Here goes again ... launching myself into another blog ... many years ago when i was a child my dad used to sometimes take me as his sailing crew. I wasn't his preferred crew, my oldest sister Vicky was keener and more competent, but sometimes, not often i would be there in the boat with him. It would be planned the day before, getting up at whatever time was needed to catch the high tide, gearing up and going to the boat yard to rig the boat, it was a Tideway, a wooden clinker-built boat that my dad maintained well because that's how my dad is. When the boat was as rigged as it could be on land he would wheel it on it's squeaky trailer to the harbour slipway, along with all the other boats and their sailors, with me following. I was a bit of a puddle of a child, not sharp or clever or agile, I suspect taking me out sailing was a bit of a chore for my father, but the thought of launching into my blog brought back the memory of getting into the boat, leg deep in water and over the side before my dad pushed the boat out getting in as the boat sailed out into deeper water. I think of the salt smell and the clinking of metal ropes and the flapping of sails and the shouting and excitement and i think thats a good memory to have tho' i suspect i was really only part present as i was/am not really all with it, more often than not i am faraway in some dream world.
Memories are funny things. This year past has been full of memories of Jon, i think i've mentioned that before, and as memories of time i spent with him and without him have surfaced within the net are other memories and they are all very live, vivid and visceral in quality.
We are as living beings and bodies a container for the life we've lived, I think. I am repeating myself please excuse me. Repeat is a thing, part of our patterning. Here we go again, this way of living that actually doesn't quite work for us hitting up against the same or a similar obstacle and until we learn to meet it in another way. 
We, who is this we ? I've noticed i slip into this when i blog as if i can speak for others when i only speak for me. because how can i know how it is for someone else. Maybe it's only me that repeats mistakes, responds in the same way to some one or something that gets to me, makes me feel bad, or good, tho' feeling good would seem like less of a problem. But then what if good is an addiction, this drink makes me feel better, now i need this drink to feel better, now the drink doesn't necessarily make me feel better but i need it because if i don't have it i feel awful. I'm speaking with very ancient knowledge about drinking. Falling back into my late teens when my drinking was no more than any eighteen to nineteen year old's drinking but when if i hadn't had my daughter it might have gone bad. 
I am throwing up yesterdays because over the past few weeks i've been thinking about time. It began when i started using my instagram account. 
I'd had a look at Patti Smith's and looking at hers gave me ideas about how i could use that platform to make notes in a slightly different way. All social media platforms eat time. This blog is no exception. But if they perform a useful function then they are worth the time. This is a kind of diary. Twitter and facebook i mostly use as scrapbooks/notebooks often posting stuff to myself much as i might jot down a note on a scrap of paper. Face book memories are great. On twitter and facebook i get waylaid by national and global politics, then i become someone i don't like, mouthy and horrible, but i can't seem to help myself. I guess it's one of my patterns, it forces me up against a version of myself i am not comfortable with but can't let go, a part of me that has to fight when i think something is foul. A legacy perhaps from feeling desperately vulnerable when my children were small and Thatcher was in power. Anything that triggers feelings i recognise from those days tends to make me edgy and ugly. My body contains the fear and darkness of those days. Or maybe it is something even earlier in my life, something wary that hates to be confined. 
But back to yesterdays and why i am throwing those up in this blog it's because beginning to engage with instagram has made me wonder how long is an instant ? Is an instant a lifetime ? A lifetime of a species ? A lifetime of a world ? Is the lifetime of a thing that lasts less time, a mayfly for instance, of the same worth as the lifetime of something more long lived, a human, you or me ? Does their instant  weigh the same as ours ? 
Here I am a series of breath filled incidents that occur from the moment i'm born, or maybe conceived, until the day that i die. Does my instant go back into my ancestral past ? Does it go forward beyond my dying to my descendants and those i have touched whilst still alive ? 
It feels strange to me that a person's instant might end when their physical body ceases to live because those and that which i love and value is part of my being and so continues to be part of my being. Will that go on forever. I think of the me that got up early to go sailing with my dad, that me is still me, and the person i was before i had children, and later the young mother and the woman i am now. Every part of my being is part of my instant, my now, and in that instant, that now, even tho' some of the people and places i was once connected to are no longer accessible physically, their being still lives in me until i forget or die too, until i dissolve into the ether. 
I can feel resistance like a wall of wind as i write now. I am trying to finish this blog but i keep writing and then deleting what i've written and starting again. I don't know how to meet my next day.  I want to talk about Jon but also I don't. I want to stop grieving, I'm tired of grieving, is that a terrible thing to say ? I want to let go. But also i don't. I don't know how to move on without losing him. He was important to me and so the thought of forgetting him hurts. But forgetting will happen I think. Is that why i am calling my life a single instant so that the time we had together still retains some presence in my everyday ? He was far from perfect but a person doesn't have to be perfect to be loved do they. 
Understanding is a curious thing. The effort to understand can be unbearable, filling space with questions and mind-noise, but understanding itself, i feel, is quiet. I wonder if maybe the only path to understanding is to let go of some of the questions (some questions are un-answerable) so that silence and softness allow understanding to nestle gently in the steady beat of my heart, so the steady beat of my heart can carry me forward into tomorrow. 
I think this blog is to be continued ... this is maybe part one