Day 1 of my blog

Eight years ago just before I moved from Malaysia to the UK, I had a plan. I would contact UK magazines and/or newspapers within the first three months and offer my services as a writer. Eight years on, I still haven’t done it, but am throwing myself now into a writing exercise to build up confidence, and hopefully a voice: a blog.

There are a few reasons why I haven’t done it before. A blog seems indulgent. There is no editor to vet what I write, the language nor the content. It’s little more than a glorified journal. There’s a risk of there being less effort put into a blog than an article, so it may be long and tedious to read for others. On the plus side, because it’s more spontaneous, I won’t agonize over getting that extra piece of information needed to form a full picture, as I did when I wrote. I like to be thorough, and in a way it has slowed me down tremendously, as I was always nervous I might have missed an important facet to what I was researching. I’m the same when making life decisions: I need to explore every single path before testing properly the one I finally chose. Ask people around me, it drives them crazy.

Also, journalists notoriously write about things they don’t really know much about. Partly because it’s the discovering new things that attracts them to the job, partly because as an onlooker you never have the insight of a doer. So I used to feel I needed to do justice to the subject I was researching and speak to as many “doers” in the field as possibly to try and imagine what it felt like.

With a blog, I can un-ashamedly state that it’s all about ‘me, me, me”, and therefore warn readers (who will be…. well, hopefully my mum might read!) that I’m just talking about what I, very limited human, know, and my take on it.  It’s a personal exercise to define what I think, how I feel about things, …who I am. I just listened to Grayson Perry’s ‘Reith lectures’, and he states that art has enabled him to find himself. In the process of losing himself into the making of art, he has found who he is. I believe anything creative does that. Whether it’s gardening, cooking, drawing, bringing up children, writing. Everyone can be creative in their jobs, not just ‘artists’. That’s what Satish Kumar said when he came to open our ‘out of nature’ sculpture exhibition last year: we must all listen to the artist within ourselves, and honor it.

And the lessons life has for us can be found in every trade, sport, and occupation, and it’s probably all the same lessons, regardless of pay and status. As long as you can be free to do those things in a way that suits you, that makes your soul sing and feel happy. Every cook has their own style. Every sports person has their own style. Every manager has their own style. Depending on who they are, the energy around them is completely different. The outcome is completely different. Everyone changes the world around them in completely different ways. And only because what they create is so personal, so related to who they are deep down as people. And it’s all beautiful and all valid. We need the obvious ones who obviously help and heal: doctors, teachers, firemen… But we also need the guy in Bromyard with a passion for Star Wars who built a quirky museum full of Star Wars Memorabilia. And we need the wonderful paper maker in Brilley, who spent 40 years making paper and can make paper out of any plant, as if she was trying to get the essence out of what the plant is.

I suppose what I’m doing is justifying my need to write. What else can I write that hasn’t been written before? How many more uninformed articles does the world need? Well, actually, we’re all trying to make sense out of this wondrous, mysterious world, each in our own ways, and if this is my way, what can I do about it? That’s what rocks my boat. Maybe something in me feels it’s worthier being a doctor or a teacher, but it doesn’t resonate with me as much as writing.

And writing is about trying to find the truth in things, their essence. I believe, probably very naively, that actually everything is part of a whole, and that differences can be minimized if both parties in a disagreement agree to listen to the other. It’s difficult because it means accepting to maybe lose a bit of one’s own position, the ego hates that. It’s much easier to be a proud cockerel and shout louder.  In the long rum, there’s more harmony when one quietens the ego a bit, and listens. Miraculous events have happened that way, such as the US Jewish lady whose father was killed in a bombing in Israël by a Hamas militant. She researched who he was as she couldn’t understand why her father had to die when he had no political stance against the Palestinians, became familiar with him and actually became friends before she could tell him he’d shot her father. He acknowledged her pain. It didn’t bring her father back, but it did help bring healing.

Phew. This came out fast and strong. It had been brewing for a while, I suppose. Now, I have to be brave and accept someone else might read this and see a bit of my soul. Might think it’s self conscious, righteous, earnest, all that stuff. But hell, if this is me, I’m not going to apologize about it for ever. I am who I am, I’ll just have to go with it and hope for the best. 🙂