Doing a bit of a ‘Waiting for Godot’.

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Aaah, she sighs. It was with such promise that resolve and resolutions lay fixed in her bosom. All the best intentions, but as most of us know, and me in particular, the ringing in of a New Year does not always flow smoothly. We want it to be so, be rid of the old and somehow that crippled horse from 2021 just kept limping into 2022.

Blame it on the heat, the African heat, or truth be told, the lack of activities that London offers in abundance. It has been too hot to venture to the beach, too crowded to venture to the beach and sweating in the wine lands is not a promising concept.

Week by week slipped by as did the Christmas decorations from the tree. Godot came to mind.

Waiting for Godot by Samual Beckett.

As a young, and embarrassingly naive student, totally out of my depth from a small town who thought studying Drama would lead directly to Hollywood, this play was presented for study. The Theatre of the Absurd was the genre, which made absolutely no sense to me anyway, and I struggled to grasp the depth and meaning behind the characters, stuck in one place, waiting for Godot to arrive. He never does. Attempts are made to move, and they never do. Time is marked by the bare tree in the first act, to having a few leaves in the second.

I do remember reading that the play was initially slated, torn to shreds, critically damned, but when performed to the long lifers in San Quenton prison in the fifties, the inmates were visibly moved, emotional. Who more than those serving hardship would be able to relate to the passage of time and waiting for ‘God’, or salvation.

This is not what is happening here, or is it? What has happened to the past weeks and my inability to get things going? How the days rolled into one without a credible thought or action to write about. Some call it procrastination, others depression, quite plausible on both counts, but it is the lack of stimulation and new ideas that has been the true culprit. When the writer’s block sits firmly between thought and deed, it is a sorry state of listlessness, waiting for something to happen, waiting for Godot to come with inspiration and happy thoughts.

Must be the heat in Africa.

But. The acknowledging of the problem is half the problem solved. I have been lax, lazy and lethargic. Said it now, and does it also have something to do with semi-retirement and being this age? Perhaps, yet others have embraced and explored other avenues in our mature years. Travel is a passion for me and COVID has put this on hold for so long, stories are old yet adventures are out there.

Have I been waiting for something to trigger the start again? Will it happen. Only we can make it so.

The last line of the play is thus: “Well, shall we go?/Yes, let’s go. (They do not move.)

It is time to move. All us feeling like this, we need to get moving. Stirrings.

Image: Wiki