Geoff Thompson: Writer – Teacher – Martial artist

Imagine if you will a pile of dust. It is sat to your left hand side. It is about six inches high and the same in breadth.

Do you see it in your minds eye?

Now move across to your right, a metre, and find another pile of dust. Similar in height and breadth.

The pile of dust on your left represents your genesis. It is where you started. At some point you were and – according to biblical lore – you came from dust.

The pile of dust on your right represents where you are going. To your grave. At some point in the near or far future you are going to die. According to new science, physiologically speaking, you are already dying, and your demise is as certain as anything can be in this quantum soup.

When you are cornered by the coffin you will go back to dust.

We are born in human form and we die. That is fact. But do not despair, this is not an article in the negative, this is inspirational. Birth and death are the two things we can rely on. The only certainties in the spinning chaos we call the Milky Way. This is good! Hard facts in a world of infinite variables is good purchase. We can grind our feet into certainty as we push off on our hurdle through space.

But that is not the most interesting aspect of our earthly sojourn; the exciting part for me, the bit that gets my juices going, is the span in the middle.

The span between birth and death. You may know it as ‘life.’

Whilst birth and death are completely out of our control, life is not. That span in the middle, the century (or less) of time that constitutes our existence in the coil is down to us. It is not down to our parents or our birth place, it is not down to our teachers and schools, the boss at work, the state of the economy, your husband, wife, children, relatives or friends, even the government and the politicians have no say over your free will. And neither, according to all religious doctrine, does God. Your birth and your death are out of your hands but your life is not. You can do anything, you can be anything, you can go anywhere, and you can be anyone you choose to be. You have no limitations, other than the amount of time you get in the span.

I spoke with a soldier the other day. He had experienced nine tours in war zones around the world as a paratrooper and he had seen death. I asked what lessons his dark liaisons had taught him. He was still young but I could see he was a man tempered and scarred by atrocity. He said that working in the ultimate arena had taught him one important lesson; life is fragile. That’s what he said. That is the word he used and I was moved. A fragile life. And people, he continued, believe they have all the time in the world to do the things they want to do. But they haven’t. And because they think their time is infinite they usually do nothing at all, instead they shelve their dusty dreams, they put them off until another day, a better day, next week, next year, maybe new year. They have a finite and fragile life and they do not honour it. And often the things they neglect are not just the big dreams and aspirations that we all harbour, they also ignore the delicate issues that might transform their world. One woman hasn’t spoken to her daughter for five years, and her daughter hasn’t spoken to her mother. They can hardly remember the argument but neither of them will break the impasse for fear of appearing weak, so the gap widens and loss becomes their lot. Another hasn’t touched her husband for as long as he can remember, she can’t be bothered, and the last time he brought her flowers and used the love word was when they got married. Flowers are always too expensive and love is for doting teenagers. So instead of acting, he finds his surrogate on late night playboy channels and she sadly traces back through the annals of her memory looking for her lost beau as she puts her own flowers in the supermarket trolley.

Life is fragile.

A father never rings his son, just to say hello. He thinks that the onus is on the young so he waits and he simmers and gets upset that the boy he raised and nurtured and cuddled and taught never calls, no matter how long he looks at the telephone, and he does look. And the son never calls because he is young, he is living his life. And anyway, he has left it so long that the call can no longer be made because through the ether he feels his father’s disappointment and sadness and so his fingers freeze on the telephone and the call is postponed. Again. Another lost day.
So son and father, mother and daughter, husband and wife become strangers.

Life is fragile.

You think you have got forever, well, you haven’t.

The tomorrow that you are waiting for to mend your wounds, heal your family fractures and live your dreams may never come other than in eulogy and regret and that is a choice you make, no one else.

You were born and you will die. The beginning and the end page are fixed but the story in the middle is not. The story is all yours, waiting to be written. That delicious chunk of rich living is before you, baited and ripe, and it is all yours to do with how ever you please you free man, woman with infinite choices.

So now that you know you are free, are you going to make something of that freedom? Well, are you?

I know what I am going to do. I am going to live a thousand dreams, I shall jaunt manically through my life like a man let lose in paradise. And I am going to tell my wife I love her ten thousand times and shower her path with petals, and I’m going to take my lovely mum shopping until the wheels fall off her trolley and I’m definitely going to ring someone that I haven’t rang for too long, because the onus is not on him and neither is it on me. I am going to ring him because I miss him. I am going to ring because I love him. I love his bones. I am going to ring him because I don’t know how long he has left, or for that matter I. One day or twelve score years, it doesn’t matter. Ten life times is not long enough to tell him how many times and how many ways I adore him.

Life really is fragile.

Be well.
Geoff Thompson