Time past and Time present

Thoughts on my 55th birthday

Time past and time future. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. From Burnt Norton, TS Eliot

Burnt Norton is my favourite part of Four Quartets, which is, in turn, my favourite long poem. I don’t claim to understand all the references but the underlying sense, the deeper intention beneath the words chimes with me, meets some kind of longing for meaning.

I was reminded of these words on a recent trip to Clumber Park. Since I was a tiny child this has been one of the places my family always returned to; where I took my new boyfriend the first time I brought him home and where he and I still visit after almost thirty years of marriage. It is one of those places which become part of you – all the days spent among the trees, sunlit picnics, games of French cricket, adventures tracking through the waist high ferns, feeding the ducks at the lake’s edge. So, on my 55^th birthday when the sun came peeping tentatively above the horizon for the first time in a rainwashed week, that’s where I chose to go.

The sun kept its promise and shone throughout the day, prompting removal of jackets and eating of ice cream. And of course I had to visit ‘my’ tree. The ancient yew which has been part of my life and my visits to Clumber since before I can remember. In those days you could park a car anywhere and Dad would always aim for the same clearing, away from other families and beside the old, spreading tree. It’s only in latter years I have recognised it as a yew. As a child it was just the tree which I always greeted as soon as I scrambled out of the car with Cindy, the miniature poodle.

When I first started bringing my husband I told him we had to find ‘my tree’. He gazed round at the hundreds of acres and thousands of trees and must have thought I was mad. But the yew has become his tree too. A touchstone through the years.

You can no longer park nearby so the tree seems even more withdrawn into the woodland. Yet I can always find it, even when the landscape seems to have shifted, the paths and tracks adjusted by time. So, on my birthday I stood, with my palms pressed against the bark of this old yew, to whom I must just be a recurring flutter of brief life in its vast lifespan. And standing there I was both 55 year old Rebecca and 7 year old Rebecca and all the Rebeccas  who had existed in between. I could see through the child’s eyes. My parents unpacking the deckchairs from the boot of the car, setting up the picnic table. My dad stretching, then lighting his pipe, saying ‘this is the life’ as he gazed around. Time past and time present were one, I was one.

And yet we are different, that girl from the past and I. I know everything she knew then but now I know so much more, have had experiences she’s never had, have been shaped by them, for good and for ill. I recognise her and can see the world through her eyes but would she recognise me? I’d like to think so.

Technically I can take my pension from my birthday. A reminder that time and my life are moving on and that in only a short while I will look back on the 55 year old me, standing by this tree and marvel at all she didn’t know. And I have a choice now, about how I live in time future. I can finally grasp for the creative life I’ve craved. Or I can continue to play safe, to hide behind my job which has always been a bad fit and is beginning to make me ill, can cling to security at whatever cost.

I look out of the eyes of seven year old Rebecca. Her world was full of wonder. As mine is today, if I let it.  A falling leaf, a tiny jewelled beetle, the scales of the tree’s bark under my fingers still feel like magic. She looked out at a world of possibility, of imagination. That world has been calling to me for a very long time. Maybe it is time we took a leap of faith, the two of us, together.