I’m not ignoring you. I’m ignoring the imminent return to school, the general routine, and the whole shebang. This means I have been ignoring other ought tos, shoulds and mean tos. And while I go about ignoring, Robert Louis Stevenson poems come to mind.
Anticipating the return to early alarm clocks definitely sets this one in motion for me:
‘In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light’
Living in Scotland in wintertime, there is still a shock factor of the degree of darkness at getting up time. And, quite frankly, at how dark it is at half-four in the afternoon, when it feels like bedtime and isn’t even teatime yet.
For the young, less skilled in telling the time, it is confusing indeed. Although Stevenson penned the poems as an adult, there are still a good number of them that retain that sense of confusion about the world – and its unfairness.
The poem is called ‘Bed in Summer’, and most of it is actually about the bigger unfairness of having to go to bed when it is patently clear that there is plenty of interesting stuff going on, but the child is shut off from it by bedtime.
‘And does it not seem hard to you
When all the sky is clear and blue
And I should like so much to play
To have to go to bed by day?’
As adults, we have grown used to these bits of life that don’t make sense. We forget to rail at them, and instead excuse them.
Admittedly, there’s not a lot we can do about the length of day or night where we live, but we can look again at other aspects of life where we have more choice. That’s as good a New Year’s Resolution as I can think of so far.