What choice(s) do we have?

hell is a closed door
when you’re starving for your goddamned art
but sometimes you feel at least like having a
peek through the
keyhole.

young or old, good or bad,
I don’t think anything dies as slow and
as hard as a
writer. — Charles Bukowski, hell is a closed door, The Last Night of the Earth Poems

Currently, I’m listening to a wonderful book written by Charlotte Wood called Stone Yard Devotional. It’s a beautiful story of a lady who leaves her life behind — all of it — and joins a nunnery; I still haven’t worked out her age but I think she’s in her mid-60s. Anyhow, there is a passage in the book where she talks about her life as a series of rooms replete with their own psychic furniture, and it got me wondering about my own life and the white walls of normalcy; or to put it less prosaically, how they’ve all been decorated with the same veneer, namely one where work — dull, boring work — was the primary colour (I was never convinced, still aren’t that I was doing the ‘right’ thing).

As a child, perhaps as early as I can remember, I always had this unerring sense that I was here for a reason and that I would make something of my life. (I suspect we all have a sense that happenstance is not the first order of the day but something more uplifting of the soul.) Trouble was, the dominant narrative that I had to navigate was one where I was expected to grow up as fast as possible, not act my age and find employment toot suite.

And I did; and even though I was hamfisted in my attempts to get on, climb the greasy pole and be the best version of myself, I still thought, naively, that my other self would somehow emerge from the wreckage of my work/life travails.

But of course it never did; and that remains the case to this day.

I chide myself daily for what might have been (please listen to this wonderful song called Regrets by Messrs. Jenkinson and Hoskins) and, much less frequently now, if at all, secretly believe that even though I’m in the third Act of my life, there’s still time.

Then again, another part of me accepted a long time ago that if I had a calling or whatever the marketing maestros call it, it would have emerged/manifested long before now.

And that means, or so it seems, I’ll be walking the corridor of ennui-infused work for a long time to come — retirement will only come at the very end — trying a few more handles, walking through a few more rooms and closing doors on my life.

If this sounds, as I’m sure it does, melancholic or morose then I make no apologies. This is my lot, and perhaps I always knew that this is how it would turn out.

Anyhow, it’s Sunday. A time for (I hope) quiet contemplation and an opportunity to explore a bit more of my locus in quo.

Blessings, and much love.

— Julian