Letting Go of My Ego

It’s immensely freeing

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to let my ego not dominate my life, which is why, as I write, Jenny is repairing the brick wall at the back of our property.

I no longer pay attention to her groans about aches and pains, such as we all get when lifting bricks all day, the stooping, the shuffling back and forth with a hod loaded with bricks, or the mixing of cement. Tomorrow she will talk about poor circulation while preparing breakfast, stricken with bruised fingers, and pain in her lower back that prevented her getting a good night’s sleep.

I can’t pay too much attention to her groans and whinnying because she’s tired and the wall isn’t finished. There are other things to consider when schoolkids are getting shot to pieces, innocent people are dying in their thousands from artillery fire in a war going on in Europe.

So, Jenny cannot anymore prance around on the spot.

Ego, before letting it go, would not have allowed me to watch her suffer, but so many times Jenny told me my ego was a curse. It’s taken a long time to let go but doing so has changed my life.

I explained at breakfast that she should change her watch to a different time zone — say, three hours ahead. Only because if she did so, when I came down for breakfast, she would have already put three hours work into the wall building project.

When I eventually sat down at my desk, Jenny passed the window in a stooping kind of fashion, stricken I suppose, and I do believe I heard her cursing.

I mean, look, I’m not a beast. In previous times my actions would shine with goodness. But what if I’ve got only six months to live? I don’t want to go to my grave shattered, back bent, fingers scraped, having croaked before fixing the wall.

That’s not how I envisage me passing.

Jenny has lunch in the garden, no sense bringing dirt into the house halfway through the day. I like to hush her anxieties about the time it is taking her to rebuild. It doesn’t have to be perfect, I explain, but it must be straight, right?

I have acquired the ability to resist temptations. I’m tempted to help with the wall, but whatever weakness that temptation stirs in me, I’m strong enough to put it to one side and understand that Jenny will cope with the knocks and bruises that are now part of her daily lot.

Look, in all fairness, Jenny is starting to get used to it. I offer a few tips during the day having strolled down the garden to see the progress. How to build a wall can take years to learn. Brick laying is a cruel profession, labor intensive, can hardly be called art, not the wall Jenny is building anyway. Though, peering out the bedroom window, just before dark, you’d think she was working on a wall Picaso would have been proud of. I lifted the window, straight, darling, we’re building a straight wall.

Jenny’s language, these days, honestly! She replied something about the definition of we? Which is odd when I remember dad telling me about Chamberlain on the radio having returned from a meeting with Hitler and announced, as of 11:00 am, today, we are at war with Germany. Dad had an huge issue with that we, too.

When Jenny and I met I was not keen to confide in her my predilections for whisky, women, gambling, and getting drawn into every riotous assembly.

That came later, several years in fact, when Jenny suggested I remove the threatening greasepaint from my face every time I met her family, and to use watercolors instead. At the time, such advice went straight over my head. But she followed up by asking if there was anything I’d like to change about myself, which was a question that I was happy to answer. My bank manager, I said.

It has always been my way to take great responsibility in the removal of insects that sometimes find a way into our home. I always conduct myself with absolute obedience to nature, even though I am the supreme authority at that moment, not behaving like a naughty schoolboy, but a guard looking after a condemned crawler.

Jenny has a dislike for arthropods and doesn’t understand that our home is not a fucking fortress. (The reason she is building the wall.) The slightest suggestion that one spider has been sighted on the carpet brings about a bloody fiasco. Or, in the case of arthropods, a fiasco.

All this, as you’ll remember came about from my fall down the stairs, followed by the chest of drawers. I wasn’t cheered as a hero, willing to break my leg for her comfort. Your ego will be the death of you, she said waiting for the ambulance to arrive. You’d think, wouldn’t you, she would have crouched down, kissed my head and been tearful. No, no, Jenny is very efficient. The furniture removal people arrived before the ambulance.

Look at the time, almost 8: pm. Jenny will be in soon. Thank God, I’m starving. No sense in letting my ego kill me, right?