Death of a Salesman

I am continually amazed at how much I’m learning each day. How much there is still to learn about the ways of the world and myself. It never ceases to baffle me how this process can never be a finite one. No matter where I’ll be, what I’ll do, how old I’ll be: there will always be something to learn. If it weren’t like this, mankind would not have been fuelled to excel. Motivation would not have been present and major theories and inventions would have died in the desk drawers.

I’ve learned so far that the main aim in life for everyone should be finding what they’re good at. It’s a strenuous process, but wholly rewarding at the end because everyone is good at something, and that only needs to surface. I’ve found writing. Modesty and an imminent threat of big headedness prevents me from saying I’m good at it, but I’m trying. Writing’s a craft that needs to be practised and polished. I love the craft of it. I love the potency of creation. I love the phoniness of it as well. I love the fact that the self can get lost in the haze of glamorous words and leave the writer nakedly exposed at the same time. This duality brings the craft its amazing power and the craftswoman’s hunger for appreciation, for each word offers the writer on a plate and therefore makes the creative vessel lead to unthinkable vulnerability. What I write is not me, but what I write is only me. If you look closely, you can see me bare all. But then comes the paradox. I possess a type of creativity that can only be called boxed in, or limited. I work well with limits, I respond to restraints and no matter how much my mind wonders, I still arrive back at the problem of lack of motivation, willpower and a fenced off scope of imagination. I’m creative but within the city limits. I’m something a little and something else a lot. I have to work out how to balance this and at the same time try to enhance my creative output. And I arrive back at the aforementioned path of nihilism and complacency running through my veins. A helpless state of being.

Then there’s love. I’ve learnt a lot about love too. After seven years, I have finally gotten it into my head that there’s two kinds of love. I’ve finally realised that the first kind, the one that everyone wants and should experience at least once, the kind that leaves you gasping for air, is the one that will leave you with scars much deeper than you expected. The kind of love that’s pure passion and blind and flaming and makes you want to hang from a trapeze, makes you travel far and wide, makes you cry and cry was never meant to last. That kind of love was meant to teach, but was never meant to last. That kind of silly passion and burning desire, heathen longing was only ever thrown down at us mortals from above for amusement. But we took it too seriously and some ended up waiting seven years: “for that kind of love, that kind of intensity surely can last. It can surely reach across oceans and lands. It can surely be re-ignited with just one glance”. And the heart has such power over the head. The heart can murmur soft words so it drowns out the sensible screaming of the head. I love the heart for having the faith and I respect the head for having the courage, but most of all I salute the compromise of the two in showing that love can be calm and gentle, mature and sensible, comforting and convincingly passionate. Love can be all this and a million more things.

At least now, my hopes are not in the sky and my heart’s not like grape gum on the ground. This train of thought I will continue because there’s far more to tell…