On a train from London, the darkness flies past studded by lights from suburban windows.
I’m reading a report about an imminent slump in property prices and I think about the house that my late in-laws have, in the recent past, left uninhabited but far from empty.
The furniture is gone but there is still the garage, rammed to the rafters and front to back with bits and pieces of unfinished projects.
Oh, and the boat.
A 26ft Snapdragon yacht has stood on blocks in the garden since the early 1970s and would take a crane to remove even if we could find someone who wanted it.
When it arrived I imagine that my father-in-law, a boatbuilder by trade, had grand plans for renovation and adventure on the high seas.
“Did your mum have anything similar that she left unfinished for years?” I ask.
“There was some knitting that she began in the early 80s, and I bought some foam to make cushions when the children were small but it disintegrated before I had got round to it,” my wife replies.
When my mother died she left drawers full of fabric that she’d intended to use for making dresses.
My father had started to catalogue his vast record collection in a large leather-bound accounting ledger but he’d got no further than “C” and anyway, when he died I found countless volumes of vinyl discs that hadn’t even been opened let alone played.
Did these projects that existed somewhere in the far distant future keep our parents moving forward with purpose and determination, or were they burdensome and a source of unfulfilled promise, or even guilt?
These parts of our lives feel important but are not urgent enough to press us into action. Or maybe they are representations of someone we think we want to be but emerge from an idea of a person that we never were.
Do we engage in these things because we want the end result without the effort? In which case we lose most of the joy that is in the journey.
Do we involve ourselves because we think this is who we are meant to be? If so, we are wasting our time trying to live a life that is not ours.
Or do we never get around to them because we determine other things more important and so live in the service of someone else’s dreams rather than those of our own?
Maybe we simply don’t regard ourselves as worth it, not valuable enough to spend our precious time indulging in our own search for joy and fulfilment.
Recovery is like this too.
I am convinced that some people like the thought of being free from poor mental health but that isn’t how they see themselves. Maybe because they don’t feel worth it, are too busy prioritising the needs of others, are ruled by more “shoulds” than “wants”, or are not prepared to do the sometimes brutally hard work to get there.
When my father-in-law did eventually get a boat out on the water he was long past the point where he was able to handle it let alone enjoy it.
It’s making me question the things I choose to spend my time on and the reasons I do so because, as the Baptist preacher Lester Roloff once said, “I would rather sail and hit a rock than sit and rot in dry dock.
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