It is never too late to be what you might have been.
A quote attributed to George Elliot & somewhat encouraging not only to the late bloomers of planet earth but also to everyone who wakes up one morning to find that their life has ended up being different than they would like it to be.
Everybody takes stock of their life at certain points along the way. That’s how we fine tune the game plan, though some of us may have operated for great portions of our life cruising on autopilot & letting life happen to us rather than creating it for ourselves. Looking out through the window pane at life & all of it’s opportunities just passing us by.
I know what that is like. I did that for a long, long time. I’m the queen of the window view seat.
It’s a glorious day when we decide then to join the game of life again whether we are hurled there in a daze with a thud out of a major life crisis or we arrive there more gently in a gradual and considered fashion.
That moment where perspective changes and suddenly what is possible can be imagined & visualised is the point at which the future begins to unfold with wonder. The pivotal moment.
There’s something exquisite about stepping into a world of glorious possibilities from the point of a thunderbolt of epiphany. Such a gift. The only thing greater than it in this earthly experience is to know love.
So exciting being in a period of reinvention, poised to write a new script & the sky sparkling with a myriad of options.
The universe has a way of responding with astronishing synchronicities & signs when that happens to light up the new irresistible pathway.
I’m a real life drama queen.My life thus far has been anything but boring. Unexpected. Surprising. Unconventional. Avant-garde. Alternate. Mysterious. Shocking. Turbulent. Scandalous.
I’ve experienced so many bizarre things, spectacular happenings & out of the box life experiences, well, let’s just say that I could keep you entertained for quite a while with my true life stories and you would be excused for thinking that I was making them up.
This is no mean feat for somebody with a start to life as ordinary and conservative as my own. It’s not as if I was born the child of revolutionaries or something. I could have been Beaver Cleaver’s sister.
My maternal great grandmother was a bit of a character however & led an unconventional life & a passionate one running away with her lover to Tasmania to live a kind of travelling show existence in caravans. Scandalous for her day.
Perhaps there is a genetic component.
I love this wonderful photograph of her with a python draped around her neck like an exotic feather boa.
But some people seem to have such straight forward lives don’t they. Consistent and secure and stable. Ordinary. Unremarkable. Predictable. Constant. One long term boyfriend or girlfriend becomes life long husband or wife. One career. One address for forty years. A set safe formula put in place early on and set to repeat every week like clockwork for the rest of their lives.
That’s what life is like for some folks.
And then there are people like the mistress of the blog.
It seems to me that I’ve been given the perfect writer’s life. A field of rich life experiences and lessons from an early age upon which to draw. A cast of real life characters to excite Dickens. Real life plots & twists & situations reminiscent of a great psychological thriller. But most valuable of all for the writer, a heart shattered into a thousand pieces long ago.
That sounded a tad Miss Haversham & I digress. I was going to talk to you about reinventing oneself.
Change, especially drastic change is very uncomfortable for many people, but change can be invigorating & a blessing.
Several times in my life I have completely reinvented myself. I’m not talking new hairstyle here & a makeover. I don’t just mean reinventing myself a little bit either. I mean completely reinventing myself. The whole hog. Everything & all at once. New job. (New career on several occasions). New home. New partner. New stuff. New start. New name. Bang. Overnight. Whole new life.
In each instance, the universe has booted me onto the next path in spectacular fashion & after the crescendo or should I say explosion, the pieces have fallen in a brand new pattern heralding a fresh start with all things new & nothing of the past left to take along for the ride except memories unable to be erased.
The image which comes to mind would be that of tarot’s The Tower card, the tower struck by lightning, where life forces tumultuous upheaval & often with considerable loss and discomfort to clear out what no longer serves in order to bring in necessary change.
This life has been a spectacular ride thus far & it doesn’t look like changing any time soon. I’m always looking forward to the next fascinating chapter.
Yesterday I did lunch at the Windsor Hotel in South Perth with girlfriends.
Having received the complete boxed set of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares for Christmas, I’ve been spending quite a few hours with Gordon over the last couple of days. I’m struggling here not to launch into a kind of mini food critique peppered with lots of ‘f’ word nouns, adjectives and adverbs Gordon Ramsay style, so I won’t tell you that the food was really very good, nor very quietly that although the waitress got two out of five main courses wrong, she was otherwise so attentive & friendly that we didn’t mind that much.
It was one of those lunches which was a little like limp lettuce despite the fact that there was one person at the table, the friend of a friend, who was out for a big afternoon & as the champagne flowed revealed to the party with unfortunate consistency approximately half hourly that she was minus underwear. As we were all straight women at the table, & most of us barely knew her, this held little interest for us and progressively less as the afternoon wore on.
Everybody else at the table was more than a little shellshocked from the demands of the whole December Christmas crescendo thing – & one came to the table from a sick bed the day before, so it was indeed an odd mix of the seasonally subdued & burned out by Christmas & Ms No Knickers out for a very very good time.
We moved to a table on the Mend Street verandah for another glass of champagne after lunch, a good position for someone like our knickerless luncheon companion looking for action really. Eye contact or more can be made with flirtatious gentlemen in nice cars stopped at the intersection of Mill Point Road & it would actually be possible to run out and stop cars, lol, were one so inclined.
In the end, the afternoon sun became a little intense for my liking which was my cue to exit & I tottered off back to the hills for a delicious late afternoon siesta leaving Ms No Knickers behind at the Windsor shamelessly & proudly self promoting her bare au natural bottom to all of those in earshot.
Not sure if I’ll have the pleasure of having lunch with the Ms Knickers free again, but if I were to find myself at such a gathering, I rather fancy jumping in with the whole of the rest of the table whoever they may be to steal her thunder – premeditated underwear status reports right up front – to cut her off at the pass so to speak before the first glass of wine.
“Hi. Great to meet you. Not a stitch. ”
“Me neither. ”
“Likewise.”
This has nothing at all to do with personal development. (Ok. Lol. Maybe it does. There’s is a lesson for me here somewhere under all of this Santa snow.)
I’m one of those people who find December draining. I really do. Sedate me December 1st until Boxing Day when it is all over.
I struggle with the whole Christmas joy thing. The crass commercialism gets to me as do the greedy expectations of the horribly spoiled. The whole obligation thing drives me nuts.
Why does everybody feel the desperate need to see me before or on Christmas Day when I don’t feel the need to see some of them at all, lol, & in many cases have successfully dodged seeing them for twelve months?
I could go on, but you get my drift.
The cynic in me finds Christmas a gruelling time of year, every aspect of it, though I find it interesting from the point of view of a snapshot of human behaviour.
Christmas seems to make certain people fine actors and actresses. Knives normally firmly implanted in backs become invisible in the spirit of the season of goodwill to all men, as people are forced together at Christmas tables with those they don’t much care for or flat out despise. Silly hats and crackers break the ice as the loathed and the loathing take turkey together with trimmings. It’s a funny business.
But here’s the thing , If I hold my hand on my heart, I have to admit that the need to express my festive season cynicism probably stems from that which has nothing to do with Christmas & more to do with that which is lost to me & reflected in every piece of tinsel & every Christmas light. Therein lies my lesson of course.
It’s the time of year when I get nostalgic, reflective & a little melancholy. I think about the year that has been, about some Christmases past & once I have successfully pulled the whole Christmas nightmare, (I mean “miracle”, lol) together, & finally get to sit alone with a quiet drink, I begin to think about the new year soon to arrive and what I want it to look like.
I confess, I am not immune to the emotional charge of that period around midnight on Christmas Eve when for just a little while, there seems to be some magic in the skies. One can almost hear the distant tinkle of bells, a bittersweet window for memories & reflection, for secret longing & yearning, and for deepest wishes to be made upon the stars.
But noone is happier than I when the sun rises on Boxing Day and it is all over for another year. Time then to whip out the vision board & spend some relaxing time in the lead up to New Year’s Eve on fine tuning desires to manifest for the year to follow.
I’ve been toying with actually posting something to this blank blog for some time now. You know how it is. The whole blocked writer thing.
I’ve had an impressive track record of success with self sabotage.
But I digress. I was telling you that this blog, even once it had been created, (and that was after months of existing only in my imagination) stared back at me for some time as nothing more than a blank page. A wordless would be blog.
Not just this blog either, but several other projects which were all motionless somewhere between brilliant idea & barest foundations.
Suddenly, one day, without warning, a shift. Epiphany.
Perhaps even, a life changing breakthrough.
A day where I did something . . different.
I stepped out of my cosy but still uncomfortable denial just long enough to ask myself exactly how many more days of my life did I plan to fritter away running my eternal all the reasons why not story to myself .
Foot poised, but, always finding an excuse to never quite take the step forward into the creative & life possibilities which await me. Sound familiar?
I was confronted with the fact that I could continue, change nothing, rest upon my excuse filled all the reasons why not story & confidently know that I would watch the rest of my life remain exactly the same, one day ticking into the next, ticking into the next, ticking into the next . . .
A slow death by procrastination.
A funny thing happened when I got honest with myself. I was confronted with the face of my self sabotage masking as writer’s block & procrastination, & I saw that it was in fact nothing but plain garden variety fear. Nothing special. Just fear of being known, seen, heard, visible, vulnerable, bared, authentic & accountable. Oh & I forgot. Lol. Fear of being successful.
The odd thing is that when I looked my fear in the face for what it was, it evaporated, for the larger part of me actually found all of the above. . . appealing.
My own take on it is that we step up when we are ready and in perfect timing. Whatever the project. Whatever the dream. I’ve just taken my sweet time to get here.
So, breaking out of the box & in the process of reinventing myself.
The blogging begins . . .
