Not More New Year Resolutions
Things change in a week, I am not going to ramble on about my mislaid diary, even if my mind keeps jumping to it. Instead, I am going to stay on track with what I planned. And, yes, I did have a sort of plan before I started writing, really, I did.
My plan had been to dive a little deeper into how I envisaged my weekly blog developing. For a while, I have seen my weekly blogs as a form of “reflective practice”. Not the contrived reflective practice of (my) professional development portfolio deftly steered towards the required learning outcomes; rather, an actual reflection alongside anything learned. I have had this structure in mind for a while. I have been tempted to reverse engineer my writing as per the professional portfolio; every time I have deleted the resulting word salad.
I think the idea has some merit and runway. My issue, however, is that this feels like arranging napkins on the deck of the Titanic. I do my best to live in a curated bubble away from the immediate tides of current events. At the same time, I know that getting too far away from an awareness of the world is also asphyxiatingly unhealthy. Finding my way through the constant noise of life is a precarious journey that I undertake, acutely aware of the dangers to my health and well-being of being too immersed in either.
I see, Venezuela, Epstein, Gaza, AI, Palantir, horrors in Sudan, China, or Russia and further afield waged on people simply trying to survive. It is a holocaust of a world that never ends, where those who can don’t and those who can’t are left to look on horrified under the threat of being the next person for the hangman’s noose. Horrors set to the soundtrack of surveillance capitalism and predatory consumption. Am I really one Starbucks cup away from happiness? I don’t think so!
This is what history does: move on relentlessly, crushing human reason and consciousness under its ever increasing burden. What is the point of a poem thrown into the void to be crushed by an algorithm of AI cat and thirst traps?
I find it easy to get lost in hopelessness, to get seduced into my irrelevance by metrics, to feel like I don’t matter for a million different reasons. I get the feeling that I am supposed to feel this way, like I am insignificant, that I should give up, go quiet and do whatever it is I am supposed to be doing, buy some plastic shit, watch some ai video of noodles being slurped obnoxiously, gently sedated in my passivity. I just can’t do it.
Really, I medicated myself into passivity, and all it did was teach me that passivity and making time go away sucks. It isn’t living, it’s being dead with a pulse. I don’t want to do that, I know I tried. It’s about how I want to remember myself. I’ve had a stroke, I have memory loss, but what stayed with me is a sense of self. I can’t tell you if this me is the same me that has always been, but this me. The me that I have been slowly building, he is the one learning from every me that has gone before to do things the best he can. That matters, and it matters to me to shine my light so that someone might see it, in the way I have seen all those individual lights while making my journey. I’ve looked at each one, and it has shown me that I am not alone, it’s not hopeless, and the universe isn’t empty; it’s full of light.
This week, I am conscious of the temptation of despair, to feel overwhelmed by the darkness rolling across all of us, and that it’s getting ever more important to shine our light. So until next week, keep on keeping on!
Bonus Poem: A Second Takes Forever
I’m lying here on the grass
Just thinking of the time that’s past
Wondering how to make hurt rhyme
Taking up too much time
And second feels like forever
But forever never comes inside my head
Just like all the words I could have said
That would never made a shred of difference
It would have taken you to have conscience
And still a second feels like forever
Outside in the rain, people just walking past
Inside, the time refuses to move so fast
Not that it heals, I just want new memories,
Replace some of all those tragedies,
Like the second it would take forever
Like the people walking past my door
I’ll pretend I’ve something more
Than the scars and pain you gave me
That when you look no one ever sees
And this second takes forever
Because the thought won’t leave
A boat beached among the reeds
Struggling to leave and make it out
To keep being pulled back in, ever deeper now
In fear the second feels like forever
Sometimes I ask the stupid question
I don’t expect an answer, that’s my lesson
The cruelty deserved or not
So many times I took the shot
And those seconds felt like forever
And so we go our separate ways
Not to care about the days
To stalk the lonely hours which you stole
Every Birthday passes takes it toll
Each second of that day feels like forever
The birthday I never saw, the picture I never took
The days out and loving look
The first days and school and the new teacher
Or even watching the rain, weather never bleaker
I would cherish those seconds forever
Instead, we have new lives now
Gone is the hurt and the row
Come is the peace to heal
Soothing balm and a warm meal
Seconds I wish would last forever
