Walking Backwards

"I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end." — Thomas Merton
"I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past." — Maori proverb

Three years ago, on the 26th April I returned to the UK after a seventeen year absence. I departed these shores with one family, and returned with a different one. Be lovely to describe that moment of arrival in terms such as, Oh, the future opened up before us like a wondrous, magical gift, new horizons, a vast landscape of possibility! Anything was possible, and our whole lives lay before us... And so on. But it's not really like that, the future. It's more like a narrow doorway we squeeze through into a dimly lit room with little or no clue what's about to happen next. I have no idea where I am going.

The future is not awesome, it's nothing but a murky mess, pockmarked with a few possibilities, including imminent death. The past though, now that's awesome. The past is wondrous. When I look back over my life I look back in amazement. How did I ever do the things I did? How did I rebuild that ceiling, fall in love, read Kant, learn to cook, restore a Georgian house, trek around Morocco on a moped with no money and a drug habit, grow strawberries, raise children, not die. My past is a fantastic tapestry of exceptional beauty, a magical reality of ridiculous surprise, impossible circumstance, film-like coincidence and nonsensical synchronicity. I have no idea where I'm going, and that's alright with me. I know where I've come from, where I have boldly been.

I walk backwards into the future, feeling my way along that narrow passageway, receiving my murky tomorrow one small, confusing moment at a time. I have no plan, no intent, no big idea, no ambition and, I'd like to say, few expectations. But that last part takes some work. I often expect the future to live up to the past, while simultaneously hope its nothing like the past, which in all it's beauty had its fair share of sadness, madness and hopelessness, much as I would romanticise such moments away. To remove expectation would be to free myself to live entirely in acceptance, which would be to love and embrace each moment as a gift. Not a gift of future promise, but one of present truth, informed by past experience, naturally.

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The photograph in this month's newsletter is an old one, taken on Rayna's birthday at Half Moon Bay, California in April 2016, a few days before our move back to the UK. A fleck of our shared past, vivid and momentous.

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April News

This month I got to attend an Autism at Work event, which reminded me why the term "spectrum" is so important in the acronym ASD—and that the term "disorder" is so unimportant, indeed inappropriate. I also taught my first deconstruction workshop in April, which was both challenging and eye-opening. Another of those coming up in July. I find my work engaging, but most of the past month was happily spent home in Sheffield, away from corporate concerns.

April is a month of family birthdays, including Rayna on the 15th, and Zoë on the 26th, who turned four. We had planned a garden party for Zoë which got moved to the local park due to the landscapers still being immersed in their transformation process, and then moved into the unfinished house due to rain. Ten adults (mostly dads, interestingly) and sixteen children crunched into our living room and dining room, creating masks and necklaces (again, mostly dads) and eating pasta. I even baked and decorated a chocolate avocado vegan birthday cake. A jolly good time was had by all.

We continue to enjoy our house, cats, and now newly renovated garden. Family life is seldom smooth, rarely manageable and often completely nuts. We're an oddly-tuned string quartet, attempting Schubert but often sounding more like Stockhausen.

So here we are, a week into the merry, merry month of May. Enjoy the beauty.

"Be like a flower and turn your face to the sun." — Kahlil Gibran

Tobias

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Thanks for reading. Always happy to hear from you if you feel like writing.
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April Writing & Video

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5th May 2019, 5 am