Further on up the Road: Volume 3: A Journey through Corona: 'The Long Haul'

By Graham Macey

Now in this volume three of 'Further on up the Road: A Journey Through Corona: The Long Haul', Graham J Macey reflects on the new opportunities being presented to us. 'Use this opportunity to seek and to find that freedom which is true and everlasting – the freedom that remains untouched and untainted by all the ways of our mortal existence.'

Originally, this book was simply that it be a journal of the author’s travels through Spain and Italy in the anticipation that it would be a time of just letting the dust settle from all the ups and downs of the previous seven years – a time of healing and peace and a time of moving on from the past. But, over three volumes, and volume four soon to be published, the author has so much more to convey to us. Read to grasp how being safely cocooned from Corona has provided the author the opportunity to help us also see and understand our own lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chaim Mazo
• Release date: Jun 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463723999

Book preview

Further On Up The Road

The Long Haul

by

Graham J Macey

Volume Three

Copyright © 2020

Published by

Mazo Publishers

www.mazopublishers.com

Smashwords edition

All Rights Reserved

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Contents

Part One – ‘A New Normality’

1. Heads above the Water

2. Exile No More

3. Barnaby’s Cupboard

4. Bubbling Up and Bouncing Back

5. Falling

6. Will the Circle be Unbroken

Part Two – With Strings Attached

7. One at a Time Please

8. Faith, Fear and Facades

9. Neighbours

10. The Road to Lulworth Cove

11. … as You Love Yourself

Part Three – All Bubbled Out

12. There was a Law

13. Social Bubbling

14. Down by the Riverside

Part One

‘A New Normality’

1.

Heads above the Water

These are the days of the endless summer

these are the days, the time is now

there is no past, there's only future

there's only here, there's only now

Van Morrison

For most of the time that I spent looking after my mother, my daughters were 250 miles away in Cornwall, which meant that we’d only see each other two or three times a year at the most… but that was fine – we’d be in contact most days and we always had a great time when we did meet up, and there was always the comfort in knowing that, if we really needed to, we were always just a pleasant car journey away from each other.

It was the same for my friends in Cornwall and Devon and Somerset – getting together was always something to look forward to, it was never anything to get hung up about.

Of course, there are always those that are set apart by longer distances – those that we’d like to see more often – that’s just the way of things it seems – we just do the best we can.

But now we’re all discovering that there is a vast difference between choosing whether or not to see someone and being told whether or not we can see them.

This simple distinction is something we all learn as a child – that it is much more fun doing things that we want to do than doing things that we are told to do – especially as being told what to do usually meant having to do stuff that was boring and labour intensive and completely devoid of any sense of glee – but then we get older and we knuckle down, and although the reality pretty much stays the same, our perception of it gets ever more blurred around the edges.

But now it has all changed in a heart-beat as lockdown throws everything into a new and mercilessly lucid perspective. There are no blurred edges now – everything is clear-cut – every pattern of our lives defined in stark contrast by what we can and cannot do… maybe for the first time in our lives, we are being faced with the realities of freedom and control – not as comfortable conceptual arguments – but as brutal existential facts.

For someone who has spent the winter in Spain a few thousand miles from family and friends, lockdown is not causing me to see them any less than I have in the last six months – but this is not how it feels. I chose to travel to Spain and to set myself apart physically from my loved ones – but now I am being told that I cannot see them, without any reassurance that this might change in the foreseeable future.

Even though the practical outcomes in my case are pretty much the same, the effect on me, of having to re-align my life from ‘controller’ to ‘controlee’, is most definitely not.

It seems to me that this difference between Freedom and Being Controlled – that maybe, over time, it can become the difference between peace and anxiety – joy and sorrow – health and sickness – happiness and misery – harmony and discord…

… not that Freedom exists purely within the total absence of boundaries, not at all – I believe that Freedom can only exist within boundaries, but that there is a world of distinction between being free to exercise duty and responsibility and being bound in rigid subjugation.

I enjoy a privileged peaceful comfortable life here in Wiltshire, I have no worries, no anxieties – but when I am told that I cannot see my family and my friends – even though I can understand why and to the most part agree – it still feels like a constant nagging at my heart, like something is quietly but relentlessly eating away inside of me.

I am not a student of all the various physiological and psychological systems that contribute to our well-being, or lack of it – but perhaps knowing what it is that we’re feeling and why we’re feeling it may help us to keep our heads above the water during these days of Corona.

Whatever it all means to us both