Well, I feel a little better now. Looked through photographs covering the last year of my life while listening to a random selection of my songs on iTunes (came out as “Puppet Man” by The 5th Dimension, “Kinky Afro” by the Happy Mondays, “Easy to Love” by Billie Holliday, “You Call it Madness” by Nat King Cole, “I Need Love” by Olivia Newton-John(?!), “Sometimes I’m Happy” by Sarah Vaughan and then Beethoven’s Eroica variations and Brahms’s German Requiem. Something happened to me while I was looking at the photos, hearing the music, remembering wonderful places and seeing the people I love. I realised that I have a really, really good life. Yes, OK, this post is corny, so feel free to skip the rest. But it’s important for me to document how I feel, because I so often get that feeling of wanting to hide away from the world, a feeling that I just can’t face it any more, and looking through those photos reminded me that when I do make the effort I have some pretty memorable experiences.
What does this have to do with the state of the world? Nothing, really. My dilemma remains totally unresolved, and it will likely not be too long before I end up right back where I was earlier this afternoon. I suspect that dilemma will be with me for a long time. But the hopelessness has passed. If I want to change the world, I must first change my life, and I’m not going to do that by locking myself in my flat and wallowing in self-pity. I’m probably not going to achieve a lot anyway, but I’ve got to make the effort, and for fairly arbitrary reasons to do with some nice photos and a serendipitous string of songs which I normally wouldn’t like very much but which hit my mood just perfectly, I feel as if I can make the effort now.
I must remember this afternoon for my fiction writing. Clean resolutions are for soap operas. Reality is never resolved — the characters just muddle through their unresolved problems in bizarre, random ways. And it doesn’t get much more bizarre or random than discovering salvation through Olivia Newton-John.
