Do I have to go all the way to the country park? My parking season ticket is still valid. I can go into Sainsbury’s on the way and buy a picnic, drive there and park under the trees, make a cuppa and sit inside the van if it’s raining.

I know that’s what I should do. Here we go again, about the ‘shoulds’. This is not just what some voice from childhood is muttering into my inner ear. It’s something that I know will make me feel better once I’ve done it, and that I also know won’t be as bad as it seems once I get started – but I still don’t want to do it. Which is the story of my life – so really, I know I have to go.

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Dodgy Knee

I think my version of hibernation is waking three hours before sunrise and lying in bed listening to podcasts or reading from my Kindle until about seven then getting up, doing my exercises, making coffee and coming on here to write this blog. Three hours before sunrise is pretty much the same time as sunrise was six months ago, when I was waking around the same time but it wasn’t dark. The advice I had from the insomnia clinic, years ago, was to get up rather than lying in bed, so that my brain would be trained to associate bed with sleep, but that ship has not only sailed, but long ago disappeared below the horizon, and I might as well just listen or read. Sometimes I do drift back to sleep again, and some days, like today, it gets to this time (it’s half past eight) and I think – maybe I could go back to sleep now (except I can’t, because I’ve got wet hair and a towel round my head, and anyway if I lay down on the bed I probably wouldn’t get back to sleep, just waste another half hour or so trying to, and even if I did I’d hate it when I did wake up, because I’d have wasted half the day).

Geoff Dyer’s book ‘Out of Sheer Rage’ makes me alternately laugh out loud and cringe, because of his rambly stream-of-consciousness style, and because I relate to so much of what he writes about himself – and it’s all the worst bits – maybe not the worst bits of him, but the worst bits of me. One that struck a chord with me this morning was when he was complaining about his dodgy knee – the right one, whereas mine is the left. He had terrible problems with it when he was in Italy (I think – or maybe Mexico) and he saw a doctor who showed him two exercises that would help if he did them regularly, except of course he didn’t, so it got worse, then when he was back in England he went to his GP who sent him to a knee specialist, who sent him to a physiotherapist, who showed him the same exercises, which he still didn’t do. Four years ago (nearly five now), I started to notice pains in my leg, so I went to the GP and was referred to the physio, and I saw her monthly for a while, but didn’t like to admit I wasn’t doing the exercises in between, but by the end of the year I had cancer anyway which kind of trumped the leg thing, except that a couple of weeks ago I woke up one morning with so much pain in my left knee I could barely stand – I put it down to spending the previous day in a low armchair doing stuff on my laptop on a stool in front of me – it gradually eased and now it comes and goes but is bearable.

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Je Ne Regrette Rien

This morning I got up and walked to the beach. I was there in time for the sunrise, but the cloud cover was solid, and there was nothing to see. I sat on my usual bench, but the wind seemed to be blowing directly at me, and I didn’t feel comfortable enough to drink my coffee, so I walked down to the tideline and tried to photograph the waves, which were pretty fearsome. They were licking at the remains of a sandcastle, which seemed bizarre – who had been there building a sandcastle at this time of year?

I left the beach to cross the esplanade and drink my coffee in the Rose Garden, which is more sheltered, and as I turned to look back, I saw the clouds moving and parting, and a brief burst of light came from the gap and shone momentarily on the sea.

I think I finished yesterday saying something about regret, and Geoff Dyer saying that whatever you do, or don’t, there are always regrets. But I part company with him there – I think I’m quite good at avoiding regrets, over the big things, anyway. Of all the major changes I’ve made over the last twelve years, I don’t think there are any which I would undo, were such a thing possible, even the ones whose consequences were painful at the time. Not that that spares me from agonies when I have to make a choice, but that’s another matter. The torments I went through before I decided to move here – which seem ludicrous looking back from this perspective – were only finally settled when I realised that if I didn’t at least try it, I would always wonder what would have happened if I had. And now I know.

I read somewhere – a few years ago now – that it is part of human psychology to see major life choices – marriage, house purchase, choice of job, divorce – in a positive light once they’ve been made and committed to. It’s the ‘it was meant to be…’ syndrome: ‘I was meant to meet you, move here, do that – because look what happened!’ I was saying this a couple of weeks ago, I think, when I talked about fate and fatalism. We know the consequences of those decisions, and can’t really imagine what the alternatives might have been like. Of course, this isn’t universal, and I can’t remember the research and references off the top of my head, but I can see how it has worked out in my life.

In the time before I left my husband, I bought a greeting card with the legend: ‘The only things I’ll regret are the things I don’t do’, and stuck it to the wall behind my computer. It also became the tagline for the new blog I started when I moved out. I’ve still got that card, in fact if I look over my left shoulder, I can see it on a shelf. I think it’s a pretty good motto.

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Starlings

I looked at the clock and it was 6:21. I looked at the Accuweather app and saw that no precipitation was expected for 120 minutes, it was currently 11° and sunrise would be at 7:27. So I immediately decided I would get up and go to the beach with a flask of coffee, and then thirteen minutes later I got out of bed and dressed, let Miko out for her morning constitutional, filled her food bowl, made coffee, put on my shoes and winter coat and walked to the beach, arriving on the dot of 7:27.

I hadn’t thought about the clouds. There was a grey curtain hanging over the sea, and white overlapping ones over the land. And a surprising number of people out and about – not so surprising really, because it’s always like that, but somehow it always surprises me. Even more surprisingly, I wasn’t the only person just walking on the beach for the sake of walking, on their own, without a dog, or a metal detector, or a litter grabber and plastic sack. When my parents were ill, and after they passed away, I would go out for walks by myself, just generally through the fields around the village where we lived then, and along the old railway track, and the people I met invariably had dogs, and I always felt self conscious, as though walking by myself was vaguely suspicious, and I must be up to no good somehow. Until this year, it’s always been like that on the beach too, but now it seems people do go out on their own walking without ulterior motive – even walking normally, in normal clothes, like me, rather than ‘power’ walking (or whatever it’s called) with their elbows flailing.

I sat behind the café, where I always sit, and gradually the white clouds became tinged with pink, which was strange because they were over the land and hence further north, but evidently the light was seeping out from behind the darker clouds as the sun crept up surreptitiously, with none of the usual showy light across the sea. I watched the gulls and listened to the waves and drank my coffee, wondering why there were no starlings on the street lamp this morning, then a few minutes later I heard them chattering and looked again. I counted five on the lamp, none on the wire, but gradually more turned up, and I’d just got my phone out to take a photo when they all flew up at once and formed a small cloud which passed out of my eyeline then reappeared over the park. Two women with a beagle on a lead came from behind me, past the café. The one holding the dog’s lead was trying to jog and her friend was trying to take a photo of her, but the dog wasn’t co-operating, and stopped for a pee against a bunch of seakale. When they’d passed by, the starlings came back, so maybe the dog disturbed them.

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Sunrise

Add to the list of things done this week: sunrise walk. I was awake from 4:30 anyway, so got up around six, got dressed and made coffee to take out in my flask. First day of lockdown, but there were quite a few people on the streets and at the beach – joggers, dog walkers, and the regular wild swimmers. I sat in my usual place to drink my coffee, then walked down to the waves’ edge to watch the sun come up behind the bank of cloud low over the sea. Walked along the beach and through the Rose Garden, then through the gardens behind the natural history museum (surprised to find the gates open so early). Nowhere to stop for breakfast, so I was home before eight – which meant that I thought maybe I should still write.

I did take a notebook and pen out with me, by the way, but didn’t feel inclined to write anything on the beach. Didn’t do much of anything really, just sat and walked and watched for the first appearance of the spot on the horizon where the light came through a crack in the clouds.

Being there is important. Getting there doesn’t always feel that easy. The urge has to be followed when it arises.

I wrote something at bedtime last night – onto my phone, so I wouldn’t forget. This is it: ‘I have to keep reminding myself that, although fundamentally nothing ever really changes, some days, hours, moments are better than others, so I have to believe that those are worth hanging on for’.

It’s a privilege to be able to get up in the morning and walk to the beach in time to see the sun rise over the sea. It never gets boring – god knows how many photos I’ve taken of it over the last five years since I moved here. But the motivation isn’t always there. Today, for some reason I can’t explain, it just felt like the obvious thing to do. But most mornings are not like that.

Being on the south coast, it’s possible to see both the sunrise and the sunset over the sea, but I’m not usually out for the latter.  

Granny Weatherwax has something to say about sunrises, but I can’t remember exactly what. I think it’s in reply to being asked what she believes in, and she says: ‘sunrises mostly’ or words to that effect. Which just reminded me of some good advice given to me years ago by one of my first meditation teachers: ‘if you’re still breathing, there’s more right with you than wrong’. If the sun rises, there’s more right with the world than wrong. Another breath, another day, another spring and summer to come (eventually).

I still haven’t quite got back to cause and effect, destiny and fate, Taoism and whatever else I’m always on the brink of mentioning. Today might have been a good opportunity for that. But there’ll always be another sunrise to walk towards.

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Mornings

As you probably know, I wake most days around five o’clock, and very rarely go back to sleep again after that, although I usually lie in bed for a couple of hours brooding (or reading, listening to podcasts, looking at stuff on my phone – you know how it goes) before getting up – usually around seven – and doing a half hour routine of yoga/tai chi/meditation. So over the last few months I’ve been able to notice the changes in the timing of sunrise. It always comes as a bit of a shock how much the length of daylight has reduced by the end of August, but it’s hardly surprising when you remember we’re only three weeks away from the Autumn Equinox.

Every morning I have this sense of wishing the day would go away and just leave me alone, even though I haven’t had a regular get-up-and-out-of-the-house job (even a part-time one) for over eight years. Life is still there to be dealt with, whether you have somewhere to be by a certain time or not.

I used to have this idea that one day I would find my ‘place’ in the world and when that happened I would wake every morning looking forward to the day ahead. Although I now feel that I am in the best ‘place’ I’ve ever been (or am likely to be), I’ve had to accept that (along with many other things) starting each day full of enthusiasm and positivity is just not in my power.

Why have I started writing like this today? I don’t know, except that maybe I’m not quite so deep in the usual existential despair (or ‘gloom and doom’ as some would colloquially call it) that I can’t step back a little and consider it analytically for once. Is it down to lack of sleep? Probably to some extent, but that begs the more fundamental question of how I can get my body (or rather brain) to sleep any more than it always has, a question for which I’ve never found an answer. A more interesting thought is that this probably explains why so many of these posts tend to be so dark, and the question begged by that is: why try and write at this time of day, when I’m nearly always in a bad mood?

That goes back to advice I read – probably 40 years ago now – in ‘Becoming a Writer’, by Dorothea Brande, a classic from the days before the world became swamped by books of writing advice. The one thing I still remember from this book was to write first thing in the morning, before your conscious brain has a chance to elbow out the subconscious completely. Over the years, I’ve striven to follow that rule, although it’s sometimes led me down some strange alleyways.

And I think it might lead me somewhere now… but I’m nearly at the end of my quota. So I’m going to leave that for now and let it stew till tomorrow.    

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Tell Me the Old, Old Story

I think I surfaced just about bang on sunrise this morning: 5:40. I went to the window and saw the pink glow creeping over the house roofs, then left the gap in the curtains and went back to bed, watching the colour briefly suffusing the wall. At least it’s sunny – well, it was for most of yesterday too – the rain didn’t last long.

Am I feeling any more sunny this morning? Maybe. Yesterday did not turn out to be a good day. I spent most of the morning digging through old laptops, archived files and a set of data CDs and DVDs which I burnt as part of a back-up system around 2005 and 2006 (amazed myself by finding them, although I knew I’d seen them somewhere recently – well, in the last three years at least). I was looking for photos – a specific photo, in fact – of my cat from October 2005, when we first got her, because yesterday was her fifteenth birthday and I wanted to make a post about it on Facebook, with then-and-now pictures. I did it partly because I suspect she won’t be around to see another birthday, and I am preparing myself for the inevitable letting go, but also because her entry into my life was such a bizarre turning point – and yesterday I not only found the background to her name, which I’d saved in one of those fifteen-year-old files, but my journal entry for the morning of the day we brought her home – before I knew what a shit-storm I was initiating. And that photograph (on one of the back-up CDs), which featured, ten days later, in the first blog post I ever wrote, on a blog called ‘Husband or Cat?’ on a platform which no longer exists.

I could tell that story again. Should I? There are people who know it already – at least one of whom might even be reading this – in essence, at least, even if not in detail. But the details are still there, still documented, still accessible. It’s an odd story, full of drama, and passion, in its way, with a beginning far too implausible for fiction, and an ending… how did it end? Well, I guess – at least, as I’ve said before about all the world-churning choices I’ve made in the last fifteen years, if I hadn’t done what I did, I would never have known how things would turn out if I did, now would I?

I suppose that’s what fiction’s for – to explore the other side of the ‘what if’ – but I don’t have the energy or inspiration for fiction. Maybe that’s why I was compelled to make the choices I did – because it was the only way of finding out? When I think of the dreams and expectations I started with, it’s true that none of them quite worked out as I thought they would, but they shaped my life nonetheless.

I was going to write about writing advice – and Taoism. Another time, maybe.