Chaos

In recent years, I have come to associate this Portrush bedroom with sitting upright in bed, computer on my lap, listening to the howling wind and wondering when the shocking weather is going to abate. Last night it woke me at midnight as it threatened to pull the roof from its joists. The noise is amplified up here; sometimes it sounds like a fist fight, it punctures my heart with needles of fear. I know it to be a false fear though, because, despite the punch up, this time of my life feels like a place of calm, even when a gale is blowing. Although nothing is fixed, life is not as I envisaged it for my fifties, and I am, in some ways, as adrift as I was in my twenties – muddling through in a series of temporary jobs and renting a flat from my sister in a city where my roots are only just beginning to take hold – despite all this, I feel as happy as I’ve ever done. Life is disordered, though not chaotic. I am sad, though not grief-stricken. And the rest of it all, I can live with because it feels like peace.

If there is a path into chaos, there is path out. Chaos is something that is creeping: this falls apart and then that falls apart, small setbacks add up to huge impediments and, before you know it, life is a head-wreck of tangled Christmas tree lights and matchless socks and lost passwords and mouldy food in the fridge and a leaking roof that you’ve no money to fix and buddleia growing out of the chimney stack and children who refuse to go to school and consume a diet of oven chips and video games. That would be my chaos anyway, maybe my bar is low, but I propose that one gets mired in chaos slowly, via an incremental layering of small things not dealt with because life is overwhelming. And the path out of chaos is incremental too, picking off what needs dealt with, piece by difficult piece, coming to terms with the fact that things cannot and will not be perfect, that the perfect lives of others are a façade and that everyone lives with, if not chaos, then a dissatisfaction that all is not as they would want it, the ideal is always out of arm’s reach.

Grief is less of a path and more of a plunge. Grief comes in a sudden drop of which there is no mistaking it, there’s nothing in the least incremental about it. One moment, things are ok, you have hope, you have the person with you, you have life, and, in the space of one out breath, they are dead, their soul takes flight, and grief flies in. (Why do I suppose someone dies on the outbreath – is it because that feels like more of a letting go and breathing in is to hold on?) You cannot be hoisted out from the grief hole as quickly as you fell into it. Extrication is a long and complicated process, as complicated as the route out of chaos. The difference is, we ‘fix’ chaos, we take to it with doing, practical mending and seeing to, whereas with grief there is nothing to be seen to, it demands only to be witnessed, watched and accepted, to let the feelings be, have them pass through and over like the horrific weather front that’s currently battering Portrush, and to trust that in acknowledging you are broken, you will, in time, self-mend through doing nothing.