Friends & Supporters, Wow! We launched our campaign to fund Act3 – How To Live A Better Life After 50 barely a week ago and we're already 10% funded — thanks to you.
Judy & I have been extraordinarily gratified by the number of people - even those we're rudely emailled after years of silence - who've said, "... this is really needed, and it’s not just us, it's our parents too ..."
Indeed yesterday a good friend, Alasdair, told me he’d been visiting his widowed mother in Scotland and introducing some Act3 thinking - affecting, as it turned out, her newspaper choice.
Alasdair said, ‘we’d been encouraging her to exercise for ages, but mother had been scared to take walks in the park, even though as a retired doctor she knows it’d be good for her. I asked her why not.
“Well, it’s the ALL THESE MURDERS!”
“Murders, mum?”
“Aye, MURDERS!” brandishing her copy of The Daily Mail.
Now an alternative newspaper has been procured, and with it a more rational mind-set, and Alasdair reports his mother is contentedly reading her newspaper and walking in the park.
Fear is something to be aware of and afeard of in Act3. And confronted.
In the same week we launched the campaign for this book, Judy and I became empty-nesters. For the first time in 27 years we’ve no children at home, no-one donning a uniform, no bike tyres to pump up, no slamming of doors – just silence. Our three daughters are elsewhere – and moving from Act1 into Act2 where they are discovering independence.
No doubt we’ll see them again.
Others are expreiencing the same — our good friend and co-Act-or Martin Wroe just wrote this:
Boomerang
For every welcome hello,
An unsettling goodbye
You pick someone up, from bus or train
Or the doorbell rings, it’s them
Here they are,
Again
But for all the anticipation
Still, you can’t bury the thought,
Soon, you’ll be dropping them off
Again
The orbit of the boomerang expands
In time it flies out of sight
It does not always return
You have only yourself to blame
Hello, you made it, how you doing
Thanks for coming, see you soon, goodbye.
Their life, you notice, the one you gave them
Is no longer yours, and still it is
And always will be
Two rights do not make a wrong
Our joy is encircled by grief
Or our grief encircled by joy
Or perhaps everything is encircled by something else
That none of us can name
Stay around,
Watch carefully,
Put aside regret
And see how, behind her back,
Happiness, discreetly, holds hands
With sadness
You cannot avoid this bittersweet life
By never leaving,
Only by never arriving