A month ago Natasha and I were going to book a holiday in Torquay, just to get away, see the coast. Around the time the weather was really cold up here and all I really wanted to do was go back down south to live, full stop. With the pandemic it seems like Harrogate had become, for me, similar to being in Australia, cut away from the rest of the work, but with nicer people and much colder weather. I told Tish we should go to Guildford as its 20 years since we started out there together. She did say we
should go down there for our 20th anniversary in 2024. The next day she came back to me and said we should go down this year. I agreed. Hopefully in 2024 it will be common to go further afield again. For now we could go back down there, see some old favourites, in term of places and friends. After all, we have some catching up to do.

This does raise the question of how much one should look back. During the pandemic, London seemed so far away. We went back down in January and the February, just for a night, but that was enough. It really was just a train ride away (something I continually told myself when we were relocating up here). During our travels, I have often looked back to the period of our living there together between 2002 and 2005 as the happiest time of my life. Do I want to recapture that? If I am, does that mean I am unhappy right now? I know I prefer living in a bigger house up here than being cooked up in a dingy flat down there. I like the people here more also. Will it be like visiting London again. Just by doing it, the place will lose its unobtainability (which it did seem like during some of the time when we lived in Australia, which is a lot better on paper than the real thing).

Strangely the cameras I will be using are very like the ones I had when we lived there. Some hobbies seem to have come full circle. Again is that a bad thing? Can I do that better now. If not, so what? If I just enjoy it, is that not enough? In meditating we learn to enjoy that moment of presence. Can we not also return briefly to the past? In continually rushing to the future, are we not just trying to avoid the mistakes of the past? Lama Jampa told me it’s good to have regrets, because this helps you re-assess how you have lived. It urges you to strive for improvement. Not to ruminate, just appreciate the bad and try to improve on it. How much should we reflect on the good also though? Or it all the same?