Suddenly, somehow, we are sitting at Advent Eve!
Normally I look forward to this day as excitedly as
an overworked bird looks forward to the day her offspring fledge, but this year
I feel quite indifferent.
It’s crept up on me, that’s the trouble. This year
has been a weird conglomeration of parental strife, work woes, Brexit bullcrap
and insomnia, and I haven’t been able to register the passing of time as it’s
happened. Now we’ve hit the last day of November and I’m wondering where the
Hell Spring went.
I know I’ll get into it tomorrow. There’ll be Advent
calendars to open (Mathew has one, even though he’s too little for the
chocolate. Daddy will be helping him on that front, I’m sure.) There’ll be
newspapers that quite clearly have the date DECEMBER 1st on them,
and there’ll be the usual flurry of start-of-the-month e-mails from Head
Office, where mid-level management bods will need to be producing more
pointless spreadsheets to justify their own overpaid, unnecessary existences.
Everything just seems to happen so quickly, these
days. I hate to sound old, but I’m sure I remember a time when life moved on
quite steadily, and we could all take odd moments here and there to enjoy the
beauty of the world and appreciate what we had around us. Nowadays it seems
we’re all just rushing on to the next appointment, or the next hour of work, or
the next social media post, or the next celebrity television show, and no-one
pauses for breath. No-one pauses for reflection. No-one allows themselves time
to regroup, re-evaluate and reset. We’re all just charging full-pelt at a
destination we don’t even know, desperately trying to get there before the
other people who, like us, have no idea what they’re doing and are just being
pulled along by the tide. We’re leaderless, rudderless and clueless; driven on
by the cultural obsession with consumerism and instant answers and self.
No wonder the months fly by unattended.
RC 30-11-19
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