Lament: “An honest cry of the heart, expressing the paradox between the pain of life and the promises of God.” – Joanna Jackson (Director of Counselling at the All Souls Counselling Service, London)
Perhaps it was the excitement of a new year, which now seems so long ago; maybe it was just time to stop, take a breath and re-assess, but I’ve been contemplating how I use my days of late. Nothing has given us time for that like a pandemic, right?
It’s all very well having time to organise those photo albums stretching back to 1978, and as an activity with an achievable, measurable outcome, it would feature in my personal preference list. In the same vein, reviewing my last year has, therefore, been surprisingly satisfying. Considering it was a year when I thought we didn’t do much thanks to everyone’s least favourite menacing companion – yes, Corona, I’m looking at you – I was quite surprised to find more landmarks than anticipated.
We had a team weekend with partners from Bedfordshire and Zurich; I led a women’s faith-based day, travelled to both Plymouth and Northern Ireland with my husband and was diagnosed with breast cancer all before we’d even got out of January. There followed a flight to South Africa and three frenetic months of shaping the manuscript of my book, including writing a whole new chapter, finding a bunch of kind people to endorse it, and managing three rounds of rigorous editing before the deadline, while taking the meds, hosting my sister for an activity-packed fortnight in Cape Town and beyond, as well as packing up the apartment we’d rented for 6 years before lockdown kicked in. Phew!
All this was accompanied by the strange backdrop of not knowing whether we could get back to England for my cancer op and book launch in May. It felt like living in a shaggy dog story, but fortunately it ended not perfectly, but fortuitously, with a repatriation flight, an international on-line launch and a spectacularly good job by my surgeon. Meanwhile, everyone on both sides of the equator began using a new vocabulary – ‘social distancing’ being the top phrase – and got used to having hands like chicken feet from all the sanitiser that was being squirted on to them umpteen times a day.
Back in the UK, post op, I did some recovering, began walking again, had some radiotherapy, spent several weeks with my Mum, did a load of writing for magazines, recorded a podcast, threw my back out to the point I couldn’t walk, recovered again, spectacularly smooshed my ankle in a fall that demonstrated the unrelenting power of gravity and stupidity combined; mostly recovered yet again, did some more writing in a very different genre, spent lockdown #2 back with my Mum, and Zoomed another women’s day event. By that time it was practically Christmas and we were all pitched into lockdown #3.
But, I have to ask myself, did I truly dance through all that apparent chaos? Looking at this body of work – something I kept up as a way to ensure that my brain still had some flexible creativity in it, and reassure myself that the power of sentence construction hadn’t completely deserted me – under its umbrella title, I ask the question again. Have I merely crawled through, or have I danced, through this chaos? In all honesty, I’m not sure I did.
How about you? As we emerge blinking into the spring sunshine, how would you assess the year you’ve just navigated? Have you merely survived or have you fought to flourish?
I recently wrote a piece for a magazine around the given theme ‘Celebrating Women’ https://www.womanalive.co.uk/stories/view?articleid=3361. As I faced the keyboard, I struggled to find integrity in the subject. Somehow it seemed highly inappropriate to be blowing the trumpet for celebration when most of us are exhausted, drained and spent from a highly challenging year which blew away our habitual security blankets of ‘normality’ and introduced us to vast stretches of uncertainty, anxiety, as well as new and prodigious concerns for our mental health. A lament seemed more fitting; hence, the working title changed to ‘Learning to Celebrate in a Time of Lament’.
I like Joanna Jackson’s definition of lament. It’s so much more than a state of personal misery verging on despair; it’s a heart cry of pain and sorrow for the gap between the original blueprint of God and the current reality. Our expectations and are experience are often entirely different things. Where God’s standards have been discarded, trampled and ignored for so long, we should hardly be surprised to discover that life is not as abundant or as satisfying as we had hoped, regardless of Covid. It’s basic ‘follow-the-maker’s-instructions’-type stuff.
Now, as we wait for the ‘magic’ vaccine and trust that there really will be a way to live beyond the virus, the question remains, chipping away in my psyche like a persistent woodpecker: am I dancing or existing?
Every dancer knows that to keep twirling they must fix their eyes on a specific point as they turn or they will lose their balance, risk injury and probably crash to the ground. The daily choice for each of us is to pick a point and lock onto it intently, blocking out all distractions.
Where do you choose to look? News reports are not a good focal point for me; social media is generally unhelpful. Heeding my own advice, I need to remember the One who originally invited me to dance and in whose hands I have always been safe. ‘He is the choreographer, the composer, the artistic director and the lead. I just need to follow.’ https://dancingthroughchaos.wordpress.com/2016/04/04/dancing-through-chaos/.
I am assured that it is possible to dance and lament simultaneously. The steps may falter; they may be accompanied by tears and prove to be the trickiest ones to master; but they may yet combine to be the most beautiful part of the whole dance.
dancingthroughchaos 