Change your world
“I think you can be anything you wanna be.
Maybe in your world, Robert.
Doesn't happen that way in mine.
Change your world.” — The Equalizer
I’m back from a short break.
Nothing too fancy but, sadly, I’ve not come back rested, nor relaxed or feeling a great deal different to when I left a week ago.
Never mind.
Life rolls on.
The above quote is one I’ve brought back from my break; namely, it’s circling around my introspective mind.
It’s taken from the screenplay to the film, The Equalizer, starring Denzil Washington (who plays Robert McCall) and Chloë Grace Moretz (who plays Teri). I must have watched it a dozen times but this time round, during one of the quieter moments on holiday — there weren’t many, with too many people crammed into too small a space — these few words suddenly hit home.
What is my (your) world?
The same routine? The same faces? The same conversation? The same food? The same work pattern?
Perhaps it’s an age thing but for me at least, life, of late, has taken on a repeat to the point where my questioning has been honed to a very narrow focus, and it’s one with a bright, existential hue.
But I’m blessed, right?
A job.
A house.
A loving family
…
Then again, I can’t be the only person to wonder:
what is it (i.e. life) all about?
But of course, wallowing in that place makes me sound nihilistic or misanthropic or, god forbid, depressed.
I might be. I very might be but why shouldn’t we question why we’re here? I mean, in case it’s not already obvious, our permission wasn’t sought and neither were we given much choice as to our destiny, given the very predictable and I’d say ordinary cultural milieu that was foisted upon us.
Perhaps I’ve got this all wrong. All I need do is set myself some new goal, work my sorry ass off and Hey Presto!, life will take on new meaning.
Really. Is that it? One hill after another, only to start all over again? It sounds remarkably similar to the torpor that Sisyphus was forced to endure.
But I digress.
I know that at least part of the issue is being constrained to such a narrow bandwidth of daily activity. I need to stretch my earth-bound legs and start looking wide and far — or at least for now within Devon— for my cultural roots. I’m not hopeful that I’ll find much but I have this calling to find the spiritual bedrock that connects me to something other than the story I was forced to accept from my early days. This was, much like most of my generation, premised on the almost Victorian orthodoxy that all I need do, in order to get through life with as few scars as possible was to: keep my nose clean, do as I was told, get a job — any job would do — work until retirement (or until I dropped down dead) and then sail off into the sunset to enjoy whatever was left of my sorry little life. But I didn't buy it then, less still now, and yet, as much by omission as commission, I seemed to have ended up in that place and that causes me (still) no end of angst, not logically able to make sense of my situation.
And I’m sure this is why I’m drawn to the “…change your world” musing.
And so, right now, for however long the feeling/thoughts last, I know I’ve got to bear down on the question of “What is my world?” and write out with pen and paper an exegesis and consider what if anything I can or will want to change. This isn’t solution-mongering but more an exercise in peering over the liminal wall of what might be or could be with minimal effort.
If that sounds a bit oblique, and I’m sorry if it’s testing your patience, then I make no apology. I know how these things work and it would be easy as hell to say that currently I’m doing A, B and C but next week I’ll be doing, instead, D, E and F.
For me, it’s more a question of drawing a circle and placing inside of it everything that makes up my world and then, perhaps, looking for a question that might enable me to understand:
how it all got like this?
All pretty heavy I know but like I’ve said before about my writing, I very rarely know what I’m going to say, and today is no different.
As they say: onwards dear readers, onwards.
Take care.
Julian
