Three Ghosts

I’m not the kind of person who entertains the supernatural but I’m sort of expecting three ghosts.

The first, an elegant apparition who floats straight through my door as I’m burning the midnight oil on a laptop so awfully abused it is beginning to shed keys.

The second, the own head holding sort whose decapitation seems a solid solution to the stress migraine I have been trying not to drown in Panado all week.

And the third, a grisly ghoul who swoops down via ceiling and begins to tear pages out of my diary, tossing appointments, deadlines and soon to be declined social events in the air like so much accursed confetti.

I don’t know when I became the old man in ‘A Christmas Carol’.

When I was a child, Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge was unequivocally the worst of the worst and childish vows were earnestly made to never work so much I don’t have time for friends, never be so focused on making money that I forget to be human and kind and not to geek out too much if I ever a meet a tiny boy on crutches named Tim.

The last one is the only Scrooge themed promise to myself that I have kept.

In fact, the only Tim I know towers over me, walks without a cane and is just one of the many people starting to give up on attempting to pry me away from my computer. Mostly in vain.

Which is why I’m expecting the ghosts.

A Ghost of Christmas Past who will take me back to a Christmas day in the 90s where my sisters and I are beached on our living’s room blue Persian carpet re watching the Bill Murray version of the famous Dickens’ story. A tangle of almost food comatose little bodies who want to be nothing like the mad man on screen but are about 16 years from habitually working a little too hard and a little too much.

Then the Ghost of Christmas Present who will pull me out of myself to watch myself through the sliding door of my balcony as I make hasty meals, send apologetic texts to people living life, throwing parties or simply sharing a bottle of wine as I doggedly read, write articles, rush back from galleries, movie theatres, interviews.

Always working in one way or another. Always feeling a little too guilty or exhausted to be at the non paying, purely social places I said I may go. Always alone.

Then last, perhaps most harrowing, the Ghost of Christmas Future. A frightful and foreshadowing phantom who pulls me through space and ticking clocks and shows me a nebulous scene in which I am doing what I have always done.

Working. Postponing relaxation and release for some faraway place in some faraway time where I dance in the street, sip from fresh coconuts on a beach, sleep all day, read all night. But only for a minute.

For a pause.

For a gasp of air before getting back to the business of drowning.

In work, in career commitments, in being busy.

The sad thing is that I’m not unlike many people.

Hop in a cab, stand in a queue, eavesdrop on a conversation and we’re all saying the same thing.

We’re busy, we’re stressed, we need a vacation from circa now till tombstone.

In a world where money rules the world, perhaps it makes some sick sense to want to accumulate a lot of it.

It makes sense to want to keep the lights on, food in the fridge, a roof over your head and, if you’re lucky, work so hard and so well that you make so much money, it ceases to exist as a barrier, a ball and chain or that foot on your neck.

So I work hard.

I try to keep afloat.

I love my job as much as I detest its ceaseless necessity but, lately, to do right by myself – my past, present and future self – I try to remember the three ghosts.

The one from the past who has a clear idea of who I don’t want to be.

And finally, the one from the future whose hazy flash forward is not set in stone. The cautionary spectre who forces me to consider both the good and the bad of carrying on the way I do so I can slow down, recalibrate and not wake up 10 years from now having forgotten to breathe.

One year for each ghost ago, Susie Steiner published an article about the top five regrets of the dying as recorded by a nurse tending to patients during their final days.

The first: ‘I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me’.