Tuesday, November 2, 2010

If something touches you... (Tabula Rasa)

My belief is if something can touch you you can relate to it. Not a wild-out-of-the-world idea right?

So sometimes it touches you so much you'd like to write about it.

Anyway, this I read in a book somewhere before. "How to Be Good" by Nick Hornby actually. It's a metaphor made by the protagonist of the story (may I say that this book is about a woman in a troubled marriage? With a spiritual healer which annoys her? How do I relate, you ask, but I verily do...somehow) on how her life with her husband was like a sheet of paper all filled out, and she wanted an affair not because she liked the other guy, or less because she wanted to feel the spark of "adventure" and "scandal" in her mundane life, but because she just wanted a new sheet of paper to draw on. To work on. Because the one she made with her husband was filled up all the way to the corners and she didn't like the picture.

(I read that book ages ago, that I still remember it says something, no?) But seriously, that metaphor gave me the chills. Because I felt it so, so deeply and easily. In other words, I knew exactly how she felt (well maybe not with the husband and two kids and spiritual healer, but the paper analogy...)


And I realized... for myself I think I am a chalkboard. For the longest time I've been having ideas, but I never enacted on any of them, for fear of how other people look at me or whatever. What I didn't know (or acknowledge... secret subconscious knowledge doesn't count?) was that Time was a tricky bastard and draws for you while you're not looking. Or trying. So when I looked on the sheet of paper that "could have been" I only think: well, I didn't draw that. I could have drawn what I wanted, only I didn't.

Well, I woke up and I realized that's really worse. Worse than not trying to draw. To create myself.

Thankfully I'm still (quite) young and now I want to fill out the paper how I want it. There's been a dozen metaphors on this: write the story of your life, model your own life (as in it's like clay?) and etc...
Sorry. Got carried away.

Anyway, I intend to snatch the Pen (or if I were a chalkboard, chalk) back from Time, and put him in his place, on a pedestal, but not on my back with a handed saddle. (That might have made no sense at all...)

...And that's all jolly good right? Well, so it is. Only... I still fear being too different. For example, recently I had an urge to speak (try to anyhow) in Shakespearian English. Why not? I thought, besides from the obvious, it'd at least force me to think thrice before I speak, and make me learn new vocabulary.
Well the obvious won out. But I couldn't hold my Muse... but that is mine secret.

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