Winter Stories

On noticing the stories I tell and the direction they lead me in

Perhaps January is silly month to start gardening again, but I have begun it all the same. I am attempting five minutes every day. I have a set of too-long blue overalls on a nail by the door and mid-afternoon, as the light is running fast out of the day, I have begun the ritual of solemnly zipping myself into this unfashionable, serious attire and opening the door to the wind and the damp.

Five minutes really is five minutes and I am soon back in again. It is hardly worth the overalls, but I like the intention of it. The garden looks repulsive - dead growth thick, pots crooked, black soil heaped - but by the end of January, I can see that I’ll have restored much of it back to clean, wet earth and that it will feel good. I stand out there with my unsteady legs, looking at the tangled, dead leaves twisted, the sky grey and sullen. Clogged planters, their drainage holes blocked, have become slimy ponds. The wood beds are slowly rotting. I lost many plants in the drought and many will not regrow come spring. It would be easy to see it all as yet another disaster, yet another dark cloud in my life and my circumstances, but it doesn’t feel like that in these fresh new weeks, the sharp air on my face. It feels peaceful. Exhilarating, almost, in its honesty and its potential for change. Cold emptiness has a tidiness to it and I lean into it, comforted.

This winter is teaching me something about how I tell stories. I have been busy telling sad stories about my life lately. Whoever I speak to, I find myself with a sad story right there on my tongue. One day, it struck me with something like horror, how habitual and instinctive my sad stories have become. On one hand, there is a lot to be sad about, of course. I suspect there are very few people who don’t have a sad story that is easy to recount just now. That seems to be the painful way of things. But on the other hand, I can see how easily this could turn into how I speak of things forever.

I could tell my sad stories all through this wet, dark winter. I could tell them through the spring, too, as the garden finds new life around me. I could tell them through the bright light of summer and the beauty of autumn. I could make it one big sad year. It will always be possible to list all the things that are wrong, if I want to. There are always things happening, or not happening, that could be commandeered. What haunts me is the memory of people who do that, their minds the deepest places of suffering of all, who you notice only ever verbally list things that aren’t working in their favour, sifting their lives despondently for the hardships and picking them out one at a time. It is my fear to become someone like that. That perhaps I’ve already begun.

As I get older, it becomes more and more apparent that at some point, the weight of the years inevitably heavy, you have to choose how you will bear it. You have to choose whether to continue with a glass half empty or a glass half full life. It is trite and annoying and true. Life is often - usually, I find - persistently coloured by some hardship or another. My life has no real prospect of changing in that regards any time soon, so what to do?

It doesn’t feel Pollyannaish to want to choose differently, to look differently, to sift through the realities of my life with a different mindset. It feels hard and pragmatic, like January wind and snug, blue overalls. The question is, who do I want to be? Someone focused on misery, or someone focused on everything else? No, it isn’t mawkish. It is the sticking of a foot in a closing door and pressing through. It is choosing differently before I am changed too much.

We are often afraid to re-orientate towards the positives, I think. We are afraid we’ll be struck off the already over-subscribed sympathy list and end up getting passed over for care. We’re afraid that if we don’t stress what’s awful, our lives won’t be fully seen. It is a risk to set aside our sad stories, but I am increasingly curious about what might happen if I do, and what could take their place.

This is what the winter garden is teaching me, slowly, with its mess and decay. Enjoying what is here to be enjoyed changes very little, yet somehow each day, I am restored. Telling the story of hidden, unexpected pleasure feels more honest, too. Less filtered. There IS a lot to enjoy still, after all.

It is a new year and in three days, it is my birthday, too. Another year older and if I were to wish something for this complicated, ageing body and mind, it would be to start being more careful with my stories. Mindful of what they emphasise and what they erase. Mindful of the direction they’re pulling me in.

---

You’re reading a bimblings freebie post — my heartfelt gift to the universe. If you subscribe, you’ll receive one or two posts like this a month. For more behind-the-scenes news about my personal life, book-writing, art practice, loves and losses, plus more on how I navigate life with a body that doesn’t work so well, please do consider upgrading for a small monthly fee. Alternatively, perhaps you’d like to buy me a coffee? It all helps me and my family enormously. Thank you so much for being here.