Time out for re-assembly

We all need what Robert Frost called ‘time out for re-assembly’, time to face our doubts, our demons, our dreams and intuitions, and time to re-charge our batteries.

Robert Frost develops this thought further in his poem, The Armful:

For every parcel I stoop down to seize,
I lose some other off my arms or knees,
And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns,
Extremes too hard to comprehend at once,
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.
With all I have to hold with, hand and mind
And heart, if need be, I will do my best
To keep their building balanced at my breast.
I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;
Then sit down in the middle of them all.
I had to drop the armful in the road
And try to stack them in a better load.

Sometimes, in periods of being alone and reflective, when our meditation can go deep, we may realise that we have things we need to shed, that we have too many possessions, too many distractions and that we can simplify our lives. Indeed, with every decade it is valuable to take a personal inventory and say: Do I really need this? Is this what my life is about? We need to take time out, not just for re-assembly but also for re-assessment.

This happened to a man I know. He used to be the stage designer for a premier Repertory Theatre, turning out new sets every three weeks. One day, as he told me, he sat on a hillside and asked himself: Is this what I want to be doing for the rest of my life? And there came into his mind the image of soil. He gave up his job at the theatre, sold his car, bought himself a bicycle and became a jobbing gardener. What he earned was modest but adequate (he was lucky that he owned a small cottage where he could also grow his own vegetables, and he was able to rent one room to visiting actors or directors.) More importantly, he is among the most fulfilled and contented individuals I have ever met.

Mary Oliver’s poem, The Journey, imagines a youngster setting out on life’s journey, and the great pressures put upon us by our family and by society’s expectations. As we learn to resist these siren voices, we may begin to hear another voice,

which you slowly
recognised as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.

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4 thoughts on “Time out for re-assembly”

  1. Dear James,

    Where are you and Hywel? I have just found several long letters from you to me!

    Andrew died last year, peacefully. Now I am planning to move to a flat in the middle of Winchester. Geoffrey is also moving to Winchester where 6 of our 9 grandchildren live. He is 85 and published a huge book on the Huguenots last year (OUP).

    Love to you both, Melisa

    1. dear dear Melisa, what a lovely surprise to hear from you. What a support you were to Andrew and i am glad that his ending was peaceful. Hywel also died two years ago, indeed he died at home on his 76th birthday, though he was not conscious. He had a benign tumour on the brain and other complications…but he was never in pain. it all coincided with selling Waterloo LOdge and also our London flat -which had 72 stairs to climb! and moving a few streets away to a garden flat. i am writing a book about our 54 years together. Let me have your postal address in Winchester. i have preached in that handsome cathedral. I will write you a proper letter once I have an address for you. with much loveJames

  2. Yes. Thank you. And sometimes, ‘to save the only life you could save’ takes a lifetime. That’s my story, the one I found that fits. If it is a rationalized fabrication, so be it. I’m good at that then! Seventy journal books later. But it took so long to save the life, that now feeling as a young man coming to his individuation, as Jung would have it, I am old, lacking in time and resource to be fulfilled in that self. The lifetime it took to save my life is a journey of discovery of self that is the greatest of joys, even if the realization of the potential of self in living out that self, won’t be. To glimpse the self, if not live its potential is better than not knowing self.

    The inventory of packages and work at reassembly is not always one’s possessions and distractions -I have never had much of either of these, though what I have is too much!- but more I had to shed the personal consequences of the battle for the Irish Free State, Cranmer in the Book of Common Prayer, a culture of poverty, an attitude of self-denial. In 1983, I started on a study leave that became an experiential journey that lasted 30 years and ended just over a year ago.

    I was pretty good at balancing the packages, rationalizing their possession. But the muse all along the way, at times floated a balloon, a brightly coloured balloon, that looking up, I saw float by my consciousness, and because of these moments of Aphrodite sparkle, I held my packages less firmly, slowly, so slowly over the decades I learned to drift after the balloons, to grasp hold onto them instead. Most all of the muse’s balloons, seemingly irrational to how I believed my ‘self’ to be in the world, were in the end what freed my soul to be ‘Reg.’ Most of the balloons were of the theatre. One of the earliest was your ‘Experimental Theatre’ book and then, by chance found on a sales table at a theological school library, the library selling a review copy no less, the institution obviously not valuing what I came to value most (!) was your ‘The Inner Stage.’ Oh, the irony…

    As Thomas Mann and many others say ‘the journey and not the arrival matters.’ For me both matter for the journey of the muse that became the arrival at embracing self, my individuation, that journey only matters because the arrival matters most. And I am sad my life journey could not have been with my self. And I am full of joy nonetheless at my arrival. And grateful for the days left to me. What will they be. I start on a new journey, attentive to the muse, my darling sweet muse.

  3. Dear Reg. I HAVE ONLY JUST DISC OVERED THIS MESSAGE FROM YOU, AND THERE IS ANOTHER I HAVE YET TO READ AND RESPOND TO…I AM SLOWLY LEARNING TO DEAL WITH THIS TECHNOLOGY!- BUT YOUR LONG JOURNEY AND SENSE OF FINAL ARRIVAL, DOES SO MOVINGLY PREPARE YOU FOR THE JOURNEY AHEAD. I HAVE NO DOUBT OF A CONTINUITY BEYOND THIS PRESENT EXISTENCE, IT IS DEEP WITHIN ME AND HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ANY DOGMAS ETC. WHEN MY PARTNER OF 54 YEARS DIED TWO YEARS AGO I DID NOT WEEP- THERE WAS NO NEED – BUT FOR ONE MINUTE ON ONE OCCASION I DID WEEP,. SISTER MARCELLA, WROE, A CATHOLIC NUN FRIEND, LENT ME A DVD OF THE WONDERFUL JOHN O DONOHUE SPEAKING FROM THE BURREN ( WHICH HYWEL AND I HAD VISITED WITH MOLLY KEANE) AND HE SAID THIS: WHEN YOU SEE SOMEONE DYING THAT IS WHAT YOU SEE, BUT TO THOSE WAITING ON THE OTHER SIDE, THEY ARE SEEING SOMEONE BEING BORN.’ I WEPT FOR JOY …..AND SO ALL YOUR HARD WORK, IS BUT A PREPARATION, AS INDEED FOR EACH OF US, FOR THE NEXT STAGE OF THE JOURNEY.
    I REMEMBER WHEN DIRECTING THE REVIVAL OF HUGH WHITEMORE’S PLAY THE BEST OF FRIENDS, WHEN ROY DOTRICE WAS PLAYING BERNARD SHAW, HIS LAST TO THE ABBESS IS ‘i AM GOING TO DIE NOW;, AND ROY WAS PLAYING VERY DOWNBEAT AND I SAID NO, NO! FOR SHAW IT IS EXCITING, HE IS FULL OF CURIOSITY, EAGER TO LEARN. IN REAL LIFE A WEEK BEFORE HE DIED HE WAS BUILDING A HUGE BON FIRE IN HIS GARDEN!
    I WONDER HOW YOU SPEND YOUR DAYS NOW? i AM ABOUT TO BE 87 but much work
    surrounds me. what a joy it is hearing from you,- HAPPY GREETINGS, JAMES

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