Well, I hope it is. Life is more than T.S. Eliot’s measured coffee spoons. I mean a lot of what goes on around us and within us cannot be grasped and captured so easily. And actually most of the time, I believe, life consists of brimming tablespoons of enjoyment. It’s only some days one has to scrape up the small bits and pieces, and slowly and painfully fill those tiny, almost obsolete, teaspoons.

I’ve just been deleting the hundreds, thousands, of photos on my computer, spanning almost 20 years. Also sorting through my parents’ photos that have had several siftings already before being returned to a pile to languish for a few more years. I haven’t learnt to be ruthless in my culling. I mean 10 photos of one child on one occasion, taken by different people at various angles.

What do I want to recall? What does the photo say? How relevant is it now? Where do I place it? Who will look at it?

Just some very common questions facing all of us who are trying to organise a jumble of photos. Indeed we face many of those questions whenever we reluctantly sort through and cull our accumulated possessions.

The thrust of this blog is the underlying big question:

What is this life about?

Besides photos of children, now of course fully grown, grandchildren and even one great grandchild, my life seems to have been one of celebrations, garden, spaces, and walking, eating and travel. Life as encapsulated in those photos seems short.

My parents lives seem equally brief, perhaps more celebrations and less travel. Fewer photos and they are more posed, but still the procession of birth and marriages and children and, generally, smiling at each other or into the camera

Grandparents, aunts and uncles are fewer, more solemn, darker, presenting a solid front of certainty. There is no hint of the sometimes sad sometimes funny stories that lie behind that respectable facade.

Preparing to travel to the country closest to my heart, Spain, there was the usual pre travel sorting, culling, arranging, reviewing present life. Before stepping into a different one, a different version. Stepping full of hope, and some trepidation.

Elliot’s “I grow old, I grow old” reverberates alongside Marvell’s “Time’s winged chariot on my heels”. The challenge is now no longer to keep running or shake off that pesky biter. The deeper concern is where am I running, do I want to and, more realistically, can I run fast enough?

I can show up and see what happens. My life is my life and it’s been all that the photos show. But more, and less. No one knows the depth of the individual life. Only now, years later, do I look at photos and read accounts in journals and letters of my parents; their lives are thicker and more complex than I ever recognised. Maybe only the individual knows their own life. Even that knowledge is shaky.

(Refs

Andrew Marvell . To his Coy Mistress

At my back I always feel

Times winged chariot at my heels

T.S.Elliot .The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock.

.” I grow old I grow old

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolld”