I walk into the study, the cat is sitting on the desk, and I can hear an angry buzzing coming from the window. Somehow, a bee or bluebottle has got in between the makeshift arrangement of secondary double glazing – an additional sheet of glass wedged into the dormer and taped around the edges to keep out the winter draughts. The bee batters itself against the outer glass. The cat follows it with her eyes, every muscle tense, alert, twitching. The drone of the buzzing is continuous.
‘It’ll drive you crazy, Miko’, I say, as I sit down in front of the keyboard.
The bee, trapped between the glass; the cat, trapped in her desire to get at it, and I... trapped in what? Trapped in my same old circles of thought, back here again.
After yesterday’s outburst, I thought: ‘Why do I keep doing this? Why do I keep coming back? What purpose am I serving, what am I achieving? Why, why, why? Back, again and again, to the same old questions.
When I look back over my life, I can see that there has never been an extended period when I have been happy, or contented, with life-as-it-was. Brief moments of intense joy and excitement flash upon long, long periods of dull, dissatisfaction – I was going to say ‘despair’, but that is too intense, it’s not usually as exciting as that.. Whether it is the circumstances of my life, or something in my personality, I don’t really know, though I would say it’s most likely to be the latter. A deep personality flaw. Where it comes from, or what I can do about it, are the great puzzles of my life, the ones I ponder over again and again, but never come to any answers. Changing the circumstances of my life, I suppose, would be easy by comparison with changing that.
Where/how do other people find happiness? In their work, their relationships and families, their hobbies and passions, their beliefs, their religious faith. For me, all of these are flawed in some way, none of them lasts, all may be capable of giving very brief, intense highs, but there is no long term, solid, underlying strain of contentment to be found in any of them. Yet that is the conventional wisdom, that is where happiness is to be found, so people say, and those I read, those I listen to, seem to be fairly consistently in agreement.
Yet it seems to me to be hopelessly unrealistic to expect to find that kind of longterm satisfaction. Are all these people deluding themselves, then? It doesn’t seem so, I meet people who seem genuinely satisfied with their lot, capable of finding happiness.
So, why do I keep on asking these questions? Am I any nearer to a solution, a resolution?
The bee has gone quiet. Whether it has found a way out, killed itself through its frantic efforts, or is just resting, I don’t know. The cat has got bored eventually, walked over to the door, made her soft squeaking noise and stared at me until I got up and walked over to the door to let her out.
Why do I come back here every day? To keep trying. Sometimes it is important to keep trying, even when you can’t see the way out, or the possibility of a way out. Sometimes just the act of trying can be beneficial in itself, the repetition of routine, knocking a thousand times on the same door because maybe the thousandth knock is the one which will be answered. Sometimes, maybe, it’s better to let go. But I don’t think the time to let go has come, not just yet.
I read this in Writing Magazine yesterday evening, a quote from a children’s writer called Markus Zusak, someone I’ve never heard of, who from his photo could be young enough to be my son:
‘Don’t be afraid to fail. I fail every day. I failed thousands of times writing ‘The Book Thief’, and that book now means everything to me. Some of what I feel are the best ideas in it came to me when I was working away for apparently no result.’
I unsealed the glass, took the pane away, opened the window and let the bee out. It seemed confused, a little stunned perhaps, but still alive. Hubby will moan that I've broken the seal, and I'll have to put up with the draught, but hey, summer's coming. and bees need all the help they can get.