Mindfully Stylish

I found joy in a churchyard when I was 17. Surrounded by the bright yellow of daffodils bathed in weak yet warm Spring sunshine, my back against a tombstone, I would sit in the uncut sweet grass devouring strangely festive red, gold and silver foil-wrapped praline eggs from Thorntons that would coat my teeth in sweet sickliness and read poetry ~ John Keats and A.E. Housman, a depressed, mournful kind of beauty that suited my mood perfectly.

Back on boarding school grounds, I bent the rules to the point of breaking. To keep my sanity and some semblance of normality ~ an echo, I guess, of what I had found in town. And so, quietly, I went wild.

Late nights out running, dodging staff and bedtimes, softly pounding round the concrete circle we called The Mile under the thick, heady perfume of the overhanging horse chestnut trees just coming into bud. Finishing in Music School with the ghostly grey corridors still reminiscent of the energy that had flowed through them just hours before, with the empty rooms all to myself, only heading back to my boarding house when Security inevitably turfed me out at 11. These rituals saved my life when I was too young to know there was the option of not carrying on. Survival instinct and a kind of deluded blindness to the previous Summer that had come and moved on, leaving a trail of hedgerows in its wake, trampled and torn.

Different stages seem to proffer a variety of goals to work towards. When Edexcel examined us at the end of the academic year, it was quite comforting to know we’d ‘made it’ and get given a grade. Almost 20 years on, I still find myself pondering on this precarious notion ~ that when pre-planned destinations are reached or certainty ends and the classrooms of routine collapse around us, we can be left rootless, unsure of how to find our way back or forge a way forwards. 

Around the brick and metal of life, perennials bloom under neon lights and soften our pretty, gritty cities the world over. Simply attaining genuine and fulfilling happiness is the lesson that seems to matter most now. They tell us that even in the hardness and coarseness we have built for ourselves out of necessity, there will always be a season of hope, and that in itself gives us something to hold onto, a garden of potential with which to tend, a space in which to cope.

Things have changed a lot since I rebelled in the healthiest of ways, around a pre-paved track protected by a backbone of tradition, Chapel Choir on Sundays and a weighty book of school rules that, when broken, seemed to call for a lifetime of contrition. AI looms like an unsleeping citadel of data in the dark with nothing to touch it. It seems it could destroy us or save the day. I find myself reaching for tiny bits of it anyway.

I once read Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse in my last year of school. Another lifeline that would meet me at the bottom the many times in following years that I would stumble and fall. She describes the family’s home overlooking the bay as it is abandoned and taken over by the undergrowth ~ it remains a potent message of recall ~ that this will all be here long after the Age of Information has been and gone ~ the inescapability of the world turning, of environmental reclamation and its amazing tolerance of us, despite the fragility of human life. And I wonder if some kind of silicone philosopher’s stone to circumnavigate this ultimate and slightly terrifying truth is what we were after all along, a kind of perpetual lighthouse to be kept, forever turning its gaze onwards and inwards, flashing forever for those seeking land out at Sea, and moored, tantalisingly, just beyond our reach…

In Love&Light, FS XOX