Dude, have you seen my shades?
I was watching a recording of a work meeting last night, and a colleague said, “After a while, a new pattern will become a rut and you’ll have to pivot again.” It’s not exactly original new-age corporate wisdom, but it’s refreshing to hear someone say it as a natural progression of their argument, rather than a regurgitation of something written on the office walls. Not that any of us are working from an office.
It’s carrying some Aaliyah energy: “If, at first, you don’t succeed, brush yourself off and try again…”
It got me thinking. I remember when that song was hitting the radio, and I liked it — it felt kind of spiritual and ethereal to my seven-going-on-eight-year-old self. I remember being outside by the boat, getting ready to go down the sounds, thinking not long after, about how she’d been killed in a plane crash.
I remember that playing on my mind — not for the fact that she was 22, because I still considered that to be a pretty full and well-lived adult life at the time — but because it was a period when the chilling fringes of this world’s harsh realities first began to brush against my young mind — alongside the likes of Jack the Ripper (though, the song I associated with that theme was somehow Maxi Priest’s ‘Close to You’) and the inherent emptiness of what it means to exist.
Just a few years earlier, when my grandfather had passed, it’s not just that I didn’t know about the, shall we say, depth or profundity of, shall we say, darkness, it’s that I couldn’t even conceptualise how to, or what on earth I might be looking for, or why I’d be looking for/find it in the first place.
And so, by the age of seven, I’d at least begun to figure it out.
Which is interesting, because even now, in my 30s, I’m exposed to much more (insidious/darker/chilling) realities than what plane crashes and Jack the Ripper meant to me back then: A lifetime spent building dreams, abandoned at the eleventh hour; the injustice of a nation of people suffering through weaponised starvation when I have food on my plate; intended words never spoken, actions never taken, only for their potential for impact to be permanently removed from your past, present and future. Meanwhile, some wanker’s out here puttering on about how X group of people doesn’t deserve rights and Y group of people shouldn’t live in this country (the arrogance of which being a clear sign of having lived a life with absolutely zero genuine affliction or inconvenience to strap your brain-dead skull with any humility).
And as we get older, or wiser, or more exposed, or something to do with progression rather than regression, the palette of life and experience we encounter become not only about the colours, but shades. Which is weirdly enriching, if you think about it in the sense of being a painter, that you have new depth to add to your paintings.
