There's a lot going in the world right now

And there always was.

My neighbour Gary and I go to Ecstatic Dance in Hackney Wick. For a while when my health wasn’t so good, I’d spend most of the dance on the floor, stretching. ‘Ecstatic sitting’ as Gary put it.

This dance can be annoying. Sometimes it just plays great music and it’s like a sober rave and other times they get a bit spiritual about it. They try to make out that this dance is ‘the work’, an opportunity to ‘drop down and meet yourself’ and ‘go on a journey’. Gary and I compete to see who can roll their eyes the most. When we are told to breathe in and out we do exaggerated breaths. We are probably quite annoying.

One of the things that the facilitator might say at the beginning, often with hushed serious tones is: ‘There’s a lot going on in the world right now….’ and we all nod earnestly. Except for Gary, who hates this phrase.

‘There’s not a lot going on in my world,’ Gary will say on the walk back. ‘Nobody is bombing our street. I’m not in a war zone. My life is the same as it always was.’

And I agree. We live a charmed life and in many ways it’s ridiculous to think we are suffering compared to the real suffering that is going on right now.

And yet.

There really is a lot going on in the world right now and it’s giving life a surreal quality. Sometimes I feel like we are the beginning bit of a disaster movie, the bit where we are all acting like things are normal but they are not.

I made the mistakes of falling asleep listening to The Rest of Politics last night. I dreamt that Trump was on our road starting a war and I was queuing in the Co-op for loo roll. It was kind of a war / covid mash up dream and I woke up tired and cranky.

In the coffee shop, I was hell bent on reading more enraging / scary articles about the Trump situation. I keep feeding the fire. Why? I was hunched over the laptop with a clenched jaw and a scrunched up face when an old man sat down near me with a grunt. He apologised for the sounds. I pretended I hadn’t heard it. ‘I’m busy reading about the end of the world,’ I said.

‘Is it happening soon?’ he asked.

‘I think so,’ I said.

‘Do I have time to have a coffee?’ he asked.

‘Just,’ I said.

He got his coffee and I closed my laptop. The sun was coming in the massive windows we were both sitting by. I closed my eyes and let it warm me.

“What do you think about what’s happening in the world right now?’ I asked him.

‘It’s cycles,’ he said. ‘I remember when this street was a bomb site, those three houses were rubble,’ he said pointing to the new builds.

‘We thought the world was ending then. I remember being in the cinema when JFK was president and things were tense with Krushchev - and at the start of the film there was a public service announcement about what to do if the atomic bomb hit. They told us we had to take down the doors and put them around a table and hide under it. As if that would save us.’

‘By the time you got the door down, you’d be dead,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘We’d still be looking for the screwdriver!’

He said: ‘Fear is the problem - fear is what you have to fight. Fear makes your cells sick.’

We talked about young people today and how they are growing up in a climate of fear. He talked about how when he was younger life was simpler. You went out and had fun. Now everything is so serious. He said that people got on with things and found a way to enjoy life. His mother lost her child and her mother in the war.

‘I asked her years later if she ever talked to anyone about it and she said “who would I talk to? The woman across the road lost her whole family, everyone lost people - you had to keep living.”

He asked me if I had children and I said I didn’t. I asked him if he had children and he said he didn’t.

We chatted more and he asked me if I worked in London. I told him that I was technically working right now and pointed to my laptop.

‘Technology!’ he said.

‘Exactly.’

I told him I should get back to it. We shook hands and said our goodbyes as he made some more grunts getting out of the stool. ‘This is what happens at 85,’ he said. I smiled. He had the posture of a young man. I imagined he had been something very interesting in his younger days, maybe a a dancer, or an academic, or a therapist. He had a kind of gentle open-minded wisdom coming off him, and blue blue eyes. I wondered if I should have tried to set him and mum up, but I doubt either would have any interest.

When he got to the cafe door he turned back to me.

‘Remember - the main thing is not to worry!’ he said.

It was loud enough for the whole cafe to hear.

We needed to hear it.

There is a lot going on in the world right now but there always was.

Don’t worry.

xxx

Under the ‘don’t worry’ banner, I started an art class at Hackney City Farm. My neighbour Thomas asked me how it had gone and I explained the first session was just an intro. ‘Just cutting up the potatoes were you?’ he asked.

xxx

This is from the bible: “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”. Also there is a phrase I came across online. ‘Do not borrow grief from tomorrow.’