This is me right now. I’ve delved into my poetry, selected a couple of the older pieces of work, tweaked them, and now I want to write something inspiring and fascinating, dynamic and motivational. Except I have no ideas, am bored witless, would need the Chippendales and a magnifying glass to become even mildly interested, and feel motivated to do sod all. Ugh.
Flick a switch
I’m not the only writer who wishes they could flick a switch, set the muse to ‘on’, and dash out 10,000 perfect lines of the best writing ever written, yet can’t think of anything more interesting than a cucumber.
For me this is a great metaphor for life, you think when you’re young that you’re going to live a crazy-fascinating life full of travel, good food, interesting friends, and numerous challenging hobbies. Instead you land up sitting on the sofa after a hard day of boredom, watching a film you know you’ve watched before but can only remember snippets, wondering how the heck you got here and where’s the switch to set your life to ‘on’.
Unrealistically Real
People love to tell you that you’re being unrealistic if you crave an interesting and active life, but that’s only because culturally we’re programmed into the birth, school, work, house, children, retirement path.
Dreamers are regularly shot down with scoffing remarks, ridiculed for having an imagination, laughed at for believing in more. But only because those doing the criticising have forgotten their dreams. Yes our parents and other elders had dreams, then they got trapped on the Ferris wheel of life, and convinced themselves that dreaming and believing wasn’t the province of grown ups.
Yet the real truth is that life has a great deal to offer if you go out and find out what’s available. You don’t have to follow any proscribed path. And whilst it is handy to pay your bills and be sensible with money, that doesn’t actually preclude having some adventures.
Here’s a question
What were your dreams?
If you tell me they were to sit in an office in front of a computer for 8 hours a day 5 days a week, I won’t believe you. I certainly never even considered that, I was just forced into it by circumstances and the decisions of my parents.
How did you get where you are? (Okay so that’s two questions but we’re learning to rebel aren’t we?)
It’s too late
This is another misconception. You may not be able to do the things you dreamed of when you were younger, but you can live your dreams.
You may be in work and unable to do that world tour, but on the other hand you can plan it and do a bit at a time.
You may not be in a band, but you can still join one, or create a band yourself. Wrinklies Rock? You may not be a multi award winning singer, but you can still join a choir and sing. Susan Boyle isn’t your typical huge star, launching on Britain’s Got Talent at an advanced age, but she kept her dream close and acted on it when she could. Brave, wonderful, inspiring, woman.
It’s never too late if you decide it’s not. Life is about decisions not about following the herd or listening to social opinion. Make decisions about your own life, decide who you want to be and what you want, and then take action.
It’s too late for my husband and I to move to Europe, we have cats and would have to feel confident in a foreign language when dealing with vets, but it’s not too late to visit the many countries we would like to have lived in. In fact it’s easier, as making a decision between Sweden, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, you get the picture, would have been impossible.
So the fact that we’ve left it late actually makes life easier, we can see them all but we don’t have to move. Moving house is bad enough, moving countries doesn’t bear thinking about. Besides, he’s already done that to the tune of 13,000 miles.
There you go, that’s what’s happened when you’re bored and just start doing something, an idea appears and you land up inspiring yourself!
To your happiness and optimistic thinking
Deb xx
Deb Hawken 