The Place of Tides

We cannot be what we are and what we aspire to be at the same time, something in us has to die for something else to be born.

Human life is full of projection, like we are constantly being filmed in the movie of our own lives. We endlessly shape and reshape our own stories to make ourselves feel relevant or seen - desperate to be the major character. But we don't end up feeling seen, we end up drowning in noise, because everyone else is as desperate to be heard as we are. The world has become a mad shouting match, making us distracted and anxious.

There is a point where hard work and striving flips from something noble, making the lives of the people around you better, to something too intense, making their lives worse, and for a year or two I'd been on the wrong side of that line.

There is no end to learning... When we were young, the old folk seemed to know everything. I had imagined a moment when you felt wise, that you had learnt it all... We are all just children. We never know enough. Not even half of it.

A story is rarely as simple as it seems. We are all a bundle of virtues and vices, strengths and flaws, hopes and fears.

He reminded me of my childhood when we had roamed for miles to catch fish in little streams, and the whole world was no bigger than where we could get with our bicycles.

We were soon far out on the water beneath the bluest of skies. As we sailed away we talked about the sea. I said it was hard to worry about something that looked so perfect, when we could not see below the surface or see the damage we had done. Anna looked at me and was solemn. Nothing was quite the same as it was in the old days, she said. The giant seabird colonies to the north were one by one falling silent, as the birds failed to breed. But, she said quietly, we must not give up.

A raven passed over idly and was given the banging-pans treatment too: it got a shock and tumbled as though it had been attacked by a peregrine, then recovered its dignity and headed away.

They saw themselves as the last of their kind. Some, particularly the old men, were almost proud to be taking their knowledge to the grave with them. Anna thought that was stupid: knowledge was for passing on, not burying; for the living, not the dead. Others, though, shared what they knew.

We walked through the rubbish vomited up by the choking sea. There were blue plastic ropes, tennis balls, green and white torn fishing nets, cyclists’ reusable water bottles, and endless Coke, Fanta, and Pepsi bottles.

Anna reminded me that the first rule of living is to live. To see, hear, smell, touch, and taste the world. The more I tuned in, the closer Anna and I were growing as friends. I was beginning a journey back to the person I had once been – and needed to be again.

Anna’s life here was, I was coming to see, devoted to paying attention to – or, more than that, being completely committed to – the beauty of the world before her. She seemed to have done it by cultivating an extraordinary form of independence from other people, their values, and their noise. She used every ounce of her wilfulness to shut out the world and concentrate on these simple things.

On the way, she showed me a pile of feathers: the remains of a goose killed by a sea eagle. She said an ancient tug-of-war took place here each day between those that would bring their young into the world, and those that killed them to live. The whole sea estate was like a watery Serengeti.

I was tempted to turn the calendar on the kitchen wall to May, but noticed that it had been hung years ago. Time was losing its old meaning.

The episode seemed to confirm her judgement on the modern world: they’d take everything you had and then make a slave of you.

ourselves feel relevant or seen – desperate to be the major character. But we don’t end up feeling seen

Our lives are a series of choices – about what we do

He didn’t know how to be old and let go of things.

What had once been mocked as backwards was now admired and respected.