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Murder & Boomerang

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

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