Making resolutions is a tricky thing. Big decisions are made, mostly in our own minds, during a rush of emotion, often marked by significant milestones in life. New Year's Day is the most common one. Birthdays too. We feel like we are getting a clean slate. The end of something and the hope for a new beginning. There are other triggers too. Falling in love, a quarrel, losing or starting a new job, having a baby. Sometimes it's simply a matter of waking up with an unexplained surge of energy. After a powerful yoga session, I feel like I can change the world!
The reality though, is that many of these thought processes never see the light of day. We don't manifest many of the thoughts in our mind, because they are simply thoughts. What ifs. Coulda, shoulda, wouldas. That's why we are such suckers for entertainment. Living vicariously through others. Reality TV, a sitcom or soap opera, a film or play, music. We look outside of ourselves and want that feeling within. "I'll have what she's having!"
Finding a balance between dissatisfaction and gratitude is tricky. It's no good simmering in bitterness and unhappiness, but complacency is the killer of dreams. It's tempting to live vividly in our heads and merely survive reality. Or go the other way; mindlessly seeking instant gratification to satiate our endlessly insatiable desires, never making peace with anything we do or have.
Where can we get perspective? In nature? With our loved ones? Through exercise, sex, intoxication? Why not all of them?
Above all else is creativity. I think the answer lies in Art. What is your art? What do you create alone? By yourself and for yourself. Do you garden, cook, paint, write, play music, sing, build, craft, mend or heal?
Sometimes the jumble of thoughts that make us crave change are just a jumble of thoughts making us crave change.
Fizzy, muddled energy that clouds our vision and torments our feelings.
Go make something beautiful. Make it a habit. Share it. Sell it or give it away, display it or collect it for future generations to find. And learn to read what you create. What does it tell you about yourself? What does it make you notice? How does it help you to see? What path is it leading you on?
Do it. Or not. Sometimes doing nothing is an act of creativity - simply observing, existing, when life is demanding you to do anything but. What art and creativity does achieve is a manifestation of energy, a practice that trains us to make decisions. To choose. It really does. Art, in and of itself, imitates life. It teaches you to think and see efficiently. To make sense of the 'thought mess', the 'feeling chaos' and turn all of that into something beautiful and meaningful. Or at least external. Art pushes out the muck inside and transforms it, makes sense of it. It liberates and lightens. It empties and makes room. Art creates and takes up space simultaneously. It facilitates balance.
This is my resolution for 2018. Also, growing out my eyebrows, but that's another blog post.
I resolve to create. I write. I crochet. I sew. I might draw and paint again. I make every action a work of art. As luminous with beauty or prickly with ugliness as it needs to be, I resolve to notice my ability to create. What other purpose is there?
Happy New Year.
When I was a child, my nickname was Booka Book. I repeated the phrase over and over again: "Booka booka booka booka", whenever I wanted a book. My parents gave me books, they let me flip through the pages and absorb them, they read to me. Golden books and Lady Bird books were favourites and I still have many of them, that I have now passed on to my children.
My kids are at the age, (my eldest is three and a half and the twins are almost two), that they are finally appreciating books. They no longer squirm and lose interest and become distracted when I try to read to them. They will sit together immersed in a pile of books, alone with the pages and the stories inside. Sometimes swapping between themselves, the eldest 'reads' to the siblings, reciting from memory what happens on each page. Sometimes word for word from those stories that rhyme or making up sentences as the pictures come to life in the mind. The twins are transfixed when they listen and jibber away in their own baby language, when they have a book to themselves.
We have finally nailed down the bedtime story ritual. Whatever happens with books during the day, at bedtime we choose one or two books, sometimes three if it's early, and I sit on their bedroom floor and read to them. For the most part, they listen and join in. They know the last words of a familiar rhyming sentence and we say it together:
"...and his favourite food is roasted....?"
"FOX"
That's from The Gruffalo. It's a favourite in our house. So is The Gruffalo's Child, Room on the Broom, The Paper Dolls, in fact anything written by the incredible Julia Donaldson.
Another staple in our house is anything by the incomparable Lynley Dodd. Hairy Maclary and his friends visit our place often and they are as familiar as family members.
These days, our children are so lucky. Not only do they get to delve deep into their own imaginations through the magic of these stories, the books come to life in animated reality. Some of their most beloved tales have been made into cartoons that not only bring the pictures and words from the pages to life, they fill the gaps in the stories, highlighting the nuances that can be easily overlooked. Like in Room on the Broom. The dragon flies low and menacingly over a bog filled with a large toad and her babies. As he passes, they fart bubbles into the mud. That isn't in the book!
As fantastic as technology is, and it is, despite how much whining and criticism we hear about how everyone's face is stuck in a screen these days. So what! They once said novels would destroy young people's souls too. As fantastic as technology is, it still doesn't compare to flipping the paper pages of a colourful book. Children slow down. They go places while sitting still. They do it alone and independently and they grow as a result.
Solitude, self sufficiency, a quiet space to let the cogs of your brain turn and link up happens in a special way when you hold that bundle of paper and absorb it, letting it seep into your psyche and do what it needs to without distraction. Because that, to me, is the biggest difference between reading anything on the internet and reading a book. It's the volume of messages and pathways reaching out for your attention all at the same time when you're on an electronic device that makes your brain and your being travel too fast sometimes. That's not always a bad thing. It teaches you to be discerning and efficient. With practice you learn to skim and only take in the stuff that you need, the important information you require and discard the junk. But it's only when you're focused and expert at skimming that this works. Other times all sorts of junk falls through the cracks and derails your thinking. Again, not necessarily a bad thing. Who knows what you might learn by mistake!
A book, on the other hand, well it's a kinder journey. It's a cruise not a speed boat and sometimes the adrenaline flood is best put aside.
Have you ever looked at an old picture, knowing exactly how you felt the moment it was taken; self conscious, unattractive, miserable, uncertain, unhappy - then looked again a few years down the track and remembered it differently? You were thinner than you felt then, your skin was younger, your smile less corrupted, your heart more free. That's the power of retrospect. When we look back at ourselves we more often than not think they were great times in our lives, even though the reality back then was different.
I often re visit old photos, with exactly that experience. I think most people I know do. I don't have regrets, but I do have many 'if I knew then what I know now' moments.
I had a fairly happy and stable childhood. It has been captured pretty thoroughly in photographs and film; granted it was the 70s and 80s so not to the extent that say my children's youth will be captured; what with instant digital photo and videography often requiring little more than a mobile phone to capture every significant and not so significant moment of their upbringing. I've also had a running commentary through my mum of the story behind each photograph, so the memories have been kept vividly alive through her story telling, coupled with my own recollection.
The way in which I see my teen years has shifted though. I remember feeling self conscious and awkward, moody, restricted, confused most of the time. Nothing unusual for an angst riddled teenager really. I'm sure my experience is similar to most people at that age - that horrible hormone loaded, in transition from child to adult time, between the ages of say 14 - 17. When I think about it now, it was three years; a drop in the ocean in the scope of a lifetime, but at the time it felt like an unbearable eternity.
I look back now with different eyes. My skin was youthful and smooth, my expression serene - pouty and sullen, typically troubled, but oblivious, maybe even a little bit innocent. My figure was tidy, not posture perfect, but in proportion. I dressed eccentrically. I lived in op shops and Indian boutiques. I had my own sense of style. I applied minimal, but bold make up. I cut and dyed my hair regularly. I was never conventionally beautiful, but I looked after myself. I took pride in my appearance - however slacker and effortless.....ok lazy, it was. I felt like an outsider, a misfit, but there was a shine in that uniqueness that I completely missed at the time. What a shame!
Sometimes I think to myself, 'Why was I so shy? Why was I so self conscious? I had the world at my feet. I could have done more, enjoyed more.' But that's just seeing myself through my current eyes, after all the experience and growth that has accumulated since.
I look at my post teen years in much the same way. In my 20s I was looking back at those teenage years and lamenting the missed opportunities and really not enjoying the present I was living as much as I should have, in retrospect. It didn't occur to me that that present, the time in my 20s when I lived alone, earned a decent income and had the freedom to enjoy every moment, would be something I would look back on fondly.
I've finally come full circle. It has recently dawned on me that I keep looking back with new eyes on my past and neglecting my present. So why don't I just look at my present in the same way and just appreciate every moment now, not 10 years from now.
The other day I was driving to my parents' place in my 4wd, three beautiful daughters quietly traveling with me in the back seat. I tuned in to some classic old fogey radio station that plays all those excellent hits you never know you like until they play them on the radio in the car 10 years later. That song by Bryan Adams came on, Summer of '69. That line was a light bulb moment; "Those were the best days of my life". That's what got me thinking about this. The best days of our lives are the moments we are living right now. We just don't appreciate them until later because living in the moment is fraught with so much other stuff to distract us. It's not easy being human. We worry, we feel anxious, we fret about decisions we must make, we agonise over what people think of us or how we look and how we come across to people. It takes our attention away from the bigger picture of what we are actually experiencing. Later on, in retrospect, all that negativity falls away and we are left with the happy memories.
We forget about the ill feelings we carried and the self depreciating, crippling mind chatter that held us back from taking risks and leaping whole heartedly into the guts of our lives. We only remember our past mostly with fondness, the good old days, the simplicity and the innocence of our youth.
If we can have such clarity in retrospect, why can't we drag that optimism into our present? We should be able to recognise each and every day, each and every moment, particularly when the shit is hitting the proverbial fan, that this is it. This is all we have. This moment is the only thing that is real and it will be gone immediately. Why wait? Why only appreciate it later with the benefit of clarity? Why not clear our vision now?
So right there in the car, with Bryan Adams' gravelly voice reminiscing about his youthful summer and my girls quietly dozing in the back as I drove peacefully to my parents' place, I decided to be more grateful. To be more present every day. To love photos immediately and take more of them doing the things I love with the people that I love. I'll still look back and love them in 10 years time, but it will be the second time around.
I highly recommend reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.
