Earlier in the year, life seemed just so grim. I was injured and nothing I did seemed to change that. I was working with Ross, a personal trainer, and sometimes we made progress and sometimes I injured myself anew. Peter had sciatica which lasted for a good 8 weeks - at its worst he couldn't sit for long and couldn't lie in bed for long. It dictated everything he did. In the background, but not really in the background of our minds, Peter's brother Neil was getting more and more ill. We were making trips up the road to Aberdeenshire to see my mum, who at the time was 97 and not happy and not well. (Now she is 98 and not happy and not well.)
It's the 2nd half of life. Carl Jung, who is a bit of a hero for me spoke about it like this;
"Wholly unprepared, we embark upon the second half of life... we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie."
He says something like we have to spend the first half of life building up an ego and learning how to live in the world and then there comes a turning point at which we have to let all that go. I think this has a lot to do with identity - like the notion of yourself as "a runner". It isn't a fact about you - or not a permanent feature - you're only a runner until you aren't. You realise after a while you're in a body with a shelf-life, and what you think of as 'your times' are just a distant dream that someone else did - or you did when your body was younger and more able to adapt.
In the therapy world there's a lot of chat at the moment about the 2nd half of life and us becoming "elders" and how enriching this is - and I think it's well-meaning, but it bypasses how painful it is to see your old certainties dissolve and old cherished notions shipwreck on the shores of reality.
In my cherished-notion world, Neil would not have died, and I would still be a runner, and my mum would say inspiring things that would help me face the next few decades; always presuming that's what I get. But Neil is gone and I haven't been able to run consistently for well over a year now and my mum - understandably - struggles to be even barely rational from one day to the next because she is in pain and nearly blind and dependent in a way she never wanted to be.
So that is how I came to the notion that maybe we should go on a Butterfly Holiday. I knew it would be an easy sell to Peter. He had sort of hinted at the possibility before, but the price is steep compared to our usual holiday budget - could we invest in such a luxury? I mentioned it to Peter and soon it was pretty much a done deal. It shook him out of some of his lethargy - he had to get busy, get a new passport, sort out his insurance - all things he would kick down the road indefinitely unless there was a deadline and a good reason to address them.
So time steamed on, as it does, and it was time to fly...
I don't want to cover the same ground as Peter, but it's difficult not to, given we often took pictures of the same things. We landed at Athens airport and the first thing we had to figure out was how to get the Metro into the centre of town. I had googled the journey and got us an inexpensive hotel near the city centre metro stop - it's so impressive that you can do all this online now - but you never know how reality is going to match up to the plan you have made. On the ground, figuring out the metro thing was not easy - we were carrying big, heavy bags, it was hot, and Greek has a completely different alphabet. It just gives you no clue. It might as well be alien symbols - in fact that's what the signs made me think of.
Peter got the metro tickets and instructions from a woman who seemed to know what we were asking. "Go downstairs and take the metro on the right hand side."
We got to the bottom of the stairs with our heavy bags at the exact same moment that a busy train pulled in and the doors opened - it was do or die. "Get it!" said Peter, so we got in. After the doors closed he raised the question of whether it was really the right train. "Too late for that now matey" I thought to myself. I tried to match up what I saw on my phone with the Klingon symbols on the metro map, but the symbols were tiny, the train was busy and I couldn't get close enough even really to see. I couldn't even figure out what direction we were going in. After three stops or so the train went deep underground and there was no phone signal. Eventually we arrived at Monastiraki station, which is what we'd been hoping for, got off and made our way up several elevators to ground level and out into the bright, bright sunlight of afternoon Athens.
What followed was a nasty half mile or so with 17kgs on our backs and maybe 8kgs in our hand-luggage, trying to figure out which way the arrow was pointing on the wee map on my phone, shouting at each other a bit. We got there though- to the unpretentiously titled Economy Hotel - and it was more than adequate for what we were needing. It was clean and well-organized and nobody tried to steal our stuff or usher us into the sex-shop round the corner. It had functioning air conditioning, which was very welcome. I used to wonder why Americans made such a fuss about air-conditioning. Growing up in Orkney it was actually hard to imagine ever being too hot.
Later after we'd showered and cooled off, we headed out into the Athens evening to have a snoop around with our cameras dangling round our necks like the tourists we were.
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