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As children bring their broken toys, with tears, for us to mend;
I brought my broken dreams to God because he was my friend.
But then instead of leaving him, in peace, to work alone,
I hung around and tried to help with ways that were my own.
At last, I snatched them back and cried, “How could you be so slow?”
“My child,” He said, “What could I do? You never did let go….”
…found in an old notebook; unattributed but, sadly, not mine.
“In that first
hardly noticed moment
in which you wake,
coming back to this life
from the other more secret,
moveable and frighteningly
honest world where everything began,
there is a small opening
into the new day
which closes the moment
you begin your plans.
What you can plan
is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly
will make plans enough
for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.
To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.
To remember
the other world
in this world
is to live in your
true inheritance.
You are not a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another and greater
night than the one
from which you have just emerged….”
— David Whyte, from What to Remember When Waking
“People don’t want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.” – Chuck Palahniuk
…. says it all.
for now.
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.
“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
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.”
Be gentle first with yourself – if you wish to be gentle with others.
– Lama Yeshe
Feeling like the last 24 hours were an exercise in mercilessness: throwing myself in at the deep end of a series of pools of unknown magnitude. The good news is I realised that I could still swim. However, I could probably have found that same information out by simply climbing into the pool down the steps.
And though I think it was an interesting and worthwhile (if not, indeed, vital) exercise, from tomorrow I’ll be looking for middle ground. Which is tough as I have never yet felt comfortable within the grey scale.
So I have been mulling over the concept of neither wanting and pursuing everything my heart desires until I get it and more, nor restricting, shutting down, closing off and stepping away entirely but rather accepting with grace what is given and is available..
My conclusion?
I should tread more softly and allow myself more time, as anything I construct this quickly will fall just as fast. I have years to build a foundation strong enough to sustain all that I can be and I owe this time to myself. I am my own worst enemy. Constantly pushing. Never good enough. Expectations which, in the rare case they are not altogether unachievable, are certainly unsustainable.
And what hypocrisy as I urge and advise you of your beauty and accept you as a whole. Those things you regard as flaws sitting as neatly in my idea of you as those things you pride yourself upon. No value attribution. Just you.
…and now, to find ‘just me’.
But for now we see through a glass, darkly ... 