Look back with thanks... and love them all

IF there had never been a band called the Beatles, my life would have taken a different course.

No Beatles’ boots with two inch Cuban heels (I had to get permission from my dad before I could buy a pair) or the obligatory black polo neck sweater that had to be worn with them; no joy as the Fab Four notched up another number one in the charts.

And perhaps especially, no glorious memories of the times their music still brings to mind – the silliness, hope and excitement of being young.

The recent celebrations marking John Lennon’s 80th birthday have brought all this back. He lived just half a lifetime, fatally shot outside his Dakota residence in New York on December 8, 1980. Tributes poured in from everywhere at the time but what I recall most were the scenes of the Mersey on local television as Lennon’s song In My Life played in the background.

It was immensely poignant then and still the case now.

Lennon regarded the lyric as ‘his first real major piece of work’ and it evoked memories of childhood and his younger years:

All these places had moments

With lovers and friends I still can recall

Some are dead and some are living

In my life I’ve loved them all Lennon and McCartney were bound together by more than memories and music-making.

Paul’s postman, Eric Clague, who regularly brought the huge sacks of fan mail to his door, was the very same man who previously had killed Julia, John’s mother, in a car accident.

A strange connection that only came to light some 20 years after In My Life had been released.

The power of the song lies not simply in the nostalgia we all

their share for lost and treasured times but in the way it evokes former years as a repository for our gratitude, for the people and places, relationships and moments that changed us forever and effectively helped to make us the persons we have become.

In My Life is a tribute to the past for the hold it still has on us, and a reminder that few, if any of us, forge our life and future alone.

We owe debts to others that can never be fully repaid, except perhaps by the way we choose to live, and we can only be thankful that, incredibly and fortuitously, life placed individuals and opportunities in our path at critical moments that changed everything.

Without them we would have been so much less; with them we experienced, managed, achieved, and learned things we had never thought possible.

In My Life is up there with the best pop songs of all time because it resonates truthfully with the trusted instincts of the human heart and our better selves.

It takes issue with

the soundtracks and stories that aim to control our lives – that we are fabulous and worth it; that we really can have it all; that winning is everything and losers are wimps; that it’s all about the bling and the perfect body. John Lennon wasn’t a fan of religion but with this song he is not far from the teaching of Jesus that life is more than the body or clothes, or acquiring stuff that we never needed in the first place.

Authentic life is an unending conversation with the way we were and all the unexpected gifts that came our way through the wisdom, forbearance and kindness of others.

Dark winter nights and ‘lockdown days’ give us the opportunity to look back with thanks, and still more thanks.

But also to remember that this unique and mysterious thing I call ‘myself ’ has its roots elsewhere: in other lives and exchanges too easily forgotten, and the realisation, as a poet once expressed it, ‘ that we are a part of all that we have ever loved.’