Heroes Not Zombies

When I retired back in 2014 I emigrated. I sold a top floor apartment (a “flat” we Scots say) on the edge of Stirling. We had a great view from the windows there, looking across to Ben Ledi and the neighbours. I loved that view and took multiple photos of that landscape in all kinds of weather and in all four seasons. But the truth is I was engaging with Nature from a distance.

When I moved to France I rented an old house with a garden on the edge of a village. I was surrounded by vineyards. That change brought me much closer to Nature as every day I saw and walked amongst the ever changing trees, bushes, flowers and vines. The rhythms and cycles of the year became an obvious present reality.

My intention was to stay there for a few months while I worked out if this living in France idea was a good one, but I ended up living there for 7 years. Not exactly a gap year. Not exactly a pause. More a full life filled with wonder, delight and learning. But I’ve moved now, bought a house in a small hamlet, and I’m ready to put down my roots.

This feels like a settling.

So when I look at this old photo of a park bench in autumn I think of the seasons of life, of how I’ve moved from my career years to my retirement ones…..not to “inactivity” but to a different phase of learning and creativity. I think of how much I’ve learned to notice the arrivals and departures of migratory birds, of the phases of growth, fruition and closing down in the plant world, as leaves are shed and the garden beds down for the winter.

I look at this photo and I hear music. At this moment, in my head, I hear “Old friends, sat on a park bench like bookends”, and I hear “Leaves are brown now, and the sky is a hazy shade of winter”.

Well, that takes me back. The first music I heard in stereo! I haven’t started to unpack all my cardboard boxes yet, but I know that “Bookends”, the “LP” (or maybe you call it “vinyl”) will be there, with the rest of the records I bought, mainly in my teens.

How many seasons, how many phases, how many life stages, have I lived since then?

It’s quiet here, in this old stone house in the French countryside. It’s a good time to be alive. But then isn’t today, isn’t the present, always the best time to be fully alive?

That’s one thing I’ve learned. To be awake, aware, conscious and fully present, in the here and now.