The Force Be With You

The Force Be With You

This evening was the first pizza evening after the year-end holidays and so there was lots of well-wishing for the new year to be done as well as the inevitable “galette des rois”, in both versions, to be eaten. I know I described this new year cake a year ago so I won't do so again. Also, Patrick retired from his job as a physiotherapist at the turn of the year and that was feted with a glass of marc de Chateauneuf de Pape, about the best marc there is. A good evening and it got me thinking about what I would really like to wish people I know and like for the new year. And it is.........”let the force be with you”.

Crazy as it may seem, I think the old Star Wars film touched on a perhaps universal nerve when it came up with that phrase. Whoever wrote that script and, indeed, embedded the idea deeply in the plot, must have experienced what I am about to try to describe. In fact; so must a great many people if the idea is as universal as I suspect.

There have been three separate manifestations of this in my life: sport, writing and personal relationships. I hope I can describe these so that others can relate the same phenomenon to activities and events in their own lives.

The first and perhaps most trivial (but still important) manifestation has been in my very mediocre career in sports of all kinds: specifically, in football, tennis, darts and boules, in all of which I've played for teams at a very minor level. There have been periods, lasting from some 30 minutes to an hour or two, when I played more or less to perfection. I absolutely knew, when I made a shot, that it was going to go exactly where I wanted it to. These periods of perfection never lasted very long and were not repeatable over days; the next day I might play appallingly. However, they were magic when they happened and, for me, unexplainable. Perhaps a period of perfect body and brain coordination? Or perhaps the force was with me. I'm sure that every other sports player, whatever the sport, must have experienced something similar.

The same thing has occurred to me in writing, which has been a major occupation during my life. Sometimes, writing an article of even a few hundred words has been a real labour; at other times, articles of even several thousand words have flowed from my keyboard or pen without a moment's hesitation and barely needed re-reading, except perhaps to add a comma or eliminate a keying mistake. As Nehru said at Gandhi's funeral, you have to find the words. Yet I've never really attempted to write anything I didn't know I could. Sometimes, it seems, it was just that the force was with me.

More importantly still, the same phenomenon occurred very occasionally with personal relationships. In particular I remember a French girlfriend whom I knew when I was 19 and contacted again when I came to France. Once contact had been established, we talked with a degree of intimacy that seemed at once most natural and at the same time incredible given the intervening 50 years. I have felt this same degree of intimacy, in whatever form, become immediate and almost tangible very few times and with very few people in my life but on each occasion so evidently so on both sides that something powerful had to be at work. The force?

Yet again, with my children when they were very young, I remember meeting them again after as little as a week's absence when the reconnection was clearly overwhelmingly emotional for them and so also for me. They blushed, wouldn't look at me at first as though fearing I was just an apparition and then clung to me so tightly that I couldn't release their grip. The force again?

Maybe all these phenomena are not connected as I suppose. Maybe the personal connections are different from those in work or sport. But, whatever is at play, those moments of magic are what I would most like to wish my friends for the new year.