Roads to Joy

Sometimes it feels like our lives have been struck by a bolt of lightning: everything changes, and you can clearly identify the before and the after. The birth of a child can be one such cusp, for example. Or a much hoped-for job offer.

Lightning bolts can feel desperately negative too. Cancer diagnosis is one such, but there are many salient cusps that seem to elicit a kind of fork in the path. Nor are negative challenges necessarily bad; we’d probably be surprised at how many folks reckon that the revelations of profound disability, for instance, have compelled a different way of thinking, a perspective they now embrace.

But there are also the seemingly minor, mundane points when we might, usually in retrospect, think that this or that juncture was when life moved in this or that direction. A butterfly flitting from one flower to the next somehow contributes to the eventuality that emerges from chaos. Causality is less easily followed, of course, but we might be able to reflect on how we took one tiny step in this direction, which led on to that step, which moved us towards another one, and on and on.

Today feels like one of those cusps: we’ve accepted an offer for the place we’ve called home for the past 31 years. Whether it’s a lightning bolt emerging from a fulminating sky, pre-primed by a butterfly’s wing, or more like an inexorable result from a process we set into play some time ago, it’s a clearly identifiable, salient cusp, a point when things start to coalesce into a new period of life. Even more, it feels, than when we purchased a tiny bolt-hole across the border.

The delight, for us, is that if things go forward as planned, a new family will occupy our beloved home, ready to embark on an adventure in these high fellsides with their own menagerie, their own way of living. Our job is to help make their transition a bit more comfortable than ours was, those decades ago!

And to get working, throughout the coming weeks, on clearing out the place and looking ahead to our own new lives in some village context.

Life goes on, from one cusp to another. Joy, and no little trepidation too, hand-in-hand.