Why Do We Get All This Life If We Don’t Ever Use It?

“I’ve lived such a little life, and even that’ll be over pretty soon.”

- Shirley Valentine

Was your Christmas ‘off'?

Mine was, despite my good fortune of being healthy, and my family too, and having enough money for gifts and food. It wasn’t bad, just...hollow.

Isolation, I guess. The proof that nothing in life lights us up like the society of others, no matter how misanthropic we all think we are. No fairy lights can twinkle away that gap where time with loved ones should be. And we’re the lucky ones. The unlucky ones? 100,000 souls and counting.

Have you ever seen the film, Shirley Valentine? I caught it again on tv over the Christmas break. (I love unexpectedly ‘catching’ a good film on the telly, as opposed to streaming or ordering it. It feels a lot more serendipitous that way.)

Shirley Valentine is a housewife in Liverpool, who lives in a nice semi with her awful husband. Her children are grown up and oblivious. She spends her days talking to the wall. Literally. There are whole scenes where she talks to the wall and reminiscences about being that young schoolgirl with great legs and bags of spirit, or the early, happy years of her marriage. What happened to her? What happened to us all?

It is SO well written and acted.

Watch it all but if not, watch only this:

“Why do we get all this life if we don’t ever use it?”

I took my four-year-old son for a walk at the weekend (I am nailing this parenting thing). We walked past Sale Cemetery, which houses 37 Commonwealth war graves from WWI, and 37 from WWII. He peers through the bars of the locked iron gates, at the grimy green stones.

“Mummy! Look! Castles!”

A castle is a fortress, offering protection against attack. The castle move in chess is a once-in-a-game move where you get to move two pieces at the same time, usually deployed to protect your most valuable piece, the king, and move him from harm’s way.

Protection, fortitude. We spend most of our lives defending ourselves from attack, real or otherwise. The physical fortress around our final resting place is grimly symbolic of the walls we throw up around our vulnerability in life. Even when we’re in the ground, we don’t want anyone to really see us.

“I have allowed myself to lead this little life when inside me there was so much more.”

If we’ve learned anything from 2020 that we can take into the months ahead, it’s that everything we thought would protect us can fall away. Our retail giants, our pension funds, our industries. Our health. Our people. There are no castles for the living.

But still - you don’t have to lead a little life. Inside you there is so much more.

I won’t spoil the ending for you but I will say that Shirley Valentine makes some big energy moves that involve Tom Conti and retsina, but what inspires me the most is watching her spirit re-emerge, her playfulness. Her hope.

We’re sick, we’re homeschooling in a lockdown and no one’s getting a haircut for ages but there’s nothing little about what’s inside of us.

Don't allow it to be so, this year or any other.