Dear LPG,  

While flicking through your pages recently, I came across a poem called Bitter Sweet and In Between (►►►)  and reading the words took me back a bit.   

I think that anyone who has attained the age of retirement will agree that life has its ups and downs, and the journey between the highs and lows are often regarded as the trials that make life worth living or not, depending on one’s point of view.   

There will have been points which we felt we needed to negotiate alone no matter how hard they might have been to get through, and it will be years after the anguish of such times before we feel ready to relive them if at all…  

While we are really busy working and bringing up children, we are predominantly forced to live in the present to allow our brain’s finite capacity to remember everything it needs to and my theory is that, it is when all those responsibilities are lifted from our lives that we have more time to focus on the bits that have gone before and that are to come.     

As we get older, many have to be reminded that the good things happened, regardless of whether we engineered them ourselves through study, preparation or hard work, or we find ourselves with the good fortune of being in the right place at just the right time. And when it comes to those not so good episodes in our lives, or the painful ones, it can be easy to forget the wrong places and times until they are brought to the surface again. 

The fact that we are all individuals with many and varied ways of managing to colour the way that we see those times in retrospect, has a habit of helping us to build  a subconscious defence mechanism that will help us to supress those episodes, high or low, that we would rather not remember until, every now and then something said, either as part of a conversation we have with a few others, or something mentioned on YouTube or the television will momentarily bring some of them back.   

They say that a problem shared is a problem halved, and even though such problems will have been solved one way or the other by the time they are committed to retrospect, the thought or memory of such episodes can still be far from dealt with.  It is also worth remembering that there are few scenarios that are unique.  Someone else, somewhere else in this world will have experienced something hauntingly similar.  

The internet suggests that we face anything we feel that we cannot even talk about by committing it to the written (hand, computerised or typed) word, depending on your documenting preference.  If it all seems so bad that you don’t want to leave such evidence around for anyone else to see, burning, shredding, tearing it up or deleting it as soon as you have finished, will leave little evidence but help you feel that you have communicated it somewhere.  This is one way that might help those who are hampered by something they did in the past to feel a sense of having moved on without having to tell anyone else about it.   


KD, Penge.