Singular Scene

So Singular in Each Particular

Itchy Feet

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I have quite a time line. If I look back on the last 25 or so years I can see a recurring pattern that manifests as a regular need to make some kind of fundamental change to my world; just to keep things, well… interesting I guess…

Let me show you what I mean…

1985 – Age 17 – Leave school to embark on an adventure working for ‘the bank’ – the BNZ. Yeah, I was yet to learn about REAL adventure…

1988 – Leave New Zealand for the wilds of the American East Coast… epic. epic adventure including near miss with a very, very dubious church (read cult), the worst job I’ve ever had… exploitation and eventually crossing the Atlantic to the UK and Europe… but this period of 3 years living independently abroad was pretty incredible… the great far outweighed the dreadful.

1991 – Leave Europe and return to New Zealand… and leave small town family home to move to Auckland.

1995 – Leave working in childcare environments and move into the marvellous adventure that is Customer Service which included a move from Auckland to Whangarei.

1999 – Leave New Zealand again this time just to cross the ditch for Sydney and a 3 year course in performance vocals.

2001 – Finish my course and start full time work again, this time as an assistant to a music director.

2004 – World shifted significantly as the MD left suddenly and I was left in limbo until I got rescued with a job as Web Princess in the IT department (cue finding my niche.. woah.. only took 20 years). During this period I took on further study and got my Bachelors Degree.

2009 – Leave my full time job and embark on full time study – which coincided with surviving on full time freelancing as well.

2012 – So, now what?

Yeah, that’s the tricky part… that’s the place I’m in right now… I’m so,so itchy for something new, I can barely sit still. But what? What new thing?

I’m completely happy with the work I’m doing, and the prospect of more study is unappealing, really… and for what? I’m not ruling it out in the future… but for now, I don’t see it. What I CAN see is geographic reorganisation… I could move house… that’s incredibly appealing… leaving the flat after 5 years would be a headache… but I’d be leaving the Naked neighbour – THAT would have to be a good thing.

The zone I’m starting to find myself in is the prospect of leaving Sydney. And this is all at once terrifying and exhilarating… so the questions become… what’s to keep me here? and where could I go?

The ties to Sydney are strong, and all about wonderful friends and people I’ve connected with over the years. But these are all that’s left, really. Once upon a time I’d have never considered leaving my church but discovering God as something/someone way bigger than a building means where I go He goes. The fact that the work I do can be done anywhere is incredibly liberating and makes me feel like, right now, the sky’s the limit. Sydney is gorgeous, I absolutely love it, but I’m starting to think about the fact that there are so many other possibilities… and if I had to outline my top 5… these are them.





Am I actually making plans? No, not yet, but I’m entertaining the idea, and truth to tell, living in one of these places has been a recurring thought for at least the last year – probably longer … so it’s not beyond the realm of possibility for things to change before too long.

However, for now, I’ve a number of projects on the go that will preclude anything happening immediately, but I have to say… flirting with the idea of this kind of change is thrilling… feels like the sky’s the limit…

But, for now… to entertain me while I’m entertaining these thoughts.. tell me.. where would YOU go?

 

Two Stones

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Black & White Rocks

A Jewish Rabbi once said
A person should carry two stones in a pocket at all times,
On one should be inscribed
“i am but dust and ashes” and on the other
“for my sake the world and all that is in it was created”
and each one should be used as needed.

I have been pretty much captivated by this thought for most of the week because it seems as though everywhere I look, people are holding on to the wrong stone, listening to the wrong internal voices.  They’re not the only ones… I do it too.

I wasn’t a popular kid. I had a circle of friends – mostly other good kids from youth group. I wasn’t a rebel (though I did experiment with tobacco in the school grounds one time),  I was never much good at breaking rules and the popular kids seemed better at that than me (short skirts, anyone?).

Yeah, not popular.

When you live in that zone you blossom at every bit of attention from someone in the popular crowd even though deep down you know it’s stupid to care that much about it.  When you live in that zone you tell yourself that the reason you’re not popular is that you actually aren’t that special and you don’t deserve it…

Then you leave the school yard, and you find yourself in a much bigger social circle, and while the challenges of navigating a new social scene remain similar it’s a little easier to find your niche in a different crowd.  It takes a while, because the underlying self talk still gets in the way, still sabotages you from time to time…  But as you get older you realise that everything is meaningless… particularly where it relates to what people think and you just put your head down and do your thing, you’re much more comfortable being exactly who you are and the people who don’t get that can go get jumped on, because really… who cares?  Maybe you’ve started to figure out just which stone to apply when.

I feel like I have.

So fast forward to now, and here I am standing up in front of a crowd, they’re enjoying what I have to say, and they approach tentatively afterwards to talk about what they’ve heard… and it’s then that I hold the stone that calls me dust and ashes. Because this distance between a speaker and a crowd is bullshit. This ‘famous’ thing is meaningless and it isn’t fame… or popularity, or being in demand that’s any kind of important… and while it’s nice to be in demand let’s be real, it is here today and gone tomorrow. It is meaningless*.

But then there are times, when I’m standing on the precipice of something awesome, when there are new possibilities opening and new  friendships, a change, a challenge, an opportunity and if, while I stand there I’m holding the ‘dust and ashes’ stone I’ll be quite likely to shrink back… thinking that there could be no possible reason something this good, this scary, this massive could be being laid out for me.

Which is also bullshit… because, ‘the world and all that is in it was created for me’ – and why, on earth, should I consider that I am undeserving?  I’m no less deserving than you… or the person next to you. I am fearfully and wonderfully made, and so are you. You deserve EVERYTHING, love, laughter, passion, adventure and joy.  I deserve it. We all do.

And yet we still tell ourselves that we are but dust and ashes and we sabotage such things before they even begin.

Which stone are you holding right now?

And Is it the right one?

 

 

 

 

 

* I am at risk here of going off on a whole tear about this stupid media fuelled obsession with fame – and all these people who are no more important than we are that we look up to, that we freak out if we see them in the street and we clam up if they talk to us.  How we react in the company of such people says way more about us than them… and those of them who hold the ‘i am but dust and ashes’ stone who are the ones we should aspire to mimicking… not those who wear fame thinking that the world and all that it contains was created for them…

Where is she now?

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She was a really quiet girl, meek, actually, and she always came across a little as if she couldn’t quite believe people had enough faith in her to do her job.

She did, and well, dilligent, even.

I’ve never met anyone whose self esteem had taken such a hammering.  She may not have seen it in herself but she was one of the most courageous people I’ve known.  You have to be to beat down anorexia.  It’s part of her her history, and one she was encouraged to tell – as others often do, in church, to wow the crowds at the goodness of God. So she delivered, when asked to, a testimony of how her faith had made her well, and while she wasn’t exactly articulate, the pictures more than made up for the faltering words even though they were terrifying, so close to death, but thankfully, so long ago.

She worked a few cubicles away from me, and she worked in accounts. Ridiculous hours, fielding the disgruntled calls from creditors, calling in debts from the debtors.

She always said she was fine if she was asked, she turned down offers of help… not that I’d be any good at helping out with accounts… but at least I’d have been company.

She came to my house for tea, I thought she may have become my friend.

But then… she broke.

She walked into the boss’ office and quit, then walked out of the building, the church and out of my life, turning her back even on her closest friends, obviously wounded and protecting herself from further harm by withdrawing completely.

Church is supposed to be a place of solace.

It wasn’t for her.

I send the occasional text, assuming, perhaps wrongly, that her number is the same, that maybe my messages don’t just go out into the ether, maybe one day she’ll reply.

I ask after her in circles that go beyond our former workplace, just in case someone’s seen her, heard from her. They rarely have.

I’ve since left that workplace, that church too.  I’d like for her to know.  I’d still like to be her friend.

I wonder where she is.

I wonder if she’s ok.

[Aus Blog] Con Air

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I’ve been a blogger for a long time.  Since 2oo4. How long is that? Lemme see.. Almost 7 years.

7 years.

It’s probably fair to say that this blog lives in a very quiet corner of the internet.  I have my faithful band of loyal readers (you know who you are) who have been following along, many of you, for all of those 7 years.  I have a few family members who pop up in the ‘visits’ from time to time to check in and see what I’m up to but given the constraints of the last couple of years of full time work/study and, heck, full time life, this blog, hasn’t get a great deal of attention, (and by that I mean from ME!)

So, I am actually kind of surprised to find myself where I am right now, in another quiet corner, this time in a Sydney Hotel filling in time between the last session of the Aussie Bloggers Conference and the dinner dance.  I am of course, completely free to claim the title Aussie blogger, though the scant attention paid might make a liar of me, but I haven’t to date, really connected a whole lot with the “Aussie Bloggers” community and after the great collection of people and stories I’ve heard today I’m horrified that I’ve left it so long!

I tweeted the above during the course of the afternoon as I was listening to the amazing stories these women (and men) told, of pain, of loss, of betrayal, of kids, of husbands, and even of anxiety, I was struck that the awesome thread that followed through all of those is of love and support, of friendship and of camaraderie that they’ve discovered in the blogosphere.

I think it’s true, people were made for connection and while the way we connect has changed through the years, the fact remains that even though we may have ‘met’ or discovered each other online, on twitter, via our blogs there really is nothing that compares to having real life faces and hands and hugs to put skin on the names that have come across my twitter or RSS feeds from time to time.

So if you’re visiting from the #ausblogcon drop a comment in the box to say Hi. And if you’re an Aussie Blogger who wonders if you’re missing out by not being here… make sure you get a place for the 2012 conference.  This thing is only going to get bigger!!