Metaphorical Tractor

I don’t know what Tom Rosenthal’s song “Tractor” is actually about but then part of the joy in art is the unique and personal meaning we give it.

There was something about the refrain of the chorus,

“I’m a tractor on the motorway
I’ll be there tomorrow if not today”

It made me think about what it’s like to feel that you’re stuck, that the wheels are spinning while you are not making any progress.

It’s a common feeling in therapy when people reach some sort of plateau and forward motion feels like, well, you’re a tractor on a motorway.

It’s particularly true in January against a background of expectation that the things which need changing better be changed with some considerable haste, after all, it’s a new year, right?

My friend Martin was telling me on the podcast last week that he’d seen a Salvador Dali print in a gallery on Corsica holidaying with his wife early in their marriage.

He’d wanted to buy it but she felt it was an expensive and frivolous purchase.

I don’t think art can ever be frivolous.

If we aren’t enjoying its beauty simply for what it is we are drawing powerful metaphor that helps us understand hitherto bewilderingly confusing parts of our life.

There is a poem by Portia Nelson about falling into holes on the sidewalk which is a favourite of therapists expressing as it does the hugely frustrating habit we have of making the same mistakes over and over, even when we can see ourselves making them.

But at least if we’re making mistakes we know that we’re moving forward, even if it’s to climb out of yet another hole or, come to that, fall heading into one.

In Rosenthal’s song about a tractor, there is the wonderful line,

“The ship in the harbour is safe
But that’s not what a ship is for.”

It reminds me of this quote from George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,”

“I would not creep along the coast but steer out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.

What’s the point of having a ship (a life) if all you’re going to do is less than your heart desires?

I can’t even swim but I reckon Rosenthal and Eliot are right.

You don’t have to do anything dangerous or particularly exciting to live a life like this, you need only to take time to ask yourself what it is that you need to feel fulfilled and try your best to deliver it.

That’s all the January change you’ll ever need.

If you’re wondering why this post is shorter than normal and almost certainly lacking in narrative arc, clarity, and anything else you might require I was awake all night running a 40c fever and retching into a bucket while my mind refused to calm for even a second.

Even more galling is that I should have to feel so ghastly without it being covid over and done with for a bit.

The negative test was, I thought, just another fever dream.

Anyway, as I lay in the half-light this morning, sipping water and especially thankful for a faithful dog who lay by my side in even the least becoming moments of the night, I thought to myself, “I’m never going to be able to write my blog. The first time in nine years I’ll have missed a week.”

In the end, I was like a tractor on a motorway, but I got there.