Someone once rather unkindly described one of my past jobs as ‘janitorial services’… i.e. cleaning up the messes made by other people.
If you ever take a moment to talk to anyone who genuinely does do ‘janitorial services’, you soon learn it is hard work, low status and low paid. We should all be a little more respectful and grateful to those who do.
But stimulated by the book Atomic Habits by James Clear, I’m making small incremental improvements (and not sweeping goals) the priority.
Tidying up around the house has been this weekend’s zeitgeist – and in the process I realised, why not tidy up Achilles & Aristotle too… If I haven’t got the muse or anything new to say, then why not do a better job of what I’ve already said!
There’s no piece of writing that can’t be a little better, so punctuation and small edits are my target. And in the process I get a free trip down memory lane – starting back in 2010, as I did this morning.
Much as I found in my ‘janitorial services’ job, cleaning up can be just as fulfilling as ‘creating’ if you change your mindset.
Old King Cole was a merry old soul, And a merry old soul was he; He called for his pipe, and he called for his bowl, And he called for his fiddlers three. Every fiddler he had a fiddle, And a very fine fiddle had he; Oh, there’s none so rare, as can compare, With King Cole and his fiddlers three.
Since I’ve quit booze, and gave up smoking many years ago, the bowl and pipe aren’t that appealing; and nor are the scraping ‘fiddlers three’ to be honest.
But being ‘a merry old soul’ is a good goal. As my favourite French essayist Michel de Montaigne prompted me via the Waking Up App:
It’s a good reminder that whatever the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune – and the vicissitudes of the passing years and getting older – with a cheerful elan, is the only smart way to meet life.
My friend Andy passed away most unexpectedly last September. I think about him every day. Small things remind me of him constantly.
One by-product is I have no desire to write. I’ve come to realise that a lot of my scribblings were a means to keep him informed. He’d lived in another country for so long. Absent him there is no-one really that I want to write for. It’s a bit sad, but I’ve realised that now.
Time is the great healer, but his untimely death has left an unfillable hole in my life – so many things we’d laughed about which no-one else would find funny. It’s less the specifics, more that a whole part of the landscape of my life has disappeared. Absent him no-one else will ever be interested in swathes of our shared experiences.
I miss ‘my friend Andy’ (as I always referred to him to my family) and I am endlessly sad that he’s no longer here to read my scratchings and to laugh, correct, disagree with, indulge and cheer me.
Most of all, I’d hoped we’d waste hours in deckchairs chuckling and watching the world go round; as old men. Perhaps interspersed with the odd game of backgammon just to keep us jousting…
Sadly that most important of deckchairs is now empty.
Contemplating trees, out walking the dog last weekend, I was struck by a line of them that have been ‘managed’.
And the reason is evident lying on the ground – a great big one that fell last year on a windy day. Without having chunks periodically lopped off them, they’d get too big and too unwieldy for the park authorities.
I was struck by the fact that mighty as they are – each with the same impressive twisted pattern in their hefty trunks – they were all different shapes and had been chopped back in different places. The results were fundamentally not that shapely. They’re impressive and large, but a bit misshapen and not all that handsome in truth. And my eye was drawn to one that visibly had had a big bough lopped off it.
I felt a bit sorry for this tree. What had it done to deserve such a hacking with a chainsaw. And this set me thinking about life… looked at more closely all the older trees were misshapen. They all stood dignified and tall (except the big one now on its back sawn into pieces) but all of them had been trimmed, twisted and bent out of shape by park life.
There were smaller ones which were still perky and largely symmetrical (here’s one with the dog looking on)…
…but the big ones had all had branches which had been cut back and shapes distorted by arrested growth and long life.
And so with trees it seems to me with people. As I looked at the first tree that caught my eye, with its circled chopped bough, it made me think of my own career and life.
Lots of things I have branched out into have come to an end. Jobs and projects either outgrown by new activities or chopped off by life’s ever-active lopping shears. The odd big life branch has even been hacked off against my wishes like that chainsawed bough. My tree is getting more and more twisted and gnarled – but above all distinctive and different with the passage of time.
Big old trees are products of their environment; and when that environment includes people they get shaped, pruned, lopped, frustrated and ultimately felled. But the individual branches matter less over time.
Old trees stand as evidence of perseverance in all conditions. We may be less pretty as we age, but our many years of adaptation and growth, and the storms and setbacks we have weathered ultimately make us much more interesting.
Achilles & Aristotle 