Life’s not a dress rehearsal

by Jan on March 10, 2010


This is all you have. This is not a dry run. This is your life. If you want to fritter it away with your fears, then you will fritter it away, but you won’t get it back later.
Laura Schlessinger

This is a powerful, even a stern quote, don’t you think?

And it’s true, life isn’t a dress rehearsal. This is it.

I find that quite shocking sometimes. Mainly, I find it shocking when I’m having a bit of a struggle with my own indolence. In this case, my post-weekend-away sloth.

I’ve just got home from a few days in the Yorkshire Dales. It was perfect bliss: the company of two dear women friends; fabulous food; outings to a couple of fantastic eateries: Betty’s Tearooms and Salt’s Diner; walking and later lazing in the sunshine; a totally irreverent and non-competitive, laugh-till-I-cried game of Trivial Pursuit; and, as a special activity for Saturday afternoon, sushi making. Oh, and a movie… in our PJs.

And on Sunday, I saw this wall, loved the layers of colour, loved the whole breaking through, reaching for the sky, excitedly moving into the unknown, feels like an infinity pool, messy bundle of metaphors.

Yet now, well, right now I’m frittering for my county! And, as you’ve read, having a very serious word with myself. And judging by the fact I’m writing this, it seems to be working.

Because whilst it’s OK to fritter, I actually much prefer, greatly enjoy, properly living, don’t you?

Living, not practicing for living. And certainly not frittering.

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Snowdrops

by Jan on February 25, 2010

Like me, like you
Snowdrops
Find themselves stuck in hard places.
Hostile places.

Like me, like you
They have an instinct to grow
And so they push against the frozen soil
And finally, unseen, pop out
Into the sunshine.

Whereupon
Like me, like you
They are snowed on, iced over, pelted with hailstones,
Stung by driving rain

Yet still they grow

Until one day
When winter has long dragged on,
Far too long,
One day,
With a silent peal of soft, white bells
They suddenly appear, transformed.

And look:
Their delightful presence is discreet
Their proud flowers, slightly bowed
They are not sunflowers, gloriously tall, shining out across the fields.
They have simply grown into
Themselves.

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Take time to dream

by Jan on February 22, 2010

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. Virginia Woolf

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What is your pen?

by Jan on February 15, 2010

What is your pen?
Your pen is not a magic wand.
Your pen is a conduit
An agent of change
A baton
To mark the time of your life
A sable brush
With which you’ll colour in
The future.

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Little by little, bit by bit…

by Jan on February 11, 2010

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic. Anais Nin

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