Saturday, 14 May 2011
Builders
'We are all just like builders'.
I told myself the other day, the winter sun at the same time framing me and annulling my contours in my balcony window. You know what I mean - when the sun is so brilliant and warm and the sky so blue that things seem almost to blur together. I closed my eyes and let the feeling take over. Rushcutters Bay was shimmering in the sunlight in what could have been a Montale's miraculous moment. Montale was an early XX century Italian poet I truly adore. He was a good mate of TS Elliott as well. He wrote cryptic verses to a hypothetical yet very real female listener.
The core of what he said is that we are all trapped in this reality of limits and boundaries. However, when the sun shines really hard, or when a day to day object manages to be charged with the magnetic strength of fate and things around it become almost ethereal, then the fabric that makes our prison might tear a bit- just a bit - and we might be able to jump out to a reality of inner peace and strength.
When I let the sunlight annul me on my balcony the other day I felt the clarity that I imagine might come in a moment of Montalian trans pass.
David and I have been in Sydney for about 5 months now, after a few weeks travelling through South America. It has taken a long time to start setting up our new life in this new city. The shadow of London was very real at the beginning, that lingering feeling that reminded us that we had a very well set up show there - whilst here it was all back to casting.
I missed the city that knew me, missed my friends and at times I doubted whether I had already spent my quota of adaptability in my 20s. However it has become apparent that whilst I had wanted the journey of my new life to start on a 'sit-com-style' high, journeys like these are journey's of self discovery. And by definition, in order to discover you need to negotiate your way through unknown equations, which are often not easy.
However, whilst the starting point might have been in some shady valley, the path was to take me all the way up to a sunny balcony.
We spent the first couple of months trying building an elusive routine made of basics: a place to stay, new jobs, meeting new people, discovering a new city and a new society. Day by day the pieces came together in terms of understanding where things where and how the different 'bits' of Sydney (starting from Potts Point, Bondi and the CBD) formed the overall picture. In many ways we naturally re-invented ourselves - evolving to the next stage as individuals and as a couple.
We made a point of building a life that could not be compared to what we had in London - a life made of stuff that only Sydney could offer: sea views for breakfast, walking to work, hours spent in sunny cafe's reading the paper, healthier bodies, walking to the beach. Suddenly that first phase had finished and we were happy and had a new show going on.
'We are like builders' I told myself the other day. It's true. It seems to me that we spend our life building lives. Now the dilemma is that we are often really bad at predicting what will make us happy in the future. In our 20's we might think that a cabin by the lake by the age of 40 might be what will make us happy - so we might spend years saving for that cabin - but then when we turn 40 we might be totally different people and despise boring weekends by the lake.
So I was thinking that the trick might be making always sure that we focus on something that our 60 year old self would not regret having done (whether because of the resulting joy or the lesson learnt). The other day when the sunlight was engulfing me and Sydney was shining and everything in my life made sense, I thought that the 60 year old me will look at these days and smile.
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Great article.
ReplyDeleteLife starts at the end of your comfort zone.
Dont stop exploring.
Gav
Very cool P.
ReplyDeleteAndy, Loan and Jack