Love is an Action

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Writing down worthwhile conversations with ourselves in a diary or a journal is a great way to connect with our inner selves and tease out what’s needed to become happier in the here and now. Of course it needs a little bit of imagination, but it’s surprising what can come out of our memory store when we let it flow. 

I love good earthy conversations and,  with no-one else around to talk to, it’s not unusual for me to go back to my younger years and strike up conversations with my younger self, my inner child, and listen to the very different life he lived then and pains he still held on to.   

Over the years I’ve worked and talked with my younger self at various ages and I’ve always felt myself, the here and now person, changing, softening and gently healing as the conversation progresses. 

What starts as a slightly weird talk with a young person soon becomes a comfortable dialogue as we settle into a nurturing father / son chat about life that I never had with any male figure, let alone my father, who sadly died when I was a teenager. 

Of course, there are many ways to connect with our inner child.  It’s  always there inside of us.  

Fun, dance, laughter, painting, hobbies, music, being creative, playing with children, being present in the here and now, being curious are just some of the many ways to connect with our inner child, but the process of dedicating precious time to hear the small, quiet, sometimes hurt voice of the inner child is a more sacred way of respecting and healing ourselves. 

What follows is one of those conversations that I wrote down with the lonely and scared 12 year old that I used to be, having first created a safe, caring and quiet space to open the conversation with “Young me” and invite him to my table, and into my safe space.  Sure, it’s a creative writer’s joy to be able to write such a piece, but it brought out a surprising two-way interaction that left the “Today me” feeling calmer, which was actually the whole purpose of the exercise. 

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‘It’s a late October morning on the Northumberland coast.  Fresh. Sunny. Chilly. Windy. 

The dunegrass is flattened by the southerly wind and my neighbour’s tattered flag flaps it’s ratatat message across the empty beach.  

I have spare time and wonder whether I want to go out in my motorhome and find inspiration in the hills and valleys of the Cheviots, or stay at home and write.

It’s not long before I walk into the warmth of my conservatory with my breakfast and catch the wonderful views over the sea with its incoming tide, distant ships and a local fishing boat retrieving its lobster pots from the choppy water.  With just a single hooded walker on the beach, it looks like a place of wonderful solitude. After a warm winter the buds are just starting to show on my bonsai trees and Timber, my Schnauzer, is curled up on a chair in the sunshine, asleep, clearly happy that there are no rabbits, butterflies or wasps left to chase. 

I decide to stay, have breakfast, and sit down in a rocking chair beside Timber and ponder what comes next.

As I munch away, the answer that comes to mind is to spend time in meditation, catching up with myself, and really listening to what is coming through. The writing of my book is becoming too much of a distraction, too much of an attention seeker that my ego feels too happy to latch onto. I need to get under that little demon and push it off the table.

So I sit in quiet and honesty. My place of authenticity.

I walk my inner corridor that invites me to open doors of each of my younger ages and for no particular reason I am taken to an open door numbered “12” to have a chat with my younger self that sits inside, aged around 12.

In my visualisation I have managed to quietly snatch him from his life and take him to my safe place in my conservatory by the sea, away from his overbearing world with all its pressures and expectations. 

He sits beside me in his own rocking chair, his small frame lost in it, breakfast bowl in his hand, thin legs sticking sticking straight out, bare feet still sandy from playing on the beach. 

I start a gentle but honest dialogue with him; the kind of dialogue that he never had the chance to have in before in his life. 

I ask him  “What is it that you want?”

After a lot of thought, and a pause in chewing and a big gulp he replies;

“I just want the world to stop.”

“I want everything to wait. I want to get some time to stop and think”

He puts his bowl down and continues  “I know that in time I’ll be asked to make choices at school for the subjects I want to study and decide on the person I’m to be, but actually I have no idea whatsoever what I want to be, who I want to be, what I’m supposed to become, there’s nothing there in my head that makes any sense.”

“I want time out. As long as it takes. To be somewhere safe where I can think and wait and catch up with myself”

I can feel his sadness and feelings of being overwhelmed in life grow by the second. 

He continues eating, slowly, occasionally looking at me with big blue questioning eyes as though I’m supposed to have all the answers. 

I reassure him that this time it is safe, that I am safe to be with, and that I will do nothing to jeopardies that safety.  I assure him that he can trust me with his innermost thoughts, and together we can find good solutions. 

Slowly, as we talk more, a picture builds as we talk that his outer world of school, his homelife, his culture, is an enforced reality that doesn’t seem real, it doesn’t seem authentic. It’s a performance.  But it’s an unwelcome performance. It’s a role that is alien and confusing to him. It’s a role that he feels completely unsuited to and doesn’t know how to get out of. 

Saying “No” to it isn’t an option because he was never allowed to say No. Disappointing others, particularly his parents, comes with implications and complications. 

Sitting mostly in thoughtful silence, we examine what it is that he could find comfort with, and what significant things would need changing in order to find that comfort. 

I know that ahead of him he has a long and sometimes painful journey that I can’t save him from, but in sharing his concerns today I hope he might feel less lonely on his complicated path through life. 

He sits quietly in thought, with me, beside me, almost managing to rock his chair, with the sun on his face, hearing the wind and nature around him through the open doors.  The sun is low, shining through  clouds, sparkling off the wind flattened sea, and bringing warmth and joy into the room where we both sit and rock. It feels like a completely different world to his other world of performance and obligation.

As he soaks up this softer, gentler, rawer world of sunshine and nature, putting down his empty bowl on a table beside him, he says simply and clearly,

“This is what I want.”

“This, here, right now.  Time to stop and think and catch up with myself.”

I can feel him mellowing into a new world of perception and timeless connections as he absorbs new possibilities. He becomes older, wiser. 

A peaceful horizon widens and opens up as we talk. The colours become inexplicably different, older, ancient. 

He asks, “Can we explore this world? This is where I want to be. This makes sense. I don’t know what comes next or what happens, but I know for sure this is where I want to be. It feels more honest, more in touch, more alive. I feel like I can connect here and feel safe.”

After a long pause, pointing towards the sunshine skipping across the cold waves, like an old soul now he finally says “There is part of me out there. I know it.  I need to find it.“

I knew exactly what he meant because, as the older Nigel, this was my story too.  Trying to find the missing pieces to my puzzle.  

I looked out into sunshine, mirrored on the sea and was reminded yet again that the piece I was missing wasn’t a guru or a lover or a saviour out there in the mists of the future, it was actually sitting right here beside me. All the work I have been doing to find authenticity, truth, worthiness, happiness and peace, it all resided in me and my ability to find and heal my own inner child.

We continued in silence.  We watched and observed, quietly. 

We could hear the waves gently crashing on the shore, one after another after another. 

A flock of Canadian geese fly by noisily squawking at each other. The sun flited in and out of the clouds, bringing then stealing its welcome warmth. 

An inner silence and peace took over.

Time passed, the ancient colours remained, and we sank into a gentle reverie with nothing much more to concern ourselves about other than to sit together in a gentle and loving silence. 

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That was one of the easier conversations I had with my younger self, but one that provided reassurances that in being able to connect compassionately with my younger self, my inner child, that I could create some better pathways in my head today, create better memories of the past, and feel that pleasant, warming reassurance settle into my old,  rocking, bones, that were sat there soaking up the warming Northumberland sunshine. 

It was all about finding peace and calming the old, hidden voices in my head that were never reassured enough to be happy just being me, whatever that was.

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Next: Chapter 11: Breaking The Chains Of Unworthiness

Previous: Chapter 9: EXCERPTS from “Climbing the Mountain of Shame; Journaling Historic Abuse for Self Healing