Dear Me

A Christmas thank you letter

Dear Me,

How are you?

Thank you for the thoughtful present you gave me before
Christmas. Decorating a tree again after so many years gave
me hours of pleasure, both in the doing and later the
appreciation.

More thanks, too, in advance for the wonderful gift for my
70th birthday next Thursday: Life. Such kindness and, may I
say, miraculous generosity from one so young!

A good time - as good as any - to pause, to take stock and
consider the life you have given me. All too often, we
grown-ups are counselled to whisper wise reassurances from
our places of hindsight to comfort our young selves, so that
their fears and anxieties can be mitigated, if not dissolved
altogether.

Yet a simple reflection shows that this is a close companion
of quixotic windmill jousting; I have your memories kept
safe within me, and not one of them contains an episode in
which you hear me tell you that, in the end, all will be
well.

So you faced the uncertainties and sometimes very real
dangers from before you were born alone, without me to guide
you, protect you, or offer you succour. (Such a word —
‘succour’ – I don’t believe I have ever used it
intentionally before now!)

Yet here we both are, alongside all the incarnations you
have been in between. And as for me, I am happy to report to
you that I am content, finding joy whenever I stop and
simply notice that I am here, or that a snowdrop is shyly
checking out the temperature above ground, or that Venus is
playing hide and seek with the slivery silver of a new moon
tonight.

I made it - thanks to you, my very young Me.

We made it.

Despite everything - the sunbursts of new loves and the
dark, hidden shames, the flamboyance of lunch in Paris (back
home in time for tea) and the advent of the leukaemia
(converted from shock and despair to a lust for life in just
twenty quick years).

When the time comes for coil shuffling, there is plenty of
debris in my wake, the damage we did to those to whom we
owed love, the failed adventures and missed opportunities
which only lately have become lessons learned in full.

Abandoned so early ourselves, we abandoned too many.

Yet now you are loved and we know it and feel it, in all my
days and deep in my heart. Friendships forged in congruence,
humility, gratitude and honesty - qualities I was so very
adept at suppressing for fear of revealing a vulnerability
beyond your ability to cope.

I’ve grown fond of metaphors and allegories, my young Me.
And what I’ve thought of for this letter of thanks concerns
water, the very stuff of life itself.

Pick a starting point, any will do: how I have laid it out
here is an outcome of having to write it down. A fine artist
could do a grand job of encompassing the whole as one
experience, which it is of course.

Let’s say we start with us as a molecule in the high
atmosphere – an oxygen with a couple of spindly hydrogens
sticking out. Swirling around, we grow as we gather
experiences, shaping us into wisps of molecules, then
strands of water vapour, forming slowly into the infancy of
droplets.

Through the challenging stages of precipitation, we may
become raindrops, falling, falling. Or perhaps as snow,
pretty and admired but short-lived like so many talented
musicians, or James Dean. Our life may harden us into hail
or disperse us into fog, we may settle out as dew on the
grass or condensation on a cold window pane to be wiped away
and wrung out down a plughole with the spiders, but one way
or another, we will reach the stage of having landed.

We’d hope, perhaps, to be a mountain stream, maturing into a
valley river but we may just as likely become a muddy, dirty
puddle, washed into drains and dykes and ditches.

Onward through our life cycle we evolve, our fate to become
the sea or a lake, where we can take a well-earned final
rest before - and we never know this, before we evaporate to
do it all again.

Which molecule is us? Which of the forms and experiences
could be our "true self"?

All of them.

Even into the ocean of rest, as the crest of a wave or the
stillness down in a trench, we are the water.

All of it. All of us.

This is what I am saying thanks to you for, dear Me. For
being the water, the vapour and the torrents, the clouds and
the refreshments; without all of you and all that you have
been, there would be no me to give thanks and revel in this
day.

So thanks, with all my love,

Old You. X