As I stood at the sink washing the dishes the oppressive feeling of a dispirited low patch was tangible. It’s been a difficult few months – COVID-19 aside – and it felt like yet another hard day in a period of seemingly unending hard days.
A troubling (and almost terminal) time in our marriage has been the overriding factor of the last four months, and being furloughed from work has meant that alongside the full-time care of our two year-old I haven’t had the distraction of work to stop me not only thinking about things, but, more damagingly, overthinking about them.
As Alexi Murdoch’s ‘Orange Sky’ came through the speaker I found my gaze drifting out of the kitchen window to the summer solstice early evening light casting the warm glow on the leaves of our neighbours tree that overhangs into our postage stamp garden. Beyond the leaves and past neighbouring houses, I looked further out towards the houses on elevated ground to the north, the trees behind, and up to the sky above.
The sky was blue and cloudless. An expanse of graduated hues and stillness that brought me an instant peace as the lazy drum beat, sparse acoustic guitar strums and almost spoken lyrics of the song melded with the view. A symbiosis of sight and sound that opened up the world beyond the issues at home.
Something about the calm of the sky had me thinking that all problems are temporary. Like the sky, life preceded the problems we are working through, just as, whatever the outcome, it will continue beyond them.
A few years ago I would spend many of my days off walking around various parts of London, drinking too much coffee, reading and writing, and generally absorbing all that I saw around me. One particular line of thought had me looking at some of the older architecture contrasted against the new.
While in it’s extremes some churches date from as early as the 7th Century, and now often find themselves butted up against office blocks or residential buildings constructed in the last twenty years, the majority of the city admittedly features architectural contrasts covering a shorter timespan. What struck me most, however, was the way these buildings stood as they have for x hundred years as life has gone on around them. Wars have been fought, governments and indeed countries have risen and fallen, and countless people were born and died.
As you watch life bustling around at street level, glancing upwards you see the stonework of the buildings towering above, solid and silent as it has been for the previous hundred years or more. The societal changes that have happened beneath, around and inside these buildings also covers everything prior to, and will outlast, any of the mundane daily life that shares this particular moment in history with them. I picture
Zooming out from these buildings themselves, the sky indeed covers all that came before and will go on eternally after the last stone has crumbled, overseeing all.
The often referred to metaphor of the whole of time being laid out around the face of a clock highlights how fractional the amount of time we have been around as a species actually is, and within that our time on Earth as individuals is even smaller. To compare any particular hard time within our lives to this means we start speaking in nanoseconds, if not smaller, and the over-riding vastness of everything before and after should likewise give perspective over these periods as part of our lives.
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