Resolving to.. not give up just yet

I’m not really one for New Year’s resolutions, for a variety of reasons:

-I’m not especially good at setting effective goals, as my targets tend to be rather underwhelming and/or vague (‘try to read more’, ‘eat salad quite often’, or, even worse, ‘be slightly less depressed this year’)

-I prefer the idea of long-term, sustainable change to almost inevitably transient behavioural flips that leave you a bit sad in February, or earlier, depending on willpower.

-The division of time into years has always seemed a bit arbitrary to me: it makes sense to split our time on Earth, and indeed time in general, into some sort of segments. That said, anything beyond days and seasons is somewhat unempirical. I don’t mind years, but it seems a bit silly to make the start and end of a new one so important.

Going back to my rather shabby goals, I almost inevitably fail to read more and eat salad often enough. It doesn’t help that I have no idea how much enough is. How do you quantify salad in all its various types? Does adding pasta mean that it’s a salad with pasta, or a pasta salad? These factors, while ostensibly inconsequential, have significant bearing on my imaginary salad volume calculations.

A salad of sorts. Also a salad of apples, prunes, celery, walnuts, red peppers and avocado. I think the absence of any leaves makes the legitimacy of its identity somewhat tenuous.

As is sometimes the case, I’m being silly to avoid being too serious or sad. During a period of exhaustion over the last few weeks I’ve had a lot of time to think about the pressures and attention of elite athletics, not having a real job, what I should be trying to do with my time and where I might place myself geographically.

Well, that last one should really be when I might return to the island I call home, which is neither where I am now (despite the nice weather and surrounding warm water), nor where I flew from.

I’m now in Tenerife, and came from London. Well, not originally. Never mind.

I was going to make a joke about the weather in London still being better than anywhere on the island of Ireland, most of the time, but that it’s hard to appreciate that on account of all the smog. So I did. Sort of.

Just a photo.

Going back to the whole ‘being less depressed’ thing, my level of mental wellbeing mostly swings around a pivot, regressing to the mean like a gloomy but determined boomerang.

2017 had some huge highs, but sadly they were almost balanced out by some despondent lows. Happily, they weren’t quite, and it was, despite how it ended, the best year of my life.

But it did end crappily. I spent a large part of Christmas Day in bed, which is fine if you’re sleeping off eating half your body weight in roast dinner. It’s not fine if you’re too psychologically exhausted and anxious to leave your room for several hours.

Maybe this whole elite athlete thing isn’t for me. Maybe I should pack in London, and go back to my favourite island.

I guess this is the part where I’m supposed to write something inspirational about not giving up, fighting for what you believe in, or the tough moments defining who you are.

The truth is, I can’t do that yet. Of course I can write it, but it wouldn’t be genuine. I don’t feel I should hold the position of giving out advice when I still can’t take care of myself. I haven’t earned it, but I’m always happy to share my experiences if they might be useful.

Honestly, I think talking about the low moments will always be more important. People don’t talk about them as much, and I suppose it also makes sense in that it’s more difficult than publicising our successes.

In sport, successes and failures will always be public, but it’s those that take place away from that platform that matter more to me.

The best I can do is try and make those discussions a bit more open, and continue bumbling along. That’ll do for a resolution, I think. Every time I feel like giving up, instead of shouting ‘no’ like a brave person, I’ll just avert my eyes and awkwardly mumble ‘not yet’. It seems to have worked so far, more or less.

 

Incidentally, I did actually make a resolution to read one book a week and publish one blog post. Provided I can manage thirty more pages in the next five days or so, that’ll be two out of two so far.

A thread of hope

Normally I don’t include any context with poems, I just throw them out there and hope for the best, like lobbing a hastily improvised grenade. Or so I would imagine. Most of the time, the best is an ambiguous silence filled partly by the knowledge that someone, somewhere, has read at least a bit.

I may set a low bar (incidentally making me an awful and/or indolent high jumper), but I’d consider this a success. This does reveal something of my confidence in both myself and whatever I’ve decided, wisely or otherwise, to throw into the internet.

Every new year might be a largely if not entirely arbitrary division of time, and I confess my ‘tradition’ is usually to sleep through it, as I did last night, but I’ll try to continue posting more regularly through 2018. This might mean more poems, as they’re the things I tend to actually end up finishing most often.

This one’s probably my favourite from what I wrote last year. There’s a great quote from Frankenstein that I expect has found its way into this blog already: “seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries”.

That’s a big clue for the poem’s meaning, although my role in science and discovery is still, as ever, disappointingly nonexistent. I write a lot of very stupid jokes, and perhaps as a consequence the poems aren’t trying to be funny. To be fair, most of the jokes don’t succeed anyway. I would say to myself ‘stick to the day job‘, but I haven’t really got one anymore.

Anyway, with what was a fairly irrelevant preamble out of the way, here’s the poem.

A master’s ropes pull on reluctant legs,
A vessel full of joy drained to its dregs.
What once was sinew now seems puppets’ strings,
The limbs that moved as one, recast as ‘things‘.

They’ve come apart from what drove them before,
Lost promise that can bring them forward no more.
The mind that was a guide, it’s lost its soul,
But still the dice of chance will play its role.

Eyes half averted, also half transfixed.
Hope and despair are perhaps best unmixed,
“Where to?”, they ask, “where now?“, the muttered cry,
Three fates are left to fight, to share one eye.

These spinners always spun the webs we tread,
What looked like solid ground, in fact was thread.
Its woven well through all we think our own,
And when we’re gone, what of these seeds we’ve sown?

Shelly’s great king left nought beside a sound,
Ariadne’s silk, spun of hope, unwound,
Yeats’ great work, to perfection it was brought,
A lesson not yet learned, but it was taught.

One thing still remains: “What then, asked the ghost”
It’s what we have lost, that’s what meant the most