Synchronicity

It’s 8am. Soon the kids from next door will arrive, but for a moment I can sit here and think.

Last night I heard Professor Joseph Cambray talk about synchronicity. The idea of a cosmology articulated as things occurring simultaneously instead of cause and effect made me think first of Gavin and Stacy and the character Nessa, whose greeting isn’t ‘what’s happening?’ but ‘what’s occurrin’?’ Not causal, but synchronous.

And it made me think also of the train I got on seven years ago in London after a day working for Maggie’s where I sat by chance beside a woman whose phone didn’t work. We struck up a conversation about a sandwich, her research and were talking about death before we’d reached Swindon. It’s strange to make a friend as an adult. It lacks the simplicity of being a child but it brings the heady joy of falling in love.

After that train journey Clare and I exchanged a few emails. And not long after she met a man called Osi Rhys Osmond who was dying of cancer and who’d chosen to have chemotherapy because, he said, it was hell but better than the alternative.

And Clare, inspired by Osi, pitched an idea to me about a documentary and an artwork for the cancer centre that Maggie’s was building in Cardiff. And after that I put the architects in touch with Osi. And the conversation they had led them to change their design so that the centre would have a space integral to it where visitors could sit and look quietly at Osi’s painting.

The picture that hangs there today is unfinished. Shortly after Osi died I too met an end of sorts. An understanding that things had changed. That I couldn’t reach the end of my life without having put into words the questions that turn constantly in my brain, like the spiky orbs of viruses in Professor Cambray’s slides last night. These questions go round and round and, academic though I may be, they don’t seem to have an academic way of answering.

And in those days I wasn’t an academic anyway.

But I’d been writing a story since before my husband got ill that was driven by a sense of the world as a system of connections at odds with the structures and roles that compress us. That story had reached 24,000 words and like a birth had become viable. I knew I would finish it.

I learned from watching Osi in Clare’s documentary that it’s possible to make a life about art and words and ideas. And I learned too that Osi’s friend Nigel had been friends with my aunty Cassie many years before. Cassie had died just after I began working at Maggie’s, not long before I married the husband who later became ill, an illness that led me to rethink pretty much everything. None of these occurrences were caused by the other; but in coinciding as they did they altered the parameters of how I understood the world. Or as Professor Cambray might say, they produced an emergent state, within which I was transformed.

That was something that I wanted to capture in my book, though I don’t think I managed to. Because the moment that I got a book deal and stepped back into the world of publishing I lost some of the wonder that had led me to write the book in the first place. An anxious eldest daughter I found myself desperate to please, a pattern of behaviour so ingrained in me that noone — not even me — could have known where I was compromising.

I don’t blame anyone, not even myself. So much of making a book a success is down to blind luck and timing. But I am sad that what I was trying to enact in my writing got lost in the getting of that writing into the world. And yes my editor left, and yes publishing is a strange world of promises that often lead nowhere. But my complaint isn’t with any of the unfortunate things that happened or the structural arrangements of this business I don’t understand. It’s really only the sense that I’ve got stuck somewhere, circling a problem.

But I’m beginning to wonder if something’s coming unstuck. Because here I am letting go of the need for an endpoint.

Listen. I have to go. These two girls need to get to school.

Here they are now, banging at the door.