I have been everything before

Sit with me by this window for a little while

I am high, high up in a small room at the back of an old shoe factory on our cramped, Midlands town-centre estate. My view is of the factory roof and a great long row of narrow terraced yards, alleyways and bins, washing drying in the cold March sunshine, cats prowling the walls.

At various distances, I can see the squat shape of half a dozen other old factories, some unoccupied with windows broken and buddleia growing from the walls and gutters, others restored to usefulness but sitting dark and anonymous, their oversized chimneys stretching a little higher than everything else. The sky is blue. Pigeons perch on the terrace’s TV ariels and form great, swirling flocks of white and silver that descend to the rooftops en-masse.

If I was to knock on a door on the other side of the building and ask to look out of its window, I would be able see my own little house in its identical terrace. Our houses were built for the workers of these factories and the people who first lived in my house worked in this one, walking the same few dozen metres down the road to sit in the same room I now sit in, an echo of belonging that is deep and profoundly comforting.

Built in 1873, the brick of this old factory is red, the windows arched. Our way in is through a dark cobbled passageway into a yard that has known the weight of horses. The rooms are small and a maze of narrow corridors weave between them, but what is most exciting about all of this is that one of these rooms — this one — is now mine.

I have wanted to rent an office in this building for years and years but have never been able to before. I was too broke, too unwell, and I would have needed help to get here and back again, help to get into the creaking disabled lift that now climbs through the floors past all the other business units to rent, help to get to the toilet on my trickier days. I can only work for such short periods, it wouldn’t be worth it anyway, I’d say to myself to help soothe the disappointment whenever I looked up at its windows. The ‘you don’t work enough to deserve it’ part was left unspoken but rang as clear as the factory bell.

But Fraser is living with me now and suddenly many more things are possible. He needed an office for his work and so why not make it my office too? And, because we are bold and clever and not afraid to do things differently, why not put a day bed in it so I can lie down here, rest here?

The room is just big enough for our two desks, two chairs, a cupboard with a kettle, and the bed which we’ve covered with pillows and blankets. I am not managing to come here every day, but every morning I can now, F pushes me over, even if all I can do is rest near him while he works.

I write a little. I close my eyes. I listen to the scribble of F’s pen against paper or the rattle of his fingers at the keyboard. I listen to the muffled voices from the other units, the distant hum of the handdryer in the bathroom. Sometimes, I sleep.

It is wonderful, and yes, I feel a little useless, often, because I would have loved to finally fill this ‘room of my own’ with endless productivity, working hard for hours and hours and hours until my success poured from this place, until I changed the whole world, and yes, I am still learning to make peace with what I am and what I am not.

And still, something about this place is feeding me.

Perhaps it is the new view. Just sitting here, surrounded by layers and layers of history, surrounded by industry, it is easier to remember that I have already been everything else that exists. Right now, I happen to exist in a configuration that is human-shaped, but all the elements that make up that shape have been many, many other things before, dismantled and repurposed over and over again.

“Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.”

Within my very atoms, I hold the memory of how to be a solid wall that can hold fast for a century or more, and I know how to be the buddleia that pushes its roots deep into neglect, inviting butterflies to abandoned places. I know how to be a bird, both singularly watchful and sweepingly, gloriously aligned with my kin. I know how to be a lone tree pushing my crown above rooftops. I know how to be slate and brick and mud and iron. I know how to be a shoemaker. I know how to write all this down.

Everything I do is just an echo of something I’ve done and been before, and likely I will get to do and be it all again in some other form. Remembering that helps. It makes our (my) endlessly self-centred talk about our perceived successes or failures feel quite ridiculous.

At my very deepest level of being, I know how to live in a billion different ways: life is what I’m made of.

I can sit here in this room, looking at this view, writing when I can, and F can push me home through our old, old, hard-working neighbourhood, and I can leave small pieces of myself everywhere I go, drawing new and old pieces into me, shedding and reforming like something made of dust, because that’s what I am, what we all are, and this alone can have more meaning than I could ever need. I am nothing more or less than a moving congregation of all things past and all things yet to be, a congregation arranging itself into a particular shape, seeing what it can do with itself on this day, and that’s perfect, that’s enough.

I enjoy being everything very much indeed.

The first thing we did when we signed the lease here was to buy plants and put them on the windowsill. On those days I’m struggling to work at all, I like to lie here and just feel myself breathing out, feeling my breath stretch to the plants and beyond, out through the open window, right across the rooftops to distant trees, knowing that I’m giving everything green around us the carbon dioxide that it needs, and then I breathe in knowing I’m receiving what I need. Breathing in, breathing out, I exchange myself with everything.

I don’t have a point to make, really, only that usefulness is complex, perhaps, and that our ‘work’ is so much bigger than we think, stretching across time, across forms, across thoughts.

Perhaps I just wanted to share this special new place with you.

F tells me this is an old Ordinance Survey mark on the corner of the factory but it also looks a lot like the Druidic symbol of Awen — inspiration — and if that isn’t a blessing, then I don’t know what is.

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Introducing shaped

Have you seen my new Substack side-quest? As a 100 Day Project, I’m spending a few minutes every day painting a shape and sharing a few words. It’s meant as a daily act of devotion — a way for me to make a simple commitment to notice something and record it every day rather than getting paralysed in trying to make Big Impressive Art with a capital A. I’m enjoying it immensely and I’d love it if you’d like to follow along.

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You’re reading a bimblings — my heartfelt offering to a generous universe. If you subscribe, you’ll receive one or two posts like this a month. They’re always free and written with love. Upgrading to a paid subscription is entirely voluntary but a vital source of support to help keep me writing and to protect my livelihood. Paid subscribers receive an extra post a month in which I share a little more of my life — this year I’m exploring some new ways to think. If subscribing isn’t for you, perhaps you’d like to buy me a coffee instead? It all helps me and my family enormously. Thank you so much for being here.