Tea, Trees & Regrets

It is an unwritten law of nature that we humans are, on the whole, a remarkably ungrateful species.

One may be sitting in a garden on a quiet afternoon, watching a squirrel perform impossible acrobatics on a tree branch, or listening to rain tapping softly on an old roof, when a face from the past suddenly appears in the mind. Not a famous face. Not an important face. Just someone who was always there.

And now isn’t.

Our greatest talent is recognising the value of certain people only after we have done our absolute best to exhaust them. We notice their importance when they are no longer standing in the room. Sometimes they have left. Sometimes they have changed. Sometimes they are still physically present, but a door has quietly closed somewhere inside them.

By the time we realise what has happened, the train has already left the station and we are standing on the platform holding a ticket for yesterday.

I was thinking about this recently while standing by a window with a cup of tea that had become cold because I was too busy staring at the trees outside. This is a habit I highly recommend. Trees are far more sensible than people. They do not interrupt. They do not offer investment advice. They do not send voice notes lasting seven minutes. They simply stand where they are planted and mind their own business, a quality I increasingly admire.

Humans, on the other hand, spend much of their lives worshipping false gods. Money. Status. Recognition. The approval of people they do not even particularly like. There is a strange modern obsession with appearing successful at work rather than being content. People chase these things with extraordinary dedication.

False gods are attractive because they glitter.

The things that truly matter rarely do.

Kindness does not glitter. Loyalty does not glitter. Patience does not glitter. Faith does not glitter. Decency certainly does not glitter. It usually arrives in old clothes, carrying a cup of tea and asking if you’ve eaten.

Cats understand this far better than people.

My cats have taught me many things. Mostly that every chair in the house belongs to them and that my role in life is to open doors they have no intention of walking through.

But they have also taught me something about affection.

A cat either likes you or tolerates you. There are very few review meetings involved. Cats do not care about your bank balance, your social standing or your professional achievements. They simply decide whether you are worthy of sharing a sofa.

Humans could learn something from that.

The older I become, the less impressed I am by achievement and the more impressed I am by decency. Achievement is common enough. History is full of successful scoundrels. Decency is rarer. It requires character when nobody is watching.

The world has never suffered from a shortage of ambitious people. It has always suffered from a shortage of kind ones.

Perhaps that is why certain losses hurt.

Not because we lose people. Loss is inevitable. Everyone knows that.

The pain comes from realising that we did not fully see them while we had the chance.

We noticed their presence, but not their value.

And then memory begins its work.

Memory is an infuriating editor. It removes the trivial details and leaves behind the important ones. A laugh. A conversation. A shared cup of tea. A walk. Something that seemed ordinary at the time and priceless afterwards.

I once heard someone say that life is about finding yourself. I have never been entirely convinced. Most of the people I know who found themselves appeared rather disappointed with the discovery.

Life, I suspect, is more about learning to see other people clearly.

And that is much harder.

Seeing ourselves is easy. We have spent our entire lives practising.

Seeing another human being properly requires humility. It requires looking away from our own reflection. Not many of us manage it consistently.

I certainly haven’t.

Many years ago, I read the famous line about gazing into the abyss and finding the abyss gazing back. It sounded wonderfully dramatic, the sort of thing one imagines saying while standing on a windswept mountain in a long coat.

I have occasionally gazed into the abyss myself.

The abyss found me unnecessarily sarcastic. I found the abyss rather gloomy.

We agreed to keep our distance.

Still, it taught me one useful lesson. Life is shorter than we imagine and the people who matter are fewer than we think.

Time, of course, is the great teacher. Unfortunately, its lessons often arrive after the examination has ended. That seems to be its favourite joke.

Youth has a habit of mistaking permanence for certainty. The older I become, the more I realise they are not the same thing.

Healing, I have discovered, is a quiet process. It happens during solitary walks, in books read on rainy afternoons, and in the company of pets who possess more emotional intelligence than many humans.

Years pass. The sharp edges of pain become smooth. That is what time does. It cannot erase wounds, but it teaches them how to behave.

Sometimes people enter our lives to stay.

Sometimes they enter to teach us something.

And so, on certain evenings, when the light is fading and the trees are beginning to dissolve into shadow, I find myself thinking of those people who quietly became part of the landscape of my life.

I hope they knew what I understood far too late.

That they mattered.

Far more than all the glittering nonsense the world spends so much time chasing.