“Let everything happen to you”*

2024. 20 bloody 24. Holy moly. I’m still stuck somewhere in 2018, drunk at a wedding flicking my hair to Proud Mary. On New Year’s Eve, courtesy of Jools Holland, I had the unwelcome realisation that Sugababes released their first single in the year 2000. Is it actually genuinely feasibly fucking possible that Sugababes have been around for 24 years?

For me, 2024 will first mark four years of parenting, then – in summer – 13 years of living in London, then six years of marriage. And then, come Autumn, we’ll have somehow spent a whole year in this world without my dad. Time will keep passing, impervious, because that’s what it does. And people navigate the full spectrum of human emotion in the moments that comprise it: some excruciating; some ecstatic. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, not much happens at all. I wonder if I’ve undervalued those moments a little.

As we go into this New Year, I’m thinking about our fixation with time. How we tend to plot our lives around the annual calendar and diarise the spontaneity out of our days. We focus on planning perhaps because we have the acute sense that, if we don’t, time will just disappear. And who can blame us? We’ve had 24 years of the Sugababes, for Christ’s sake! And I can’t be the only one to have lost a couple of those to Netflix.

In the two months since my dad died, though, time seems less relevant. Its linear structure doesn’t compute with the different versions of him at different stages of his life which now somehow all coexist in my mind.  

Often, it seems more likely that we’re occupying an eternal consciousness that can’t be delineated by days, weeks or years. In this space, dad’s existence is inextricably linked to my own and I don’t think about life in terms of before and after him; I feel that he has always and will always be here, imbuing everything.   

Am I mad? It’s possible. It’s definitely possible. I am perpetually tired with two small children after all. Although, close to bereavement, I feel more consciously alive than ever. I’m fascinated by the life force within each of us and am coming to view it as something that moves and changes rather than ends.

I thought that motherhood had finally made me an adult. But the death of a parent has forced the acknowledgement of just how fleeting this physical experience is. Pain will find us, and so many people endure levels of suffering I’d still struggle to imagine.

It has been said many times in different ways, but it bears repeating: we are stronger than we know; we are resilient beyond measure. This awareness of human strength is empowering, and it’s only through the death of my dad – and observing my mum – that I’ve come anywhere close to comprehending the sheer scale of our capacity to adapt against the odds.

So I’m eternally grateful to him. In life, he was nurturing, loving, entertaining and stubborn. By 80, he was as wise and as enlightened as I’ve known anyone to be (miraculous, considering he regularly consumed the contents of The Daily Mail). And in dying he continues to teach me how to live.

So, courtesy of Peter Hart, here are some tips for the New Year and beyond (disclaimer: some may be more useful than others):

• Get stuck in. Feel everything, even if it means losing your cool occasionally.
• Work slowly and thoroughly.
• Don’t own a smart phone.
• Deal exclusively in cash, but ideally get your spouse to carry the money.
• Tell the waiter exactly how you want your G&T (one cube of ice, a slice of lemon, tall glass)
• Ask questions. Listen. Be relentlessly, endlessly curious.
• Laugh for so long that you forget why you were laughing in the first place.
• Care passionately about the world you live in and the politics that informs it (political views aside, see Daily Mail point above).  
• Sing loudly in the shower, and even louder on karaoke.
• Always ask for extra gravy – there will never be enough, especially in London.
• Take care of yourself: eat plenty of fruit, exercise religiously and find peace in the garden.
• Treat friends like family.
• Have a brazen disregard for the time (“I hate being on the clock!”)… Albeit clearly not his fault, dad was late to his own funeral.
• Celebrate the success and joy of others and – very important – enjoy yourself.

HNY! Here’s to embracing the madness, and each other. With love.

—

P.s. While I have stopped making New Year’s resolutions, I’m going to ditch social media for a while. I’ll still post, so if you’re interested you can subscribe to the old blog baby blog blog on the Home page.

*The post title is from the poem ‘Go to the Limits of Your Longing’ by Rainer Maria Rilke:
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror”.