The Essentials

The Essentials

It wasn’t as though I’d been caught by surprise.  The colours of the morning had pretended no cheerfulness, all sparrow shades of grey and brown.  Rather than invite me outdoors, they seemed to hold up an exhortatory palm, mossy damp and cold, silently, firmly, pushing me back inside the warm house.  But I had to brush past them, for I had a list of errands to complete.  So, raincoat thrown over shoulders, handbag on arm, I hit the pavement with the rest of the afternoon throng, most of whom I noticed wore the mopey faces that often populate a dreary Monday in early February.  

As I steered my little green Fiat somewhere between the cleaners and the grocers, a few lines of a poem I’d read the previous morning drifted under the lens of my mind, lines I found illuminating in their wise sadness.  Written by poet Brenda Shaughnessy the poem is meant to address one’s younger self -

“You’d pass me on the street

As well, a “normal,”

Someone who traded 

In her essentials for

A look of haunted 

Responsibility.”

Ouch.  If those words don’t stop you cold and plunge you into introspection, nothing will.
Sitting at a traffic light, I stared at the faces in the cars moving past my window,
 one by one by one, and I had to admit, “haunted responsibility” is a well-coined phrase. 

 For the rest of the day I indulged myself in a little game I like to play.  With each person I saw, I tried to imagine them at about seven or eight.  Was that child, that essential person, still in there somewhere, trapped perhaps, under responsibilities too heavy to shift - constricted by expectations or frozen by duty?  With some people, it takes no great stretch of imagination to see the essential person they’ve always been.  He is there in the smile, she glimmers in the eyes that meet yours as you pass each other on a crowded street.  With others, it’s harder.  I wonder, and hope, the distracted weariness they project is nothing more than the result of a grey Monday.  Nothing more. 

I have always thought the worst emotion one can possibly feel is great regret.  It must be sharper than loss, deeper than fear.  To wish to change something one cannot, to long for more time when the clock has run out, must be an incredible pain.  It’s difficult to conjure a more crushing regret that the loss of those essentials that make us unique, but I rather think in today’s rapacious times, it takes much care and attention to hold on to ourselves.  But hold on, we must.   Like beauty, like faith, if we hand over, or worse, ignore, those things essential to our uniqueness I fear their light will continue to dim till one dark night, perhaps when we need it the most, we see it no more.

Recently I unearthed the little pale pink diary I kept as a child.  Amidst the rather humdrum entries about sleepovers, crushes and spats I found one that caused me to laugh right out loud:

 “I can’t wait till I grow up!  Wearing lipstick... sigh.”

So, this was adulthood to me at seven.  Wearing lipstick.  No mention of the legion of responsibilities that attend adulthood like stern ladies-in-waiting, irritable and accusatory, tapping the shoulder, rapping the knuckle.  If only being “grown-up” were as simple as just “wearing lipstick”.  I smiled at my own younger self and realized anew how vital it is to retain a clear communication with that voice we had as a child, to indulge those childhood dreams and hopes - the carefree fun, the grand plans.  It’s important to protect those things that make us happy and connect us to the person we’ve always been, lest we lose something special, or tragically, something essential.  

 I happen to find my true self in books and fresh flowers,

 in a soul-enriching relationship with a big white dog. 

 I’m there on rainy London pavements, in the mists of Glencoe.  

In music, in forests, beside a wild sea.

In old houses with creaky floors, 

in gothic churches of golden light....

There are so many essentials that make me who I am, 

and I’m determined not to lose a one of them to “haunted responsibility”.

 What are the essentials that you refuse to lose? 

 What connects you to your unique self?