Birthday madness and time

It’s my birthday this week. It crept up on me like a cold and here I am the day before, wondering where all those years have gone! It got me thinking about birthday presents and what would be my ideal prezzie this year. I’ve got a fiction full MS Out There with an agent right now and I have to say that the agent signing me number is one one my list! I’d also like a new super-fast laptop, or more hours in the day!

To begin my birthday celebrations my lovely partner took me out on a mystery tour that ended in Keswick at Castlerigg Stone Circle. Now Keswick is a place close to my heart. I have no family connections there yet it remains a special, magical place for me. I took my children there when they were young and have visited almost every year since then. I suppose it has provided a landscape to my life, a dramatic backdrop to an eventful existence.

Initially I was attracted by the dramatic beauty of the panoramic views, particularly at Castlerigg. Also, the quaint village like feel to Keswick town. As I grew as a person, Keswick grew as a tourist attraction. Little by little, the individualistic feel to the town was overwritten by brands and chainstores until it was harly recognisable. The final straw on Sunday was to discover a Costa coffee shop on the town square. I fumed my way to the lake, stomping my way past hoards of outdoor clothing shops sitting back to back on the main road.

When I reached Derwentwater I realised why I had chosen it as my final resting place. I sat on the beach beside the lake and bathed in the peaceful feeling of the water lapping on the shore and the islands dotted around the lake. The mountains framed the shore and reflected back at the sky they met in the distance. In all this time the lake and the mountains remained the same. While society had moved on to MacDonalds and Wetherspoons, Costa Coffee and North Face branding, while thoughtless tourists had flocked to the hotels and walks, the mountains and lake remained and retained their natural expression.

The human measurement of time had made it’s mark on the superficial, transient surface of the place, but the real deep value of the permanence of timelessness remained intransient. I realised that, many years from now, I would end my transient visit to this life and pass into intransience as my molecules mingles with the waters of Lake Derwentwater.

So, no matter how many years old I am tomorrow, or how many more I live, time is slowed to almost a halt when I consider how long the water and the earth have lived in symbiosis, with me as merely a chemical, transient blip on it’s radar. Not a moment of sadness, but a feeling of deep joy as I look forward to my resting forever in the arms of the world, when my time comes.

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