A Little Life List: When You Need To Remember

What's the most important thing to remember on a list in the clamour?

Little Life Lists are for the complicated, unruly things life throws at us. I encourage you to write your own, too. With coffee. xoxo

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The forget-me-not flower is a tiny blue gem with five gently ruffled petals, and a white multi-pronged star in its jewelled centre. They bud pale pink, quietly straining to become their lovely selves: pops of colour in a wet, wild world. And perhaps, they can help us remember what’s most important.

One: Take a moment—even half of one. In the UK last week, I was surrounded by my two siblings, their children, mine, and all four of our parents. One has Alzheimer’s, one has had a traumatic brain injury, and I’m old enough to know that this could be the last time we’re all in the same space.

We laughed and we chatted, the rambunctious wild of seventeen people clamouring for air, leaping together onto a train to get to central London to watch a show, later hustling to the park trying like mad to get the kids to stand together for a photograph of the cousins. One half-moment, in my mum’s blossoming garden, in all this wild, in the soggy of damp leaves, I bent down and took a close-up photo.

I love to photograph flowers but the last time I did was at least a year ago.

This photo was a place without words, but I heard a little voice in it. The hurly-burly of my beloved family all around, already now scattered to our various lives in distant countries, the quiet lovely of the forget-me-not said: you love this. I didn’t listen in that moment, but I’ve thought about it since, those small flowers, that voice.

Two: Linger in Stories. Centuries ago, perhaps, a knight wearing heavy armour fell into a churning river. His maiden (!) wrung her hands at the side of the water, as we maidens are prone to do. As he drowned, he cried ‘forget-me-not’, tirra lirra by the river. Up popped tiny bouquets of blue flowers, as a reminder of his love for her.

Forget-me-nots symbolize fidelity and everlasting love, maybe, but they also speak in their name of the power and weakness of memory. Once upon a time, Zeus had named every last thing, except these tiny blue flowers. They called up to the vast skies: “forget-me-not”.

As Joan Didion says in Slouching Toward Bethlehem, “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.” The vacation with my family is slipping away, captured in photos and snippets of What’s App jokes and comments—for now. But I do remember my own need to be creative in the slip-wash of time: a close-up photo.

“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.” – Joan Didion

Three: Topple because... There’s a lot of bad advice out there, but the worst is that balance is achievable. I’m not going to tell you about self-care or hot baths or the pull of a great novel because, like me, you know all that. Some days, you perhaps even manage to chill a little. The other days, when it’s all just bananas, the quiet kernel of small pieces of joy is all we have. A giggle, a great sentence, a tiny blue flower.

How do we hear anything, though?

Four: Silence is a solace.

Five: Keep looking and listening. We don’t find forget-me-nots in Saskatchewan. At least, I’ve never seen one here, but I’m still going to search for them wherever I go, so I can take a moment to bend down where they froth and bloom. Perhaps you’ll join me so that together we’re reminded: I’m reminded, you’re reminded.

Not of the raucous clamour of to-do lists, family, chaos, the wild world and work.

But of yourself, the tiny inner you who is calling out: forget-me-not.

Sometimes this voice is drowned, the weight of the armour pulling you into the water. But we can call up to the big skies, or bend down in the muddy quiet to see what we find—because once we pay attention to our own inner voice, we know then what to do.

Xoxox

Alice

Share this with someone you know who loves a moment of quiet. And please write a note in the comments below if you read someone on here who inspires you—so I can read them, too. Tell me how you are, and how you remind yourself of that voice?

Reading more: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by

Susan Cain

has been on my shelves for a long time. As someone with ADHD, my brain is rarely quiet, and every time I go near it, I feel like the person in the subtitle who can’t stop talking, so I’ve been intimidated by my own extroversion from picking it up. Yet. It pulls me after writing this. Have you read it?

In the bath, those rare moments, I’m reading The Way of the Fearless Writer by

Beth Kempton

, which I love. It’s full of beauty and grace and tiny pops of blue.

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If you’re new here, my name is Alice Kuipers and I’m a writer, mother and dog-owner transplanted twenty years ago to the Canadian prairies from England. I’ve published fourteen books in 36 countries and my writing has been described as: “For storytellers and story lovers,” by Kirkus Reviews; ‘Gorgeous, heart-ripping, important,” by VOYA; and “Intense and wonderful” by Bif Naked.

Join me for a coffee break on here.

Xoxo