I had planned to do so many things today, but last night’s Tequila put a stop to them all, flushing my to-do list down the drain with a latin American grimace. How can a drink that has a red plastic sombrero for a lid (marketing genius) prove to be such a menace?
‘Tequila… it makes me happy!!’ we sang with vigour last night before downing a shot (and nobody on Earth has been able to drink Tequila since Terrorvision’s 1998 hit without doing the same thing I’m sure).
This morning’s rendition of the song would probably sound like more of a depressing ballad featuring a more notable string arrangement and a sombre fade-out..“thaaaaat’s the curse of Tequilaaaa” . The video would be in black and white and end with a clapped out brown Ford Cortina breaking down on the hard shoulder of the M25.
Urgh – just – urgh.
So, there was no trip to the gym today. Nor was there a long afternoon drive with which to explore Kent in the sun. Various incredibly boring yet essential tasks relating to online banking and other admin-y bits and bobs will have to be done tomorrow now, all because for most of today I didn’t have the strength to do much more beyond drink water and fall back to sleep whilst watching classic sitcoms in bed. Cool – just – cool. I am so proud of today’s achievements and will remember with certainty this milestone day for years to come.
But sarcasm aside, I know that in reality it’s important to have days like this once in a while. Life demands so much from us, every single day, and we wouldn’t want it any different because if it was we’d no doubt be bored stiff, but still, it’s important to occasionally just relax…
The problem with daily sleep is that we can seldom acknowledge that we are actually resting. We just close our eyes and either doze off quite quickly or stay awake worrying about in what order the world will end if don’t complete the 10,000 tasks we’ve set ourselves for tomorrow. Once resident in the Land of Nod we awake in what feels like minutes to acknowledge the crushing reality that it’s time to get up; and usually – in my case anyway – we’ve overslept and end up rushing around at a military pace to get ready in time, rather than slowly coax our bodies out of bed. I’d be reluctant to describe sleep as relaxing, because we just don’t know that we’re doing it!
What’s really relaxing is not having to wear a watch for the entire day and just lying around in your set of jim-jams with a break every now and then to go and make a self-gratifying big, fat unhealthy snack. What’s relaxing is laying in the garden with no concept or care for time and staring at a serene cat lying amidst flowers in the sun:
True relaxation is not something we tend to have the time for whilst in the mix of the usual daily grind. Sometimes it’s good just to pause, completely, and give our brains and bodies a day off. Sometimes it’s good to dispose of that to-do list, or at least put it to one side for day.
Maybe Tequila does make me happy after all…
And with that, it’s time to round-off my incredibly lazy day by eating a Trio in bed and channel-hopping only to hopefully land on some U.S reality show that features titillating footage of massive portions of food.
Song of the Day:C Duncan – For
Christopher Duncan is an emerging solo artist from Glasgow. Spotify introduced me to this beaut… and beaut is truly the most accurate way of describing it. Perfect song for a somewhat lazy, sunny day.
In recent weeks I have experienced some of the most wonderful days and what made them so was that they involved the winning formula of nature and good company. Nothing flashy. Nothing purchased. No long-distance travel. Just nature and friends.
Spring makes me fall in love with the countryside all over again. When the sun is shining – or even if it’s not – there really are fewer places I’d rather be than in the great outdoors amidst the elements, blinded by the bright yellow hues of the rapeseed or feeling the soft breeze of the sea on my face.
It’s been five years since I moved to Kent and the landscape back in Hertfordshire just does not compare, sporadic bits of beauty sliced apart by the likes of the M25 or Watford (a wonderful place in many ways, and also home, but my gosh it’s ugly, and if you don’t believe me just Google Streetview the Rickmansworth Road!). Five years is long enough to have visited most of the key areas of a county, as I have done, but there are still plenty of little villages and hamlets out there to experience, and I love discovering them.
I think we can learn an awful lot from nature and it’s no surprise that the likes of Thich Nhat Hanh use it as the basis for spiritual metaphors:
For me, nature distinguishes between what we need, and what we want. These are two areas that are often blurred into one and consequently leave people feeling unaccomplished for no real reason. We want many things and feel that we may struggle without those things… but we don’t actually need those things, and knowing the difference between the two is conducive to contentment. Much like the natural landscape that surrounds us, the only thing we really need is life. That’s it. There are ways to deal and cope with the absence of everything else, once you look for them. It may all sound obvious – because it is – and perhaps that’s why it’s so surprising that as humans we can all be horrendously guilty of getting overly concerned or frustrated by things that really don’t matter at all, because they’re not intrinsic to our ability to just be.
On those recent, enjoyable outings I referred to above, we didn’t need to pay a penny for the sun to shine on us, or for the sight of lambs bounding about in the fields. We didn’t need to pay to look at the pretty yellow rapeseed, or to hear the sound of the birds in the trees. We didn’t need to top-up a machine to ensure that the waves kept rippling in relentlessly whilst we were at the beach, or activate an app to tell us how to walk up a hill.
We didn’t need to do anything, because life – in this instance in it’s natural form – was all we needed.
I bloody love Spring, and Kent.
Song of the Day:Public Service Broadcasting – Lit Up
Simply stunning; I love the concept behind music like this – combining historic samples with cutting edge musical technology. Enjoy. You will. Especially the final minute and a half.
Sometimes you suddenly find yourself in one of those moments when your whole life (or what you’ve experienced of it so far) blends into just one single moment, a snapshot of time that could have been taken in any year.
I’m sat enjoying a glass of Jupiler and a weinerschnitzel in the central entertainment and dining area of a Center Parcs holiday village in the North of Belgium. I’m surrounded by a mixture of couples and families, and when I lean back, palm leaves tickle the back of my neck. The interior of this whole building has been set-up to look like a tropical paradise, and it’s a great little place to come on holiday. It always has been.
It’s a Saturday evening and timeless Euro-pop hits reverberate around the large, glass dome building in which myself and all of the other holiday-goers sit. Right now, the Macarena is playing. It gets to the bit where the lady laughs because she (nobody could ever quite make out what, despite valiantly straining to hear) to the boy who ‘was no good’ (in fact, she didn’t want him, nor could she even stand him, poor guy…). At this precise moment I could just as easily be looking into the display of a classic digital Casio watch at a date that reads something like the 30th of July 1996, whilst my older sister walks ahead of me, urging me not to dawdle as we make our way out of the ‘Parc Plaza’ (as the glass dome is more formally known) following an early evening swim. Los Del Rio’s Macarena was probably playing back then, too, only at that time it was a brand new, chart-topping hit that had swathes of people across the Continent attempting to master its dance routine. That’s quite the contrast to the tune now associated with 1:30am and the musical downturn on a night out at some sticky-floored bar with purple walls in Lancashire, or drunk old men jigging around at wedding parties with the remains of a mushroom vol au vent stuck to the soles of their white leather loafers. In 1996, the tune was an emblem of class. Or so my memory serves…
Why is it so easy to envision this moment of the past with such detail? We used to come here – to this very same place – as a family, every Summer from 1994-1999. We visited again in 2004 and 2007. My sister came here last Summer with her family, and this year I’m back again with my parents. With the exception of a few recreational additions dotted around here and there the place hasn’t changed a bit in 22 years, and that’s a good thing. Familiarity is such that I can still remember my way around the whole village. Virtually the only thing that’s changed since our jaunts in the 1990’s, is that these days I’ll opt to while away the time by quietly sitting and writing whilst sipping on a Jupiler, rather than scavenge around the adventure playground and pester the parents for a Chupa-Chup. Other than that, time may as well have stood still for a couple of decades.
A young waiter, with smooth skin and a hairstyle that looks as though he took along a picture of legendary children’s game ‘Kerplunk’ with him to the barbers, approaches my table. The child inside of me – that has never quite gone away – imagines that he’s the sort of person that 10 year old me would have had a bit of a crush on. 10 year old Sophie would probably have walked through the Café very slowly each day in hope of catching sight of him, with my head and neck at the most peculiar angles if it meant I could increase my chances of doing so. A swift glimpse would be sweet enough; but success at scoping out the moniker on the name-badge would be akin to a lottery win. I’d send half a dozen postcards home to my school friends talking about “fittie waiter Jean-Luc” (and pronounce it, ‘Gene Luck’) as though he was some imperial being that I would one day end up marrying, even though we had never, and would never still, exchange any words.
For the 30-year old me, Jean-Luc’s (not his actual name) role within my holiday is much less of a romantic dream and more-so a formality. I need Jean-Luc’s assistance in helping me settle the bill for my beer and schnitzel, a process which is straightforward enough back home, but becomes marginally more complex with a language barrier in place. When it comes to foreign language, I would in no way consider myself to be an ignoramus, far from it. I can speak basic French, basic German, basic Bahasa Indonesia… but barely a single word of Flemish, the native language of this part of Belgium. Nonetheless, I would like to try. Nothing annoys me more (well that’s not true, but figure of speech and all that jazz), than people who go abroad and don’t even try to accustom themselves to the local language. As Jean-Luc approaches my table, I desperately rack my mind for any hint of what ‘Can I get the bill please?’ could possibly be in Flemish. A number of foreign words and phrases learnt during school pass through the forefront of my mind in no logical arrangement – die Speisekarte, bitte!, je voudrais to pay, das schmeckt gut!, entschuldigang!, – but sadly, none of these is the one I’m looking for. None of these are even Flemish, so when Jean-Luc eventually arrives at the table I’ve pretty much lost all chance of communicating with him in the way I would wish to. Still determined to do so, I open my mouth and my brain does one final, last-minute rack of the limited foreign phrases within. Consequently, something comes out: “…N’errr…”.
There we have it. That, my friends, is the shameful extent of where my modern language skills (or lack of them) has got me today – emitting a sound which when written phonetically is a word that doesn’t even exist – in any language – and which tapered off once I considered it probably more communicative to wave my debit card around in front of Jean-Luc. “Follow me” he responded, and took me to the counter, where I settled the bill with no further issue beyond feeling completely hopeless at life.
The language barrier can be an enemy – as the example above indicates – but it can also be a friend. Sometimes it’s bliss not to have any idea whatsoever of what the people around you are talking about. There’s no danger of having an unpleasant commentary – which is usually enforced upon you – perforate the positive holiday vibes. Yesterday we’d gone into a service station just north of Brussels, where a group of men were sat wolfing down plates of chicken and chips, a scene which I’d otherwise think nothing more of. That was until we passed by their table as one of the party was regaling a story… “an’ ‘e (or ‘Annie’, I’m not quite sure) cayyyyme in and pisszhed all oahw-vah the floorrr”, he said, with a strong, Scouse accent. Welcome to Belgium: a land of culinary excellence, enchanting forestry, and citizens who are incredibly polite and each own a bicycle with a basket on the front. The first noise you’ll hear is an especially vocal Liverpudlian who knows somebody with an unfortunate urinary habit, possibly the flame-haired little orphan of musical fame, Annie.
Another advantage of not knowing the language, is the amusement that can be sourced from looking over at other people, and imagining what they’re saying. At the table in front of me as I ate my schnitzel, were a young-ish couple. They were clearly having a romantic evening meal, their faces drawing ever closer together as they finished their drinks:
In reality, the conversation was probably more like:
“Do you know what my favourite thing was about those chips?” “That they came served in a paper cone?” “… well, yes. Yes that was my favourite thing about them. *Short, awkward pause*. Have I got any basil stuck between my teeth?”
Nonetheless, I preferred my own version, which was made all the more funnier when one of the two – the bearded male with the paunch – tripped over a randomly-placed child’s high chair as the pair got up to leave. Inner snigger.
And speaking of leaving, it’s probably my turn. The bill for my weinerschnitzel has thankfully been settled now, thanks to the help of my old pal Gene-Luck, and it’s time for me to snooze. Nonetheless, this has been great fun. An evening of writing, relaxing, and observing. Bliss.
Song of the Day:Ezra Furman – Anything Can Happen
This chap from Illinois is my current musical obsession. If this ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ song doesn’t get you up and moving about, nothing will!
A few weeks ago I was sat on a motionless train for a considerable period of time, and felt an urge to do a little experiment to distract me from persistently looking at my watch and cursing the delays. I began to think about the literary term known as the ‘stream of consciousness’ (which in other words is when the writer scribes a narrative that reflects more accurately the spontaneity and multi-layered form of the human mind). It’s about writing that hasn’t been premeditated, or agonisingly edited in order to reach a state of perceived perfection… writing which is – in other words – a true expression of a thought process.
The following is what ended up on the page when using this methodology, and I’m not entirely sure what it means but I quite like it; and in the absence of having completed a proper blog entry for this month, I thought I’d share this instead.
“I like it when I see the piano keys bursting from behind your eyes; A tune which only you can play. …A tune that forms the soundtrack to those inner-most thoughts (The ones that dance alongside the movement of this vehicle)
There is something so profoundly special about this piece; Something that makes each time you hear it, feel like the first … The amber lights blink along in rhythm (And it feels like we all signed up to this dance class, together)
For then, for now, for tomorrow; We move together underneath this same orange glow … Sensitive to everything, familiar to nothing (And nothing before or beyond this moment matters)
Here we are.”
Song of the Day: Punchline – Simulation
Pennsylvanian indie-poppers are back with a new album and this makes me very happy…
I’ve yet to meet anyone who wouldn’t admit to having a secret love of watching the long-running gameshow, Catchphrase. In fact, I’m going to be a little bit unconventional with this post by throwing in a classic clip before I even start:
The bright colours, the amusing animations, multiple opportunities for humour upon the unveiling of each panel, and sound effects reminiscent of your ’80s toys… what’s not to enjoy? Thus I conclude that most people, if not everyone, love a bit of Catchphrase every now and then. If they don’t they wouldn’t enjoy visiting my house, where the Catchphrase card game lies in wait for unsuspecting guests.
The strength of the game lies in its simplicity. Forget the over embellished, confusing formats of the more contemporary gameshows – which are often overtly complex for the sake of how much harder it is to be original now – Catchphrase’s objective is much more straightforward. An hidden image is revealed one small panel at a time, and the sooner you can correctly identify the image as a whole, the more points you win. You are simply not supposed to know straight away, otherwise the whole purpose of the game would be completely defeated. With the revelation of each individual panel you will probably find yourself trashing some of your ideas as to the possible solution, and feeling even more convinced by others.
Not only do I think Catchphrase is a great thing to watch in accompaniment with a bowl of crisps and a fizzy drink on cold Winter weeknights, I actually think the concept of it demonstrates a key message…
How often in life do we reach ‘infallible’ conclusions when we can only see a small part of the picture?
An optical illusion has taken the Internet by storm in the past week. A photo of a bald-headed man kissing a baby was taken from such an angle that upon the first glance of it, the viewer may have been running to the child protection authorities. I won’t share it here but if you have yet to see it, head over to Google and type in ‘bald head kissing baby illusion’ and up it will pop. It’s only when you view the image in full that you realise that what you instantly thought was the opening to somebody’s rectal passage is actually just a hairless chap’s ear as he leans down to kiss his baba.
In its reality it’s an image of warmth and love, but what kind of feelings would we have been left with had we not looked at it a little longer, or been able to access the full image to see this? Rage? Disgust? Concern?
The point is that it’s very easy to make assumptions and formulate opinions based only upon the information which is immediately available to us. Humans are naturally very reactive types driven by inner sensitivities and if we have a strong sense or feeling about something, it’s very hard not to allow it to develop into what we believe to be knowledge. Waiting to see the full picture requires the necessity to shelve those gut reactions that can envelope us in an instant, and whilst that’s not easy to do, in the long-run it’s critical to making better informed choices and decisions.
In the clip above, what were your initial thoughts about the solution? You may well have found that these were of significant contrast to the actual answer. Time and thought can make a huge difference to our beliefs, we just need to permit it to do so.
Song of the Day: Animal Collective – Floridada
One of my favourite bands are BACK! Never ones to shy from experimentation, the Maryland quartet return with more of their unique brand of music you won’t hear from many artists out there. This is a classic.
As we rapidly reach the end of 2015, it makes sense to write about one of the year’s personal milestones, a topic I’ve yet to really write about here but which was quite a significant event of this year… I turned 30.
Uh-oh…
I’m pretty sure that in previous years, during all those countless discussions about the future and what it may hold for us, friends and I would reel off these stupidly excessive-sounding years which back then sounded so distant, and talk about what life may be like by then. “We’re gonna be 18 in 2003, 21 in 2006, and 30 in 2015!” went the conversations that used to take place of a lunch-break as we sat in the classroom squeezing cartons of Capri Sun and bitching about Maths teachers. We were just a bunch of naively ambitious thirteen year olds who believed we knew exactly what our futures would look like on the basis of what our parents had done, or how people lived in Albert Square.
Like most, I fell into that trap as well, although I was marginally more flexi-minded about the future than some of my friends. Unlike them, I had no idea what I wanted to do for a career – and to be honest, I didn’t really care – all I wanted was to do like my siblings and go to University, and then get married and have a couple of children by the age of 25. And own a Dyson hoover.
I’m quite sure that the thirteen year old me would probably have choked on her Capri-Sun straw had she been able to see the reality of what would be: Thirty years old, still single (and beginning to think – after numerous soirees with Tinder – that I’m just too used to my own personal space and too afraid to give it up to be anything but) and still living with my parents, albeit purely for financial reasons.
It just doesn’t sound good, does it? Thirteen year old me would’ve been most ashamed had they known this. In fact I’m pretty sure I made several vows to enter lesbian matrimony with a few school-friends of the time should we mutually have arrived at this same conclusion in life. It’s a pity I can’t remember which friends, or that we didn’t archive some official decree, written with a scented gel pen on a piece of recycled A4 (with margins).
It’s very easy to use the value of hindsight and sit back now labeling the above as naive close-mindedness borne from a lack of worldly wisdom and exposure to only the likes of Bliss magazine and Blue Peter, but as somebody who will forever preach the value of living a life that is true to yourself, and not baying into mainstream trajectories just for the sake of it, I’ll admit that even the more adult me had apprehensions about 2015, and turning 30.
Very early into my twenties I had decided that I wanted to use that decade to learn purely about myself and the world – and have my own story – rather than expend my energies into making a family of my own, and I like to think I did just that, but as 28… 29… rolled around I was finding myself feeling the doomed breath of 30 down the back of my neck once again. I set some targets to achieve by October 2015 and suffice to say I didn’t achieve all of them because I’m still sat at home in my parents’ house with no idea how – as a single person who is determined not to rent a property- I’m going to afford any alternative.
But it’s okay. I’ve reached the milestone I dreaded, and I’m not worried anymore.
Many people have told me that your 30’s are your best years. It’s early days, of course, but from what I’ve seen so far, I think they might be right.
I loved my 20’s but only now can I see how much pressure I was putting on myself in those later years by setting 30 as a deadline for various things. In small doses pressure can be powerful, and a useful catalyst for self-improvement, but if you’re not careful it can also be exceptionally detrimental to your well-being.
In February this year I saw the familiar face of one of my best friends all over the national press. A coroner’s report had deduced that she had taken her own life on the basis that she was “about to reach 30 feeling as though she wasn’t where she should be in life”. Those of us who knew her were enraged by this most simplistic of conclusions which was clearly written for mass impact rather than to reflect truth. There was a great deal more to her circumstances than that, but at the same time, reading those articles and particularly the comments attached, written by anonymous internet users all over the world, was enough to demonstrate to me that this whole ‘fear of thirty’ is a real and genuine thing that many people experience, albeit quietly.
Reading those comments alerted me to the fact that those insecurities often attributed to our teenage years really do last until much later. Many of the comments left had been written by people of a similar age, who expressed their empathy for my friend, and explained that they too felt as though they had “failed at life”. The comments all alluded to the idea that 30 is an age twinned with macro judgment, but having now been there and got the t-shirt, I can honestly say it’s not as bad as people may expect.
In truth I can think of a lot of things that have had a worse effect than turning 30: A much-loved Primarni pump dissolving in a puddle on the seventh straight day of rain in a row when I was a student, failing my 93rd driving test, the takeaway pizza I ate in Crewe… all of those prompted more disappointment and woe than the milestone birthday I had been dreading.
In fact, turning 30 has – so far – proved to be nothing but a positive thing. And why?
Purely because it was as though the needle on the ‘giveashit-o-meter’ reached zero without there being any kind of penalty. It’s like with any kind of fear; the run-up and the trepidation that ensues can be the worst part. When you’re finally faced with it, it’s a lot easier to confront, because then, you’re actively dealing with it. You don’t have a choice, so can no longer float around fearfully in the circumspect.
The way to stop caring about being 30, is to actually turn 30 and be able to accept that this is the way things have turned out, and all that has happened has happened with reason. Where there’s any dissatisfaction, rather than allow it to be the subject of disproportionate focus, it should be used to identify where any changes can be made, and if something can’t be changed, then it’s out of your control, so stop judging yourself for it. Speaking of judgment – we all know how great other people can be at it too, and that’s bound to be another reason why many people fear turning 30 – but it’s important to remember the basic rules of Science here. Unless two people have lived parallel lives and had exactly the same set of circumstances, it wouldn’t be a fair test to compare their current situations. Anyone who fails to realise this, and continues to judge others, is probably not the kind of person whose approval you’d want, anyway.
Those who extolled the virtues of the 30’s in response to my expressions of fear were adamant that one of the best things about these years is the fact that you no longer have to worry about turning 30, silly though that may sound. With that perceived deadline now just a part of history, the pressure dissipates and the freedom to do the things that we really want and are destined to do – whatever those may be – begins. Decisions become bold because we take off the shackles of fear and allow them to be.
That’s the reality of thirty, and so far it’s been fun.
Song of the Day:Weezer – Da Vinci
This band have been around for years and are still producing the tunes. This one is particularly energising.
That has been the resounding sentiment that has reverberated around each corner of the world this week; and there is a pretty convincing argument to suggest that it is more than just a feeling, and that it’s actually a fact.
In the past week, we have been reminded that our personal safety is, to an alarming extent, beyond our own control. You can keep good company, maintain decent health and be spiritually sound, but none of those things will necessarily protect you at a time of crisis.
It would be wrong and irrelevant to make assumptions about the lives of those who perished in Paris last week, but what we do know for certain is that they were people out doing what the majority of others do – dining at restaurants, drinking at bars, watching live music…simply being pedestrians in their home city, trying to get from A to B.
Any one of us could have been one of the 129 who were killed had we been in Paris last weekend, and we all know it.
We also know, that none of us are immune from suffering a similar plight in the future.
And it’s that feeling which is the one petrifying the world right now. We fear that it’s incredibly unlikely that this most recent wave of terrorism will stop here. In fact, a lot of us believe it’s probably only going to get worse before it shows any sign of getting better. I am not normally one to be easily defeated but with the Mali massacre having taken place only a few days later, and Brussels being in a state of lock-down today, it’s very hard to find a trace of hope in the idea that the world is going to be given the chance to recuperate following what happened in Paris.
And so here we are at this current moment. Nations all over the world living in a uniform state of fear, albeit of slightly different things. What choice do we have?
Negative though it may sound; when you consider some of the biggest news headlines from the past few years, there is an overwhelming sense that absolutely nowhere is an hundred per cent safe anymore, and so maybe we should stop trying to find somewhere that is. Yes, I am sounding depressing here, but the point of writing this article isn’t to depress anyone. It’s to demonstrate why we simply cannot let this fear govern us, and how we need to step around it.
Last week, the morning after the shootings, I was on a markedly sparse train heading into London. At this time of year you’re usually lucky if you can get a seat on these trains, so it was somewhat surprising to see so many available when I got on board. It was quite evident that many of those who had perhaps planned a trip into the capital that day, had re-evaluated their plans upon seeing the news, and decided to stay at home instead, through fear of a sister attack.
These people changed their plans because they felt to do so would make them feel safer, but again this brings the question, where actually is safe? Think of those headlines again: You’re not safe on a plane heading towards South East Asia. You’re not safe in an Australian chocolate cafe, or on an island in a Norwegian lake. You’re not safe in the skyscraper in which you work or on the train you take to get there, and your children aren’t even necessarily safe in school. All these events considered, it’s no surprise that to many people, going anywhere that constitutes public space feels like a risk, and so the only other option, which many people feel more inclined to take, is to simply stay at home whenever possible. Depressing as it sounds though, even our homes aren’t necessarily safe, as residents of Lockerbie, who saw neighbours’ homes destroyed and inhabitants killed by passengers falling from an exploded jumbo jet bound for New York in December 1988, may attest. Simply put, terrorism can affect anyone, anywhere; and wherever you are in the world, even if you’re not at as much risk of terrorism necessarily, you’re probably at risk of other kinds of danger,including natural disaster or general violence.
So there we have concluded that nowhere is guaranteed to be safe. And do you know what? Maybe, in a peculiar way, that knowledge is what could actually make this whole thing much easier to deal with, because to some degree it removes the element of choice and deliberation out of the equation. As with anything we might fear, the worrying and the trepidation itself doesn’t achieve or change anything, and sometimes, on those occasions when our fears do come to fruition, that can actually be the most peaceful point. The problem is identified so the questions and circumspect cease and the reaction can begin.
If we consider that nowhere is safe then we maybe we should stop painstakingly trying to work out what we should and shouldn’t do, and where we should and shouldn’t go, in terms of the risk to ourselves. To do so would only prove to be a source of frustration and irritation that as innocent people – who had no involvement in the cause of this carnage in the first place – we should have to for-go the things we really want to do in the places we want to visit. Maybe, instead of feeling foolish for ‘taking a risk’, we should commend ourselves for sticking to our original plans even in the wake of such disaster. In fact, perhaps we should enjoy our original plans even more, high on the knowledge that we haven’t been defeated by the fear like some hoped we would be.
And so this, to be honest, is why I’m choosing not to worry or change my plans following what happened in Paris. It’s not about being ignorant to the disaster, quite the opposite, it’s about not wanting those perpetrators to do any more damage than they already caused. It’s about understanding that if we only did what we thought was safe in life, we wouldn’t do anything beyond maybe stay tucked up at home reading books about adventures we only wish we could allow ourselves to have.
Despite everything that has happened not only recently but frequently throughout the years, live on as you would and do the things you enjoy, because life is much too short not to, and certainly so if you are refraining from doing so on the basis of fear. We all know life can be cruel and ugly at times, so grab any opportunity to have fun, and see the best of it. Go to wherever you want to go to, follow the things that fill you with purpose, and take those risks for which the desired outcome strongly appeals to you, because that way, whatever happens to you, you can still say you did the best with what you had and made the most out of life. That’s really all that matters.
All those innocent people from all over the world – not just Paris – who have been killed as a consequence of what is basically just somebody else’s irritation with something else, need to be considered at all times. We owe it to them to ‘fight back’ with peace, love and the willing to focus on only the good in a world which often feels so besieged with evil.
It’s our only choice. Song of the Day:Jewel – Life Uncommon
“…And lend your voices only to sounds of freedom. No longer lend your strength to that which you wish to be free from. Fill your lives with love and bravery and you shall lead a life uncommon…”
Between the start and the finish we never really know where we’re going to end up next. We are regularly confronted by choice – to go left, or to go right? There is often little to help us decide. The tall hedges immediately surrounding us conceal the larger picture, and so invariably, the decisions we end up making are blind – hurried by the demands of time and without much in the way of substance.
All of us will take a number of ‘wrong turns’ in our lives. It’s a key way of learning which routes to avoid the next time; we know that this particular left will take us to a dead-end, or that that particular right takes us back to the start again. There’s a real benefit to trial and error – arguably you could say that that’s what life is all about – but it’s not the only way to make an insightful decision. It’s not the only way to work out the solution to the maze.
Alternative perspectives are everything. You could spend years trapped in that maze, struggling to get any closer to the centre as you frantically furrow along a million paths that all look the same…
Meanwhile, the sparrow flying in the skies above you is looking down at that same maze and seeing a more instant solution that is taking the human within it ages to find…
The maze is life.
The person getting lost for years inside it is the person who sees only that which immediately surrounds them and never questions anything beyond it.
The sparrow is the person who considers the alternative perspective to everything…
Be a sparrow – explore, ask questions, look from different observation points…
You’ll be a-mazed at what you might find out…
Song of the Day:Oberhofer – Me 4 Me
This New York indie-pop band would be loved by all, if all knew of them! For now they’re one of the best-kept secrets of the music industry. This track is from their 2nd album ‘Chronovision’ which was released earlier in the month.
A selection of things that got me thinking… happy Autumn x
Saturday Morning Coffee
I’ve decided that Saturday morning coffee tastes the best.
I like to make myself a nice frothy cup of the stuff, and look out the window at the rooftops, trees and the sky. I just appreciate the time to be still, to really absorb how slowly the clouds move, and – in an infant-like way- wonder how high I can actually see. And even though it’s just a standard view from a window… once again I’m reminded of how mesmerising nature can be just to look at; how soft and how calming. I find that the coffee accompanies this moment well, and once these fifteen minutes of solace are up, it’s back to action…
When’s your favourite time for coffee?
Blogger’s Response to a Response
Minor rant time…
I have found myself becoming increasingly irritated with the number of virals I see all over the internet – especially on ‘news’ sites – about somebody’s ‘hilarious/genius/spectacular/any other superfluous adjective’ response to something else. I’m talking about those photographs of hand-written notes, or instant messenger screenshots pertaining to a personal conversation that somebody feels they simply must ‘share’ with the world wide web so that it can be viewed 5 million times over:
‘Mum’s hilarious letter to teenage son’ ‘Woman’s stern reply to Man’ etc etc
I’ve seen around a dozen of these on the internet lately and every time I read them I can’t help but wonder whether what appears to be a quest for internet fame has made a redundancy of the basic principle of being genuine. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if people just wrote these things on purpose just to earn some large-scale acclaim, and that’s what gets to me. Things become a lot less powerful or funny if they’ve been edited to entertain to the point where they deviate from sincerity, and so seldom whilst reading these things do I ever think they’re clever in any way.
And in writing of the above… I realised I’m probably making further steps to officially becoming a grumpy old lady… but whatever, I just wish these things wouldn’t be considered ‘news’.
Now, to screenshot the above couple of paragraphs and send it into The Mirror online…
The Sandal That Couldn’t Go On Holiday
Slightly fitting to the above, and further to something similar I wrote about in May, I’ve always found the most amusing things in life to be the quotes or situations that haven’t been scripted in advance.
Most recently, there was an incident involving a shoe and a Eurostar departure lounge, in which a somewhat perplexed looking assistant had approached a friend and I with a rather grotesque looking dark brown sandal dangling from her little finger.
“Is this yours? It’s only just been found… must belong to somebody who recently passed through security”
Despite any possible urge to claim the sandal as our own, we confirmed that it was neither of ours, and the assistant carried on and asked the next sets of people the same thing, prompting the same bemused replies.
A few minutes later, a puzzled sounding call came out from the tannoy…
“Err if anyone’s lost a brown sandal, please come to Customer Services to claim”
But it seemed that nobody did; at least not in the initial 15 minutes after the announcement. Perhaps they were concerned that an immediate appearance would identify them to all around as the careless owner of the dark brown sandal, or maybe they had no idea that anything of theirs had even been misplaced, and would arrive in Southern France about to merrily take a stroll along the promenade only to find that they would have to do so with just one shoe.
…I will forever ponder the ultimate fate of that sandal…
Song of the Day:Way Yes – Macondo
Soothing stuff for an Autumnal Saturday morning. Fresh out of Ohio…
sophiekemsley 
