asmallyawp-blog

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It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.

Oscar Wilde

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But failed promise only truly fails when it leads to lowered expectations.

CJ Cregg, The West Wing, The Long Goodbye, written by Jon Robin Baitz

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Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

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You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look towards another land. There is no other land; there is no life but this.

Henry David Thoreau

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A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter human speech as fully as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

Margaret Atwood

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It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

Issac Asimov

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Sacred space is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don't know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don't know who your friends are, you don't know what you owe anybody, you don't know what anybody owes to you. This is the place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are or what you might be. If you have a sacred space and use it, something eventually will happen.

Joseph Campbell

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My Un-Resume

When you are small, you are asked what you want to be when you grow up. The question doesn’t go away when you go to school, but it becomes increasingly ironic once you have left school. I have been in the workforce for 9 years now and I still get the question, only now it has become ‘Where do I want to be in 5 years? How about 10 years?’  Shit, guys, I don’t know. No one told me I was supposed to have a plan for this thing! This question makes me feel like I showed up for life without reading the instructions first.

When I was five, I told my parents that when I grew up I wanted to be Italian. Then right through primary school I wanted to be a writer, with a hint of veterinarian. Then in high school I wanted to be a lawyer, perhaps, but this was drowned in a teenage girl’s need to be liked. Being a lawyer remained a child’s dream though - the more I learned about the practice of law, the less I wanted it to define me. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted a voice. I wanted to change the world for the better. Post-adolescent idealism, perhaps, but that feeling still runs deep in me. And hey, will you look at that - I was still writing away in the background.

The idea of becoming is a heady and powerful one for a child. My childhood was rich with travel and experiences and my parents were endlessly supportive of my creativity and sense of the dramatic. I know now that there were certain things that they tried to protect me from. ‘Look Isabelle, a wedding. Look at the beautiful white dress!’ my aunt pointed to me as we walked down St Michael’s Hill in Nottingham. My mother, walking with us, chastised her for suggesting to me that women were to be valued for being beautiful and weddings were special and deserving of attention. This was in 1993 (you go, Mum) and my aunt recounts this story as an example of my parents ridiculous idealism, but I feel a twinge of pride every time she tells it.

I felt safe in my childhood. It was only marred by never being allowed to have as much chocolate hedgehog as I desired, or enough attention as I felt I deserved. I was bullied as a five year old - ostensibly for having celery with peanut butter but more likely because I was an Aussie kid in a Brit playground. The gradual building sense that people might not like me was hard for me to deal with and I probably still invest way too much in it.

Who knows why I said I wanted to be an Italian. Yes, I had been to Italy, and I remember hating boysenberry ice-cream and being told that the Tour-de-France was a never-ending bike ride all around the world. I didn’t believe in god but I believed in fairies and the Easter Bunny. I made mud pies and found easter eggs in my shoes.

But I bet that at that age I didn’t want to live in Italy and that’s not what I meant when I said I wanted to be Italian. I bet that I had met Italians, and loved them and the way that they made me feel. I didn’t want to be a thing, I wanted to be a whole kind of person.

I have my parents to thank for that - they wanted me to be free to choose for myself and It has taken me 27 whole years to start to understand what that really means. That growing up isn’t about what you become, growing up is also about working out the kind of person you want to be and (trickier) being that person. It’s a constant becoming.

I have friends that I have grown up with and almost every day they amaze me with their wisdom and ability to tackle the challenges they are given head on. They are all kind, and they are all beautiful, and they all milk life for all the experiences it has to offer. Sometimes I have to stop and pinch myself when they do something incredibly wise or insightful - these are the kids I used to play with, to party with, and I love them so damn much. So, it may have taken a long time but I know now that one is never finished. One is always becoming, and that’s okay. In fact, it’s bloody brilliant.

I don’t think I have become an Italian, no. I’m gluten intolerant, for one thing, which is just about the most un-Italian thing in the world. I’m definitely not a cheerful and friendly person, and I’m cursed with a fatal case of resting bitchface. I’m sure as shit not my job - I never went into law because I didn’t want to have to be told to think a certain way, and I’m sorry to say that it turns out that most “jobs” seem to require that you adopt values that aren’t your own. What sums me up then? Not my resume - my resume lacks something. I’m a sceptical empiricist and as time goes on, what I don’t know in the world is what I hang my hat on. The unknown, for me, is huge and full of potential.

So my resume, a list of things that I have done and what I know and what I’m good at, misses a huge part of who I am. It misses out on all I want to learn, all I want to become, and the paths I didn’t take or have yet to take. This is not a to-do list, or a list of failures - this is my un-resume.

I want to be kinder. I want to listen more. I want to empower people to find answers and solutions themselves. I want to live more by my values, hard as that is sometimes. I want my friends to feel loved, celebrated and supported. I want to value security and safety less, and take more risks in my life. I want to write, and write, and write. I want to know more about the world and the people in it.

So, dear reader, my email is on this website. Whoever you are, wherever you are, send me an email. Tell me anything. I want to know what your day was like. I want to know what matters to you, what you are thinking. I promise to reply.

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This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.

John Muir (via awelltraveledwoman)

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If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again — if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man — then you are ready for a walk.

Henry David Thoreau

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and if you were there to notice this, you might have gone down as the first person to ever fall in love with the sadness of another.

The First Dream, Billy Collins

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Art is enough.

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This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment it is all that links them together.

Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

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The Ocean in Her

She had arrived in the wrong way. She landed like a storm from the desert, moving like the wild trees in the light of the moon. This was part of the story, and an important part, but it was not a very big part.

For many months it was impossible to understand. The story she had been writing was so very large, wider than the ocean and impossibly tall. She was full of ink.

Later though, she thought about it differently. The first story was a sad story. The ending, that was sad too. It was a book about loneliness. The anger of youth ebbed away into something else, something very like defeat. Life beats us all, if we try to fight it and win. And her story had kept on going while she wasn’t looking. You can never really lose something that you found on your own.

Like swimming up a river, she found her story again. It had been going behind her the whole time, sometimes only a trickle, but always a current. And the trickle was a river and the river was an ocean and the ocean was in her.

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Alhama de Granada, Spain Canon EOS 70D

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Whatever she said, it was us she was talking about, that was my interpretation. The world was so beautiful, that was about us, for we were in it together, indeed, it was almost as if we were the world.

A Man in Love, Karl Ove Knausgaard