Patience

On my way to St. Alban's Abbey today, I found myself at Euston station with a ticket in my hand and ten minutes before my train. Sensibly I thought this would be an ideal moment to get some lunch and so I went to Marks & Spencer. Predictably, being a bank holiday, the station was full of people, and so was M&S. During the week when I visit Euston, there are about 10 cashiers on duty; clearly a bank holiday only needs three. In addition, all the people with lower salaries come out of the woodwork on bank holidays meaning that there is a higher proportion of people paying at the tills with coins counted to exact addition. By the time I reached the front of the queue, I was very agitated and dropped my belongings and soon-to-be purchases on the ground. I looked up to see my cashier had the name badge 'Patience'. Needless to say, the irony of this tickled me. My journey was successful, but only after I just (and impatiently) managed to discover my train at an unmarked platform number 17.

Patience has been on my mind lately, and as ever with concepts like that, you notice so much relevant in the world around you once you are thinking about it.

One of my friends has been in hospital for a week after, randomly and for no obvious reason, rupturing the arteries in his head. I also went to see a friend give a recital at the beginning of his professional career as a singer. The two incidents together have made me think of mortality and fragility of MY life as well as who i am and what I do. On the face of it, everything is well: I have a burgeoning career as a music publisher and I manage to run a fairly lucrative freelance career alongside it. For some reason, however, I'm not happy and fulfilled, and haven't been for sometime. Immediate reasons for my uncomfort are the tensions at home, my perpetual singleness, and my sudden loneliness from close friends. Naturally, a snapshot of a life never reveals a true story or the real reasons for things, but real feelings in motion. Of course, those who know me might tell me to have 'patience'. The truth is that I do have considerable patience but that it has now worn very thin on several key points of my life. It has been a decisive weekend of thought certainly, but also I ended up doing something I never thought I'd do and I hate myself for it. .. at the moment!

Why else decisive? I have been asked to accompany my most favourite piece of music in November. It is quite a coincidence since I have listened to it most days recently when distressed. Oddly I have never played it before and have always wanted to but believed it too difficult.

Where does patience come into this rant? Life is all about markers and the energy they give us. To my choir in Cambridge I used to describe musical moments of potential energy as 'zero gravity' moments. It gave a useful image to image weightlessness before the onset of gravity and engaging of potential energy. We live our lives though these markers (or zero gravitys) and they constantly propel us to on to the next one. I suppose you might call them goals, except for the fact you don't necessarily know that they are going to happen. It is the ability to keep happy the potential energy between markers which keeps life fluid.

In discovering markers this has been an important weekend. However at the moment I seem to be stuck in a stasis of zero gravity with lots of potential markers, but none to engage with or grab. Depression and personal loneliness are both conceptual in my world, so I await the rebirth my mental struggling gives way to. It goes to prove that patience is such an important part of life, and had I not been stuck in that queue at Marks and Spencer, I would never have linked all this together.