The art of keeping going

For somebody like me, with my “educational” background and my age, moving to another country where you don’t speak the language (and, therefore, don’t understand a single thing that’s going on around you) requires a whole re-blueprinting.

This shouldn’t be taken lightly.

It’s a huge investment of every asset – yours and those of everyone around you – over the long-haul.  This is probably the last major change of my life – I doubt I’ll have time or energy for another.

And when it’s hard?  Too hard?

Give up and go back?  To what?

Some grim job teaching English to new arrivals in Manchester that I’d never have the credentials to secure anyway?  Nothing wrong with new arrivals, you understand.

Or maybe fall back on a project management agency and tramp my tired skills around centres of Government folly, disposing of my income on shitty digs in depressing towns, doing psychologically destructive work among a team of unimaginative robots?

No.

I’d be right back where I started.  Or worse.  

Workhouse inmate.

Pit-pony.

Mercenary.

Stooge.

All these things and more.

Oh, what a bastard that those Eton old boys, rosy-cheeked Oxford jetsam, busking half-wit chums, made it down the birth canal without navigational mishap. 

Bad words flood my mind.

Now I’m a foreigner.

May’s citizen of nowhere.  Well nowhere is her creation.

Stateless.

Home? 

Three bedrooms and the chicken-run of my birth?  

First floor box in a seaside town that tries and fails to hide its heroin hopelessness and escapes up the motorway to a graffiti-soiled beating-heart of commerce between the hours of eight and six? 

12 x 12 with larch-lap and a hot-tub if you make it?

What the holy fuck are you trying to do to me?

Iberia.

Not a lot of life by any conventional measure.  But who’s being conventional?

It’s tough.

Language.

Livelihood.

Bare essentials.

Slowly.

Slowly.

Word by endlessly-forgotten word.

I’m too old for all this.  Or too stupid.

Slowly.

Slowly.

Don’t give up.  Success is the art of not giving up.

The motivator and coach.

Who motivates the motivator?  Coaches the coach?

True love.

Soul mate.

Who has that?

I do.

But separation is the price we pay.

Keep the flame flickering beneath the cup of hope.

Trying.

Age is the next thing.

Trying to remain physically intact when it feels like everything is falling apart. 

Wrong side of fifty-five.  What must these kids think?

This isn’t about quantity.

Not now.

It’s quality.  

Success is in the art of keeping going.