I'm "growing up", because apparently it's the thing to do ;)
Me: “Why are you making all this effort if, when it comes to it, you’re just not interested in it. It’s like forcing yourself to finish a book you don’t enjoy – where’s the value?”
Friend: “That’s it though, isn’t it? You’ve got to sacrifice the short term in order to secure longer term happiness”
Me: “..but what happens if you continue to do that?”
Friend: “You’ll be very happy in the perpetual tomorrow.. ..Oh.”
Because sometimes it bears remembering that, despite what the British public seem to believe of enterprise and entrepreneurs, failing greatly can be a far more worthy endeavor than stagnant competence.
“It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows great enthusiasms, great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
by Theodore Roosevelt:
I write to all entrepreneurs; all creators, builders, visionaries and makers of things, a note of warning you will not heed.
No one,
… no one …
can make you believe: how much it will cost, how long it will take and how audaciously difficult and achingly lonely the path you are taking is going to be.
No one can make you believe you’ll willingly hold your head under the guillotine, time and over again; or the single minded determinism with which you’ll pursue your long term goals to all but the cataclysmic collapse of your short term welfare.
No one can tell you that having risked all you had, all you have found, and all you think you might be able to get – you’ll begin to risk that which is not yours.
No one can make you believe the strength you’ll find or the odd places you will find it, how often you can lose it, stress-test it to breaking point and (seemingly irreparable) find it intact again when you need it most.
No one can explain that not only will this occur, but you’ll come to enjoy it, rely upon it, almost. How expert you’ll become in tying a neat tourniquet around each wounding disappointment and riding right back into battle as if unscathed.
Oh, don’t take my word for it of course.
Plenty of others will tell you too, and many more qualified than I. God knows, it was told to me enough times by the life-weathered and wryly amused, those who’s arrogance had eroded down to a blunt bedrock of skill and experience.
Even if you could know, if there was some way to see, you’d go ahead, you’d do it anyway. No sooner than you had would you begin to give the cautions you couldn’t perceive to others you know will not heed them.
Keats had it right, and I know it well and through enough.
It’s likely to be the next credence I get needle-inked into my skin:
“Nothing becomes real until it is experienced, a proverb is no proverb to you until your life has illustrated it.”
Having recently spent some time confronting the frustration that my ‘alternative’ career (life?) path occasionally inspires in others, I took to wondering for a while whether I should seriously consider making that antipodean step into .. ‘traditional’ employment.
And I admit, I do have moments, whole minutes even, where I wish I had taken a more conventional option; gotten a stable job with regular hours and a wage that arrived, in my bank account, each month. Found a nice house with a manageable mortgage, taken yearly holidays to destinations you can buy guide books for..
But what I suppose becomes clear to me, as I grow weary of these daydreams within seconds, is that I’d tire of this life before I even began to build it.
I’m in the Scottish Sunday Times today, a long and flattering article which makes me blush to read. And I know that if even a line of what is written there about my future prospects comes to pass, all the stresses and frustrations I speak of, and all the rest yet to come, will have been worth it.
If not a phoneme rings true a decade from now? As my stable wage chips slowly away at my debt, and normalcy has truely claimed me?.. Well, at least we can all say I went down fighting.
I promise to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,
that I will never accept what I am told,
that I will never fall in love with safety and forget liberty
I promise that I will look for the lie in every pretty story
and the bribe in every convenience.
I’m in Ghana just now (reflections to come shortly) but as I am nearing the end of my stay here, I have found myself thinking about heading ‘home’.
“Home” – being a troublesome term when I currently, literally, do not have an address, nor truly know when I will acquire one. Obligations and meetings have me in London, Cambridge, Dorset and Glasgow in the days following my return from Accra, and so i feel somewhat sooner inclined to the notion of ‘heading onward’ than ‘heading home’. It certainly makes for less dissonance whilst my mind is assimilating the concepts surrounding my various decisions to, also, mentally ‘move on’.
I can’t help but imagine that if I deftly clicked the heels of these red-glitter pumps and chanted the infamous;
“There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home…”
Kismet would just shrug her many shoulders and look at me as if to say;
“Well…You’re on your own here Luv.”
…and i think i’m cool with that.
So I have a confession to make.
As I mentioned, I have recently moved house and during the process of boxing up my material goods I threw away:
6 black sacks of clothes
2 black sacks of shoes
1 black sack of coats
1 black sack of bags
4 black sacks of paper
2 black sacks of generic junk
That’s 16 black sacks, at 70 litres each, 1120 litres or
40 cubic feet’s worth of unnecessary clutter
which I did, of course, appropriately donate / recycle.
That my life had accumulated so much inconsequential junk is probably very telling a condition. It’d be difficult not to assert that we manifest outwardly only what is held within and, much like my internal state, some of what I was surrounding myself with was needless clutter, burdensome, and blatantly rubbish; some was perfectly viable gear, just not for me (“what possessed?!?” items) and some was truly a wrench to throw away.
You see, and here’s another somewhat redundant titbit, I’m a classic hoarder.
On the one hand I am somewhat of a reluctant materialist. Though I wish I could train myself into a Buddhist detachment from worldly goods I must sadly admit I am frequently motivated by money and ‘things’. To compound this, I am also hopelessly sentimental and cling on to worthless ticket stubs, notes, gifts, cards, photos and other mementoes going back years and years, all in shoe boxes. I revisit them regularly, scared incase I forget why I am keeping them.
But much like my childhood, where my better memories are of re-watching my youngest years captured on home movies rather than any recollection of the experiences themselves; I fear I, at times, imprint the memento, video or photograph over the feeling of actually living. So that when I come to think of the first moment I saw the dust, flame red, over New Delhi at dawn, I see the photograph I took to capture it. I have to mentally struggle to see past the frame of the photograph.
..Mementoes of friendships that didn’t survive past graduation, cards from beloved relatives who have long died, that broken necklace I meant to fix, the knitting I started and swore I could finish, the beautiful lamp I picked up in Chiang Mai night market but never changed the plug on.. all gone. The memory of each? Making me smile as I type.
And should I forget the memory of picking through the sand of the Sardinian coast now I have thrown away the shells I brought back, tucked into her empty cigarette packet? If I forget the smell of her tobacco and the sea?
That is the nature of progress. We’ll all fade out of memory someday. In trying to hold on to the past we forget the present, we forget to look outside the frame of this moment’s photograph. In forgetting to live now for the people among us we resign ourselves to a lifetime of memories, those we held on to too tightly and the memories of the people we overlooked and lost in doing so.
So if you see me pocketing that theatre ticket? Hiding behind a video camera?
Remind me..
40 cubic feet says I ought to be happier to forget.
“There is a magic in that little world, home; it is a mystic circle that surrounds comforts and virtues never known beyond its hallowed limits” – Robert Southey
I spent last week, *all* of last week, moving out of my apartment of ~3 years to became temporarily homeless pending permanent digs 350 miles away, in London.
Let it be said from the outset, I despise moving house; having done it with enough frequency to be permitted to comment.
As if it wasn’t enough to contend with the logistical and practical pain-in-the-arsery of collecting boxes, cleaning and wrapping everything you own, not having access to half the things you love because you packed them already or worrying they’ll get damaged, or even the damnable “who owns what” of it all..
As if that wasn’t enough, there’s then the emotional wrench of tearing up carefully laid roots. Deceptive, like re-potting an established flower, it is not so much the roots you can see being torn from the earth that you need worry about, gory although it is. It is the tiny, fragile hairs that you don’t see being damaged, about which you should be concerned.
Yes, yes, protestations aside, it isn’t the obvious physical trauma of moving that I hate insofar as it is the quiet discomfort of having nowhere to belong. The screaming dissonance of having de-coupled oneself from a deep, ineradicable sense of “home”.
The place where my things are, the place I feel safe, I feel comforted and where there are no expectations or requirements upon me, is no more.
For me, knowing I have a secure base is the thing that allows me to go headfirst into situations which inspire insecurity. I absolutely require a physical space where I can lock out the rest of the world. Somewhere peaceful, safe, and mine. Long term, of course, I would rather these things divorced from the physical and I have spoken at length regarding my efforts towards cultivating a sanctuary of inner space to depend upon. But until this time, I’m something of a girl adrift.
So what of “now” ? Well, I seem to be finding my sanctuary by associating only with other lost souls. The flotsam and jetsam of this world. For those who were cast out, and those who cast themselves out, have a way of finding one another.
But it is an interesting predicament, something of a territorial instinct, that without a few square metres of this strange planet to defend and call our own we cannot, really, venture forth.
“Don’t you realize that the sea is the home of water? All water is off on a journey unless it’s in the sea, and it’s homesick, and bound to make its way home someday”
– Zora Neale Hurston
“My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.” – William James
I have been considering the concept that part and parcel of my efforts to become a free agent and evaluate decisions on appropriately selfish metrics, is the ability to wilfully make wrong choices and bad compromises as long as I learn from the experience.
In my latest example, I allowed myself to be emotionally manipulated into acting under the impetus to “avoid guilt” (in a negative move away from pain rather than a positive move towards pleasure.)
I was asked to do a favor, which I refused. A sensible decision based on my workload, state of mental & physical wellbeing and my assessment of mine, and others, potential gain/loss from my participation. I was, however, co-erced into retracting my refusal despite my numerous protests in an act it would be only marginally exaggerating to call emotional blackmail. I don’t feel great about myself or the other party as a result of this. (To put it mildly.)
What I have learned, however, has shattered my ego somewhat; as I see with disarming clarity the number of times people have shelved their sense of self, their personal needs and desires, in order to support, appease or placate me. For this I am, of course, immeasurably grateful. Conversely, I can also see the number of occasions people have, steadfast in the face of my blazing need & a choice selection of tricks from every 25yr old female’s arsenal, simply refused to pause their lives for me.
I have significantly more respect for the latter.
I wish I could have been more gracious, less petulant, in the face of their instinct for self preservation. But, blinded by the unwavering egotism that comes with distress, I saw only an abandonment of me (and therefore a lack of love, care and protection) rather than an instinct towards their own personal requirement and situation (and, perhaps, a knowing and trust that not only would I be ok by myself, but that the act of being denied the escape route and my subsequent ‘survival’ might actually teach me something.)
With hindsight I’d like to thank each of you who denied me, whilst apologising in advance to those upon whom I will inflict the temporary pain of passing on this lesson in person.
This morning I wrote a post over at my ‘work blog’ on the perceptions we have of our selves, skills and roles and the huge impact these have on the wider world; specifically via the manner in which we accordingly interact (or don’t interact) with opportunities in life. All this, of course, got me thinking about the manner in which I go about (re)defining myself.
Thoughts, it turns out, that were to continue as I then met up with a friend of a friend with whom i’d been trying to arrange a meeting for some time, a particularly inspiring yet disillusioned gentleman, we spent all afternoon discussing how divorced the Human condition has become from nature, and how a holistic approach rooted in self understanding and worth is required even to begin to improve this. At this point I couldn’t help but be reminded of a line in the poem “Our Greatest Fear” by Marianne Williamson
“Your playing small does not serve the world.”
I then saw this on Twitter and couldn’t help but love the headline..
Save the Planet? We don’t even know how to take care of ourselves; we haven’t learned how to care for one another… We’re going to save the F*ckin’ Planet?
..which, though humorous and flippant in style, only stood to further reinforce these ideas solidifying in my mind.
All of this today, harshly juxtaposed with a very quiet evening alone, is culminating in an increasingly strong realisation that my initial responsibility to the wider world is to become “okay”. Not amazing. Not great. Not, as some have already said, “formidable”, “inspiring” or any of these flattering and memorable praises. Seemingly counterintuitive, perhaps, in the face of my arguments towards building greater self worth in order to ‘serve the world’ but these statements, pleasing though they are, are meaningless as they were directed not to the ‘genuine me’ but to my ‘presented self’ while there is currently an altogether too vast distinction between those things. So to become ‘okay’ simply as me should be my first step. To not require a ‘presented self’, but simply to ‘present myself‘ because, to borrow another couplet from Marianne Williamson
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”
Today was a timely and necessary illustration towards the concept of ‘living in the moment’. I could not in a million years have predicted the ebb and flow of the day and I wouldn’t have survived any attempt to foresee, halt or change the course of events that occured.
What pleases me most, I think, and on a day where it almost seems cruel to be pleased at all such is the havoc I have left in my wake (*note to butterflies everywhere, don’t carelessly flap your wings) is that I didn’t hold back and I acted on two distinct impulses. Both unexpected, both of which felt right, both were fraught with barriers (fear, insecurity, path of least resistance) and accordingly, both of which I could easily have over-analysed into inaction. Similarly, I didn’t act on another impulse, which if I am honest felt instinctively wrong, but I desperately wanted and could easily have rationalised as right.
I made choices.
I feel like I made the right choices.
I survived the day.
Yet I am in vast amounts of pain and have caused Tornados in Texas
So I can’t help but wonder how to reconcile my desperate need for independence and completeness of self, with an awareness and care for everyone and everything else. If I act solely in my own self interest for a short while as I am going to need to do (because, surely, if anything has been learnt to date it is that the chasm created by my insecurity, faithlessness in my worth and low entire lack of self esteem, cannot be solved by my attachments to drugs or food or, more importantly, to people.) Then, in this instance, what is my responsibility and rational for the pain my personal growth causes others?
But i guess i already answered my own question.
I mustn’t carelessly flap my wings. Or to rephrase. Be far more mindful of causing unecessary harm.
But for now we see through a glass, darkly ... 