It passes and I learn something…
A couple of weeks ago I shared the first real part of my Irish meanderings in a peculiarly (but aptly) titled ‘Irish Saudade’…
Weekends are our opportunity to pause and reflect. Last weekend was busy travelling here and there on the Saturday and chores on Sunday - this weekend has been quieter, not better, but slower.
In these moments that I have craved during the working week I find myself empty. A little lost… it would be easy to pick up the tools and go back to work, just to occupy my mind. Instead I am a little saudade perhaps?
Chris mentions in ‘One’ an idea that has really resonated for me - how model railways are not about modelling a prototype, but rather modelling himself. In these moments of low mood I yearn for connection, and look for it in real and model railways. Instead, recognising this and learning to study and reflect through the gentle act of making model trains, I accept the feeling rather than fight it and sit with it a while.
It passes and I learn something.
I am looking forward to my Irish adventure. At the moment this small collection of stock sat on Rushcliffe Halt is enough of a reminder of the heart I found in the pages of my Irish books, those Irish videos of trains long past and routes abandoned. Just another chapter beyond the myriad of projects that cross my personal workbench. Real heart and character, reflecting my longing for something that cannot be replaced.
Until next time more soon…
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Resonates with me too James. The Irish writer C S Lewis described it this way…..And in The Weight of Glory Lewis describes this longing further:
ReplyDelete“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited."