I like to put things into little boxes with labels: here’s my work, my art, my kitchen spices. But life isn’t really like that. Everything in enriched, strengthened, connected.
Sometimes the lines blur despite our will to control things. Three years ago I had a climbing accident and for the better part of 40 months, I had been in and out of physio, trialling drugs, herbs and walking aids.
Since October 2020, I would wake up at around 2am with pain emanating from my right hip, it felt like broken glass was grinding it’s way through my organs. Emergency rooms doped me up and dismissed me. Other specialists diagnosed me with their expertise: weird digestive bugs, stomach ulcers, food intolerances, tight muscles. My gyno recommended a women’s health physio and Jo, with her relaxing demeanour, diagnosed a pelvic floor that couldn’t chill out and was causing some nerve damage, due to my ankle injury. It’s a right royal knock-on effect.
Last Friday, I had surgery and I’ve been healing since. My hope is that it’s the last surgery I’ll have related to this ankle injury (five so far!) and now I can move on. I wish that after the first surgery, you could have a loyalty card, except instead of earning free coffee, you earn the right to stop re-explaining your medical history.
If nothing else, this whole palaver has given me bountiful empathy for differently-abled people and has taught me the mind-changing magic of being still enough to recognise that everything is changing.
Every effort or change has a ripple effect, and on a micro-level, my body is a reflection of that.
But enough about me.
This thought makes me think about you - and the actions you take.
Any action you make will be inter-connected to everything else you do.
That’s liberating. I think that’s what’s meant when people say “there’s no such thing as making a mistake”. We’re always learning, from the good as well as the bad.
The charity work a friend does re-energises her for a remote design job. The journalism degree a nurse completed enforced her integrity and her discerning intellect on picking the right sources of knowledge. The drawings I do to pass the time benefit my product design articles.
Everything is inter-connected, and so with that view, maybe we need to see the world not through a limited sense of who we are and what we can do, but through an abundance and a welcome embrace of the blurring of lines.
Tip over the spice cabinet of your life, see what smells and colours catch your attention and make something new.
Creative exercise
Mash up two of your hobbies or passions that you don’t think will necessarily get along. Use food colouring, or better yet, colourful food to paint a canvas (Don’t store it anywhere and forget about it, that would be gross. The joy is in the impermanence). Play heavy metal songs on your ukulele (Master of Puppets even). Get a cyanotype kit and use household objects to make weird imprints.
Some inspiration
Nadya Tolokonnikova and Pussy Riot released this manifesto, based on their learnings in prison and life.
Embracing the blur and smudges,
Tash