the thingyness of things

i must have been thinking about this for years. Thingy-ness. Physical matter. Reality. (The only word, according to Vladimir Nabokov, which always needs to be enclosed in inverted commas.)

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Ok. Now that i'm off Facebook, i actually have more time to think my own thoughts and do my own stuff. Maybe this will actually go somewhere good after all.

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so as to achieve ...

i just saw something on the workplace lounge bookshelf that really made me want to laugh: a bright orange booklet entitled "Achieving Happiness In Singapore". Oh my high-achieving country. It's enshrined in our national pledge, this achieving of happiness: ".... so as to achieve happiness, prosperity, and progress for our nation." We must be the only country in the world to have the audacity to set ourselves such a goal. Even the Americans only "pursue" happiness.
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light and shadow

More and more, i'm coming to see how everything, just everything, is both light and shadow, inextricably intertwined, so that you can't have the light without the shadow. i remember having a conversation with a friend and former colleague once -- my former boss at the first workplace once called her a "sixty-year-old cancerous Canadian" (!), and we were talking about something (i can't remember what), and she looked at me and said, "The older i get, the more i see that everything is both good and bad, there's always ...." -- and at this point she made a gesture with both hands that indicated how hard it is to weigh up things, how everything comes with gains and tradeoffs.
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Of course i knew this all the while, intellectually. But maybe it takes time for this head-knowledge to become heart-knowledge. i guess if a 60+ year-old cancerous Canadian can speak of only just coming to perceive this deeply, i can't be doing too badly.
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potteresque

It's interesting -- my current colleagues tend to be the sort of people who will go where their friends go when it comes to choosing a workplace, or even choosing work projects. Not because they're sheep who like following the herd, but simply because friendships, and the social support that friendships offer, matter to them so much. In the previous workplace, people didn't give so much weight to human relationships -- they tended to go where the money was, or where they stood the greatest chance of advancing their careers.
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Actually, i think this is the only workplace i've ever been in where people choose friends over achievement. It's not that my colleagues are not smart or motivated -- in fact they are highly-motivated and manage to have fun while doing excellent work. But relationships matter a lot. It makes for a very warm atmosphere. Hufflepuff-ness.  i like.

Edit:

Ok, to be more precise -- it's not quite 'go where their friends go'. Obviously it's not that clear-cut. But i think it's fair to say that the social support network is something that they definitely give quite a bit of weight to in their decisions about, for example, whether to change jobs or stay on somewhere. Having friends around makes enough of a difference to persuade them to stay in a place where the conditions are not ideal; but the moment one person leaves, then that frees other people to leave as well.
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bavarian beer

It's a bit of a bother, being alcohol-allergic when you actually like the taste of alcoholic drinks. Right now i'm just longing for a nice cold Rädler -- okok i know what a wimpy drink that is, but it really was one of the things i liked most about Germany. It's been a stressful few weeks, and i could so do with some nice Rädler, served in a beer-garden with the Alps in view, right about now.

In other news. i think it's gonna be a long time before i get to savour Bavarian beer in Bavaria again. It's ok. Maybe in a year or two, once i've mastered enough conversational German to order food properly in those tiny Bavarian village restaurants, i'll just go back there, stay in a nice B&B, and spend a week or two there just writing, eating, drinking, and hiking.  Oh God for more white asparagus and hearty meats. And mountains and forests and lakes and rivers. And Rädler. That'd be nice. 
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thanks, but no thanks

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i'll take the Years Of Boring Hard Work (have been doing it all along so no big deal), and maybe the Loyal Pet. i won't be writing this if not for the Moment Of Self-Discovery. The rest ... i think i'll pass. :)
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retrospective

Ok, let's see if i can keep this up and make it to, 10? post-titles starting with 'r'? Ready, set, go.
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Anyway. Thinking about This Writing Thing. i've been doing it for about 2 to 3 years now. It's been ... interesting.
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Good things: lots. Meeting lots of cool and interesting people, especially overseas. Seeing, even living for a while in, some cool new places. Testing myself by doing things i've never done before. Learning that, when i have something urgent to say, i actually have the ability to say it well, in writing that does speak to people. The joy that comes with doing what i love well, being affirmed for it by people-who-know, and knowing somehow that it does make a difference to the lives of a few.
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Bad things: enough. More than enough. The instability and uncertainty that come with the way i've been trying to make space and time for writing in my life. The isolation and loneliness that come with, firstly, a vocation that demands so much solitude, and secondly, prioritising writing in a society where people who make such a choice are few and far between. The considerable financial sacrifice that means i have to live frugally, much more frugally than the majority of my friends -- and the consequent difference in lifestyles that does have an impact on my social life. The noise and nastiness that come with being amongst a community of deeply-broken people, all acting out their brokenness in their various and different deeply-broken ways. (It's sad, but true: the people who feel the need to write -- and i don't count myself among them -- are the ones who are really wounded in some way or another. Normal happy psychologically-healthy people don't need to write. They may want to, they may be good at it, but it's only a need for the deeply-screwed-up.) The values-conflicts that i keep experiencing because people in the writing circles almost invariably have values that are quite different from mine.
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See. The paragraph for Bad Things is so much longer than the paragraph for Good Things. Not that paragraph length, the quantity of words, should be any indication, of course. But still. But still.
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i think, the long and short of it is, to continue to prioritise writing in my life the way i've been doing, would be bad for me. i will still write: the calling was real, and i don't doubt it. And 'wasted talent' is too much of a pet peeve for me to give up this thing that i believe God has gifted me with. i still do have things to say, and i still want to say them well. But to continue putting writing at the centre of my life, at the expense of everything else -- no. i can't say it's been really good for me, and i'd be a fool to continue down this road. So the task now is to find some way to make time and space for the writing, without pushing everything else aside in the process. To find a way to write, without necessarily doing all the peripheral stuff that comes with doing it as a quasi-career-(that-doesn't-even-pay).
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Ok then. Big Decision made, and this will pave the way for other decisions after it.
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recalibrating

Goals can change when circumstances -- the factors that led to those goals being set in the first place -- change. Maybe there's something to be said for throwing yourself into something even if you don't feel ready for it; wait too long, and the surrounding circumstances may change so much that it becomes impossible to throw yourself in, even if you wanted to.

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But i've never been one to jump into things i don't feel ready for. i will give myself wholeheartedly, 120%, to something, once i'm sure i can handle it and it's what i want. But to make promises -- to others and to myself -- without any assurance of being able to keep those promises, is just not a game i play.

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So if those are the parameters that define the way things are for me, i guess it's time to accept that things have changed, and what i wanted originally may no longer be attainable -- and perhaps not even that -- without tremendous risk and sacrifice that will probably be more bad for me than good. i have no intention of running the risk of crash-and-burning my entire life in pursuit of some far-off, unlikely goal that has a good chance of never even materialising in the first place.

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i guess the thing to do now, is to figure out what remains do-able and reasonable from the original goals i'd set myself. And to figure out a way of life that will be good for me, while making it possible for me to still do the things i want to do, and more importantly, be the person i want to be.

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reading

One thing i'm really thankful for, is the ability to read and appreciate books again. For many years, i simply couldn't read -- not literally, of course, my job requires me to read. But i'd lost the stamina to read long novels; anything over 200 pages was too much to handle. (Hence the Coetzee novels  -- they're short.) And i'd lost the pleasure in reading that i used to have, the pleasure that had made me want to make books and literature my life-work in the first place. Even after i started writing in earnest, there were times when i simply didn't find reading particularly enjoyable at all.
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i'm not sure what the problem was, really -- whether it was just a matter of me not finding the right books, or whether i was too exhausted by Life to be able to give much energy to anything else, let alone something as dispensable (!) as reading. But now that's over with. And i'm starting to take pleasure in, nah, more than that, look forward to reading again. Staying in on a quiet weekend to read a good book is now something i actually very much want to do.
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On the reading list for the next few months:
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1. Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey On Foot
2. Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor Of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
3. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
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Also, is it just me, or does reading slow down as one gets older? i used to read so fast. Now, it's almost like i find myself sounding each word in my mind, so that silent-reading takes place at almost the same speed as reading-aloud. My excuse is that nowadays, reading is a kind of dialogue for me -- because i'm reading mostly nonfiction, i'm not just taking in what the author is saying, i'm thinking through it as i go along. In the past, i read mostly fiction, and because i read for plot more than anything else, it was easy to just speed through the text, only really thinking about it if i had to write a review or essay. Also, now that i've started writing myself, i'm thinking a lot more about how writers write, and not just what they write. And all this takes time.
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reality

Reality. Is a Thing. It has these contours that cannot be moved, no matter the tone of light that surrounds them. Some things just are; and no amount of positive thinking can wish them away.
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