I’ve taken a few days off work, taking advantage of the bank
holiday, and as always happens when I have a few days to spare with no real
plans I find myself with time to think. Not straight away. It takes a few days,
a few days of reading, of travelling around, perhaps, a few days of going to
the shops or looking out of the window and watching the rain or the clouds
passing by. Eventually those things run out of currency, and I’m left with
nothing to hinder the thoughts I try so hard to escape from. This time I've
decided to listen.
It is good to have time to think. The most creative times, I
find, are those times when you have no option but to think, where thinking is
something that springs upon you almost as an inevitability. Like in the shower,
or on a long walk. These are often the times I find the keenest insight into my
life and what I need to do with it. It is, perhaps, not surprising that so many
writers are often keen walkers.
When I’m at work, when I’m in my normal routine, I don’t
think. That doesn’t mean to say that I don’t think in my job, of course I do –
I have to – but what I have to think about is everything other than myself and
what I am doing. I can think about my work, I can think about my role and the
meaning of my role, I can think, hard, to solve a problem. I think a lot, but
that thinking is never reflection. On my way to and from work, I read. My free
time at home is limited, and I can easily fill it with administration, with my
kids, with housework or gardening or more reading. All this enables me to carry
on through my life without thinking about what I’m doing. This engenders a kind
of blindness, a lack of awareness and a failure to make real decisions. If I
ever challenge myself, I spin out that old trope ‘I’ve made compromises,’ which isn’t quite true because ‘compromise’
implies a conscious choice whereas I think it is truer to say that I’ve simply taken
the expedient route. This is nowhere else more apparent than in my reading
obsession. If I think about the next book and the next book I want to read,
then I don’t have to think about why I’m reading them or what it is that drives
this need, this need which enables me to avoid confronting the course my life
is taking. Reading, it appears, is a great source of distraction and I’m
reminded of one of my less successful university interviews, many years ago,
when my interviewer asked me why I read and I answered ‘escapism’. I didn’t get a place at that university, but I knew
myself better then it seems.
Not surprisingly, then, my thinking has started with my
relationship with reading, which I’ve blogged (briefly) about before. I am
reading more than ever. I have a list of books I want to read which is ever
growing, to the point that it is unachievable. I could buy a book every day,
add them to my stack and get around to reading them, one day. Part of this is
driven by my blog, but there’s something underlying it which I’ve been hiding
from and which, to my surprise, has been revealed to me when I’ve thought about
all the books which have particularly affected me. Those books were telling me
something, and giving myself some time to think has made this clear to me.
Those books have been Tracks, A Book of Silence, A Woman in
the Polar Night, Full Tilt. More recently, Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain –
which I will blog about shortly – all of these books have shook me to my core.
What is it about these books? All these women have taken a brave (or crazy)
step. They have all done something which seems impossible, whether it is
cycling across the world or walking across the Australian desert. All of these
women have actively sought isolation and in the course of doing so have
discovered who they were. This is something which I know absorbs me, as every
idea I have for a novel centres around this theme. All of these women have
sought an intensity of experience, they have risked their safety and suffered
social approbation for what these have chosen to do. Yet their experiences have
shaped them, they have enabled them to have a transcendent experience. What is
my obsession with transcendence if not a sign to myself that the way I am
living is simply not enough?
I am not unhappy with my life, in fact if I was unhappy it
would be easier to make a change. What I see, instead, is that I am living an
unchallenged life. My work is challenging, but not risky and it is easy to rise
to that kind of challenge and pretend it is enough. It is not enough. I need to
challenge myself, I need to confront myself and always remember that a
fulfilled life is not necessarily an easy life. I let myself off the hook too
often. I love reading, but there comes a point where you realise that the story
you want to read isn’t out there, but is already inside you waiting to be
released. I am ready, I think, to write my story. Actually it doesn’t matter if
I’m ready, I simply must. I need to stop living this middle-of-the-road life. I
have walked a path which has been opened up for me, instead of forging my own
way and I have let my dreams fall along the wayside, victims of expedience and
practicality.
My dream as a child was to be a writer, but along the way I
have created the excuses which have permitted me not to pursue my dream. I have
tinkered here and there but never taken it seriously. No one should give up
their dreams so easily. I need to read less (crazy as that sounds), blog a little
less and stop myself from filling those free hours with anything other than
writing activity. I need to stop buying books, because the story I need to read
is right here already. It will be a difficult read, and I won’t be able to read
it and move on to the next story in a matter of days; but it will be the best story
I will ever read and if I don’t nurture it from me now I’m condemning myself to
die an old, regretful woman. I’m determining, right here, that this is not
going to be the story of my life.
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