It’s my last day of rest before I begin working on my project, which I’ll be releasing next month. I’m a little scared to be honest, it’s the first time that I’m offering something like this. I think that it takes a little courage to ask for a bit of money in exchange for something you’ve done… it’s like saying to everyone: here, in my opinion I have something of value to offer. You give the world the right to agree or disagree with you as you stand alone in a corner with your creation and wait. It seems a daring and silly thing to do, and I ask myself often: why am I doing something that requires a level of confidence I don’t really have? Walking around the streets this morning. I remembered my answer.
The sun rises at 4.45am here, as such by mid-morning it already feels hot. It’s this heat that brings so many images from my past to mind. An image of me sitting by a window when I was in highschool. During class after the first morning break, when the teacher went on about things I wasn’t listening to, I would look out and feel the heat of the midday sun on my skin. Sometimes I’d see people in the street, riding their bicycle or walking by. Real people, I thought. Outside of the fakeness that an organised day at school felt like. I always wondered what those people were doing? …the ones outside of the house during the middle of the day.
They weren’t in an office or being swallowed up by some institution, they were outside walking around with their own plan. It was at that moment I promised myself that I would be one of those people, walking around during the day, taking control of my life instead of someone controlling it for me. It turns out, that this was the first of a series of promises to myself that I would break. We all do, I suppose. I later went to University, which gave me the freedom in the day I was seeking… however it was all for the purpose of getting myself trapped once again within an institution. An office. A little room with a computer in front of me, listing demands and expectations about who I was to be that day.
I remember when I was working as a lawyer, I would do the same thing I did when I was 14 years old. I’d look out the window, but this time I couldn’t feel the midday heat through the double glazed glass of the ten story office building along the river. But I’d still see people walking by. What were they doing? A few years later, and I would take the plunge myself. I’d live in Singapore for four years and bounce around a lot, taking jobs that started in the afternoon, working on my first writing projects and going to school again. I was not the person I wanted to be… but walking around in that hot humid air, the air so similar to a Japanese summer, I got a taste for it. A taste for what life might be like if I could work for myself, and I liked it. But I didn’t want to take responsibility for learning about the difficult things. The money, the obligations, the self discipline… I would need to be backed into a corner first.
And it just so happened that the little corner I trapped myself into was in France, altogether not a bad place to be trapped in. It was winter, the heater in my room was up so high that my little box of an apartment became as hot as a tropical island. And I sat there, I sat down and faced my fears and learned what I had to learn. I took the long path as we all do, but finally, I am here. Deciding that I will spend the rest of my life doing what it is that I truly love. And also deciding that what I truly love is something that gives value to others too, value that some people in this world will be ready to spend their money, time and effort on. So here goes. I’m about to be that person walking around in the midday sun, who I was always looking at from behind the glass.
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