Currently viewing the tag: "life"
Yesterday when I went to my gym to exercise I was feeling pretty low; some things in life weren’t working out as I had planned and I was feeling my resolve starting to spin down. I was worried my motivation would quickly follow. Excuses began flooding my head about why things shouldn’t be this way. It should all be the way I want it, and if it’s not, then life had been unfair; or that’s how it was when I walked out of the change room onto the exercise floor.
Then I saw a young woman who wouldn’t have been much more than early 20′s. She was walking a bit funny as she approached a bench press machine and loaded it up with pretty respectable weights for someone her size. It took a moment to notice because of the very true-to-life manufacturing, that she was wearing a prosthetic leg. It was attached on her right side about mid thigh. This woman then got on the bench press machine and hammered out 4 sets with serious intensity. I watched her on and off for about three quarters of an hour as she went from machine to machine working out in a way that made everyone else look like lazy bastards.
You know, if anyone deserved to be making excuses about why life was shit, it was her. But then she wasn’t making excuses, she was in there giving it 100% and looking good doing it. The realisation hit me that we make excuses because we can. And we allow those excuses room to affect our resolve and motivation because we simply do.
That young girl taught me that you can make excuses if you want, but you can also get in there and make the best of it!
Life aint over until it’s over!
Andy.
Sometimes it’s easy to lose yourself in the repetition of life; the comfortable turn of day-by-day existence for months on end that almost makes you feel like time is standing still. It’s like a cocoon that can give you an embrace of safety that on an unconscious level most of us want. You can almost believe that things won’t change.
Almost.
For me the slow turning of the season into autumn is a reminder of not only the quiet persistence of nature, but the nature of change.
Gradual and inevitable.
We may not notice the slow change of a life heavily sedated in repetition, but like the seasons that roll into each other with graceful obviousness, change does indeed come.
Sometimes it’s easy to hold onto the illusion that things will never change, and end up taking for granted all those things in life that should remain precious. I think we do this as a consequence of having memories that fade away over time; no tumultuous emotional experience will remain so, with each turn of a day, a little bit of the pain is lost. And then one day you wake up and find out there is no pain, and there is almost no recollection.
And it’s not wrong, it’s simply the nature of change.
Andy.
I’ve never gotten along with my father; we’ve never understood each other and we’ve always been very different people. When I was 13 he left, and thus ended the time when we would be in each others lives on a day to day basis. He tried his best to maintain some semblance of parental control by enforcing a set of rules on my sister and I from outside our house, but as the first couple years passed and we got used to him not being there, his authoritarian grip quickly loosened, and eventually was removed. From then on my father became someone that I was related to, but not someone I would know anymore than an acquaintance.
However the older I get in this age of my life, the more I come to realise the things that he had to face and better understand what kind of choices he had in front of him. I still find that I don’t agree with the things that he did, but at least I feel I can appreciate what his circumstances were and how he could have taken the forks in the road that he did. I also feel I understand why he had such problems relating to his own father, and why they spent nearly a decade not talking to each other.
Funny how history repeats itself.
Andy.
Tonight I was watching that movie Lesbian Vampire Killers, which just happens to be at the top of my favourite comedy films of the month list. If you haven’t seen it I would recommend getting a hold of the DVD and rounding up some friends and beers, and get ready to laugh your collective arses off for 2 hours. Personally if I was you, I’d ignore the fact that it got 5 odd out of 10 on IMDB, that’s just totally shit for what it is. That’s one of those bizarre anomalies of statistics that you can’t explain but they just happen sometimes, like the English cricket team winning The Ashes once every 20 years.
Watching this film totally reminded me what it is that I really want to do with my life, and that’s write! Everything else seems to be so much a life support for my life, but what I really live for is writing. The irony is I always put my writing behind everything else because it just doesn’t seem as important as all the stuff that pays me money and keeps me in a lifestyle that I’ve become accustomed to.
I’ve heard that writers have to suffer for their art, so maybe I need to do some decent starving and living on the borderline of poverty to have that right proper grungy lifestyle that gets you taken seriously.
Maybe!
I just don’t think I could go there now. My Bukowski days while not over, are really getting more spaced out, with lots of recovery time in between binges.
I guess I’ll put this one in the “long term goal” bucket, and throw it five years into the future to pick up then.
Andy.
Feeling tired today, didn’t sleep at all last night. I hate it when insomnia takes you the moment you crawl into bed. Going to be a long day today.
The whole working for my own startup is starting to kick in, this morning being Monday I didn’t even think once about how shit it is that a new week has started. This is much better than that forced servitude feeling that seems to be the norm for a standard nine-to-five job. If we don’t succeed in anything else, it will have been worth it for the enjoyment alone.
Lunch soon. Then I think I’m going to sleep on the office couch for a bit.
Andy.
Watching this schmaltzy stupid romantic comedy on TV, while I burn time before heading out of the flat. It’s got Heather Graham in it, so it’s watchable just for her… just! But everytime I see something like this on TV I am reminded how much we sell this dream to kids who grow up to be adults who believe in this dream so much they make it their mission in life to make it their reality.
At least that’s what I think. Maybe it’s got something to do with me still being single, and if I don’t believe this then I’ve failed in some essential goal in life. Well given how many people I know who have been married and then divorced, I feel that I’ve made the right choice.
Today being the 9th day of the 9th month of 2009, I feel stars aligning. Maybe I’ll change my mind about something.
Andy.
The thing that bothers about what I’m doing is that I never seem to have the time to do anything else. I wonder if it’s something that I will come to regret in later years, as so many people have in the past. There is a razors edge to being focused on one thing to almost single minded exclusion of everything else; it can bring great reward, but it can also lead to a life that is empty of other rich experiences which make us happy.
I don’t think I’m going to change what I’m doing though, a point of no return has been reached, the rollercoaster has left the platform. Now the only thing to do is hang on and see how wild it gets on the turns.
Which makes me think, giving your everything is in itself a sacrifice.
Andy
When I was in early teens I got my first flat top haircut. Razor sharp on the sides, with rounded edges and a bit of a fringe. Back when I was surfing a lot it was a fully functional hairstyle, no care necessary. It was all the rage back in the day. But then when I got to my late 20′s life changed and I grew my hair out, first in a shortish same length neckline cut, then shoulder length cut, finally to a long mane that came a quarter way down my back. My 30′s was the time of long hair, sometimes messy, sometimes neat, but always flowing never pulled back in a ponytail at all, because I found that too restrictive. I found that my hair was a statement of my nonconformity, it showed externally my internal nature that – I always thought – was slightly wild and not to be tamed. Hair it seems can come full circle just like life. Over my last two hair cuts I’ve returned to short hair, tight on the sides with a bit of a fringe. It’s not the old flat top of a bygone surfing age, but instead a modern messy-neat cut being sported by all the hippest trendsetters in the young European celebrity circles.
To look at me you would think me like any mainstream society person, whose life is lived in happy conformity. Once that would have worried me, back in my early 30′s, but now it’s not so important. It seems to me returning to short hair is an external sign of a life come full circle and a change of attitude to the way I live and think about the world around me.
It does make me think that maybe radicalism is a young mans game.
Andy.
So Christmas and the New Years holiday was lovely, and thanks very much for asking. I had a wonderful time doing bugger all, staying up late until the wee hours of the morning playing WoW, watching Stargate Atlantis seasons 1 to 4, getting absolutely wasted on potent weed, and completely forgetting about work. Which is a good thing because working at a startup can be total stress and pressure, which isn’t healthy if you don’t get a release from it. Fortunately Gawd invented the bliss of Mary Jane to help take our cares away. (I would advise those with obsessive personalities to take this in moderation, and not mix with heavy machinery operation – consider that my warning to you young’uns reading). I didn’t go back to work until the beginning of the 3rd week of January and I found that in my new heavily relaxed state it took me 2 weeks to really get the work engine revved up into high gear. By which time the calendar flipped over a month and it’s now February!
February already!? But seriously, where the fuck did January go? I didn’t smoke that much Northern Lights and Jack Herrer. It was quite a modest amount, all in all, compared to the bud consumption of your average casual practicising Rastafarian, so that doesn’t explain how 31 days can by in a blur. No, I’m actually inclined to believe it’s just how January is; one big blur of cold weather (for those of us living in the northern hemisphere). My theory is we spend the last 3 months of year moving a such a high speed break neck pace, firstly preparing for Christmas and New Year, and then actually having/enjoying/tolerating Christmas and New Year, that come January 1, we’re like a Formula 1 car hitting the breaks at 300 kilometers per hour; you come to a hard stop, but only after a 500 meter uncontrolled skid. Or in this case, a 31 day uncontrolled skid.
I find I really enjoy that January downtime though. It’s pretty necessary to have a balancing month where you can move a lot slower and take your time to recharge your batteries. The modern world moves all too fast these days, and it’s speeding up – to the speed of light – thanks to all the new fangled technology we invent at a faster and faster pace. All with which to communicate and amuse ourselves in ways not possible even a few years before. [But what's it all for? I hear the more enlightened among you ask! That being another story entirely]. If we don’t take the time to slow down and move at a more leisurely pace, we risk losing the purpose within ourselves at moving as fast as we possibly can in the first place.
Deep, hey?! *grin*
So yes, I had a total blast during January, didn’t do a fucking thing, can’t remember half of it, and enjoyed every minute of it. And for it I feel such an abundant flow of enthusiasm for new projects, and creativity for new ideas, that I don’t possibly have time to keep up with them all.
Hence the cycle starts again!
Maybe I should really spend some time trying to work out that trick to staying more balanced all year round, this year.
Andy.
