"Don’t worry too much,” my Grandmother Catherine ‘Kit’ Keyes told me during one of our lengthy night-time chats in her Ivy Cottage home in Curraghmore Estate (County Waterford) over a quarter century ago. My goodness, where has the time gone? Seriously?
Granny's gentle voice and smiling eyes have been in my thoughts throughout this troubling time in Ireland and utterly devastating week in Northern Italy.
I’d been upset over something for a few days when Granny offered me that priceless piece of advice. At that time in my life, she knew me as well as anyone in my family. She didn’t want me to grow up as a nervous, overwrought man, overburdened by matters most of which would be ultimately beyond my control. She knew what she was talking about.
I did my best to listen to her then and those words have been careering through my mind since Covid-19 became the most significant event in all of our lives. Granny was the milk of human kindness, a beautiful soul who adored her children and grandchildren and we in turn loved her deeply. She knew what it meant to worry and I suspect she could see those same traits in me.
It took a great many years for me to grasp what Granny put to me in such simple but profound terms. Indeed, it took great personal loss on more than one level within my own life these past few years to truly embrace what Kit had put to me. Despite being both a Wednesday’s child and a Gemini, I’ve learned to ration worry as best I can. Instead, I’ve focused on living life as fully as I can and it’s been a great gift. It’s enriched my life and made me altogether more tolerable company.
Yesterday afternoon, having travelled home to Portlaw while adhering to social distancing, I walked one of my late Dad’s dogs, a wonderful force of nature called Dizzy (pictured). We took off down a road I’ve walked, jogged and run on for almost 35 years and the troubles of this troubled world drifted away.
The comfort in doing something which my father and his father before him had done is enormously consoling at present. Home has always been special. That I’ve worked in Waterford throughout my adult life is a blessing I’ve never taken for granted. I’ve been from one end of the county and back time and time again over the past 20 years and its charm has proven unrelenting.
As I walked Dizzy back towards home, with the Comeraghs to my back, the evening sky erupted in colour. What had been predominantly a sullen grey overhead transmogrified into an array of gold, red, pink, mauve and blue.
The sun dipping beyond the Comeraghs had unleashed the most glorious ‘slán go fóill’ to a receding Friday, and demanded my full attention. I returned Dizzy to her kennel and crossed the road outside our home to walk across the vast Guilcagh Field and take in the glorious sunset. I exhaled, smiled and recognised my good fortune for being there, for my health and for having so many kind and giving people in my life.
None of us can speak or write with too much certainty about what lies ahead. There has never been a more uncertain time in our lifetimes and while concern is natural and explicable, it is important to try and not allow such emotions to govern us.
As Gandalf told Frodo in ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” Trying not to expend too much energy on what we cannot influence would be a leaf worth turning during this public health crisis. But when the pandemic abates – and it will – keeping it turned might be the best decision you or I will ever make. Stay safe, be your own agent of change and try not to worry too much.
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