If you’re not an old Trekkie (yes, I confess) that phrase will mean nothing to you. It was the command that made things happen on the Starship Enterprise and sometimes it runs through my head when I am trying to control my future. Generally I have found that, unlike the starship, my future does not swing round into the direction I have planned for it to go in. It seems there is a different plan and I am not in charge of it…or am I?

So this is Christmas
And what have you done?
Another year over
And a new one just begun

The time of reckoning is upon us again. There have been quite a few of these for me now. I look back over the last year and wonder how it went by so quickly, and then I think about what I achieved. Quite a lot really. But I don’t go there for long. I whip over into what I did not achieve and then I berate myself and begin to burden myself with promises about what I will do in the coming year. Generally I’ll hit the ground running, with those urgent goals ahead of me, like the flashing ads on google pages: the ones about 10 easy tips to a flat belly.

You’ll think I’m a bit crazy going on about this perhaps. But I saw another one today and they always make me want to give chase and give them a good dressing down. I drive around a big city and in this big city, flitting in and out of all the cars, which in turn flit in and out of the lanes, are the cyclists. Lots of them are sensible but there are lots too like the one I saw this morning, who risk their minds, or at least a large and important part of their minds.

I was out shopping recently when I witnessed two very different scenarios:

In the first, a little girl was out with her family. She was about 4, I’d say. Other siblings and her mother were exploring a shop and she was bored. So she had taken hold of the baby buggy and she was idly pushing it back and forth. Not very far. Not doing any harm. Then I noticed a man I hadn’t realised was connected to the family. He called something to the mother and indicated the little girl. The mother rushed from the shop, grabbed the little girl’s arm and yanked her away from the baby buggy. Then she snarled something into the child’s ear and stalked off back into the shop. That little girl didn’t even cry, just turned away and scuffed the floor with her shoe.

Maybe you know the story of Stone Soup. I think it comes from Eastern Europe because there is a dark and ice laden forest in it. The snow is thigh deep and it hurts to breathe. A light sleet has started to whirl through the trees and thick dark clouds are moving across the face of the moon. The man who moves through this landscape knows that he will not see the frozen morning if he does not find shelter.

“Listen – are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?”

Mary Oliver (from Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?)

This is a serious and pervasive problem – this lack of breath, this lack of a life. How many of you sometimes notice that there is not enough air in your lungs; that thoughts race through your mind about what happened today, yesterday, before that; that your concern is with the future (a future that may never come, not as you imagine and worry about it)?

“Sometimes in the darkness of my own shadow I know that I could not see at all were it not for this old injury of love andgrief, this little flickering lamp that I watched beside for allthese years”. (Wendell Berry)

My conscious journey began with the knowledge that I had not learned how to mother in my family of origin. Yet here I was with two extraordinary beings in my care. I felt I had been entrusted with a sacred task about which I knew little and which I had been performing already for some years without giving it much thought beyond the day to day of getting everyone fed and rested and cleaned and all the rest of those consuming early life tasks. Everything else has sprung from that realisation because once I knew that, I had to try and do something about it. And from this came a consuming interest in families and what makes us tick.

I am in an abandoned village and suddenly I round a corner and find a large beautiful brick building with designs on the outside. I am delighted and amazed at this unexpected find.

1 in 3 to 1 in 5 of you will know what depression is (the figures vary) because you live with it, or you have experienced it and found a way through and out the other side. If you have never been depressed then, trust me, you cannot know what it is like. And no, the sufferer cannot just snap out of it.