Part of growing up is deciding which dreams to keep chasing. I was thinking about this last night as I watched La La Land. On the heels of it scooping up seven (7!) Golden Globes, I went in prepared to enjoy it. Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, musical, banter… what’s not to like? And yes, it was magical.
Carl’s been sitting in the waiting room for the past forty minutes, staring at the framed photograph on the opposite wall. The picture is of a man climbing a mountain, his back to the camera, his hand outstretched. Just out of the camera frame is another figure – all you can see is their hand, reaching down, towards the climber.
Caddy was the first to notice that the circus was in town – although nobody ever paid attention to Caddy, because she was only six.
It was the peanut shells that tipped her off. “Daddy,” she said. “What are these?” Her father cracked one eye open, said, “Peanuts,” and went right back to snoring in his recliner.
A couple of weeks ago, I finished up corporate work and started my ikigai-yay gap year (as I like to call it). For some, this seemed like an out of the blue decision but for me, it was something which had been building for a while. I knew I was extremely lucky in loving the company and the people I worked with, but over time I felt like something was missing. The complete freedom and opportunity to explore my creativity, something I don’t believe I have ever done in an intentional and personal way before. So, supported by my wonderful husband, I took the plunge and decided to have a gap year to find my Ikigai.
If you were here, I would call you out to come see it for yourself.
Because you aren’t here, it’s left to me to put into words all that I felt, just now, when I walked outside and saw how incredibly bright the moon is tonight.
This is how to find true north:
first find all other norths false,
littered with rubble from fallen idols,
all that glitters is pyrite; pyrrhic; permeable.
At this precise moment… where am I?
On a train, a bus? Out with friends? Coming home? Can I honestly say that any of those are true, not in the literal sense, but true in the way that really matters?
What is the colour of my seat? What material is it made from? What pattern? Who am I with? Where did they go? What was the last story that they told me, really told and not just through a veneer, a filter, which I liked from only a metre away.
While setting up this site, Steph created a placeholder entry for our blog, entitled: ‘last-test-post-then-it’s-time-for-the-real-stuff.’ It’s unlikely she intended for that to be the inspiration for our first blog post, and yet… it sums up why we’re here.
Because it is time for the real stuff.