small attempts at wisdom

[helenic]

Making plans for the summer. This year I shall not fall into that same trap of money-earning, constantly questioned about my bank balance by my parents, of forty-hour weeks and expensive weekends to try to make up for them. I will get a small, relaxed, low-earning job, in a pub or bar perhaps for two or three nights a week, and the rest of the time - I shall paint.

The thing is that every time I go to one of those little craft fair things on Saturday afternoons I see paintings, below the standard I could achieve, selling for good amounts of money. I get momentarily frustrated at my own incapacity to produce anything, and promptly forget about it. Occasionally I do a sketch or buy a pre-stretched canvas on special offer, but not once have I got around to using one. Every term I doggedly take with me my easel, primed paper, palette knife, box of paints, but they are never used. The truth is that I genuinely don't have time. During term my free time comes in bits and pieces - the sort of lengths appropriate for a phonecall or a quick game of Sonic the Hedgehog or answering emails. Usually I am too tired, inbetween attempts at work, to undertake a major creative endeavour - and even if I wasn't, I would never have an uninterrupted space of free time long enough to get really into anything. Mostly I procrastinate, telling myself I will start work "soon" - the internet is particularly good for this - but feeling too guilty about the work I am supposed to be doing to begin a definite, non-work-related project.

It seems sensible, therefore, to just give up on trying to do any art during term. Until my Part I exams are over I will need to do far more work than I ever have anyway. But over the summer, what is to stop me producing thirty or so paintings of reasonable quality and hiring myself a table at one of these fairs? They would not have to be great masterpieces, or even particularly imaginative - landscapes of Cambridge, for example, would probably sell as long as they were beautiful. My painting would improve, I would feel rather more creatively fulfilled, I might make a bit of money (you never know) and I would be so much more relaxed than last summer as to be beyond comparison. Plans and plans. I'm so desperately unmotivated I need all the short-term goals I can get.

Replying to neglected comments last night, I wrote something which, if the_waves will forgive me, I want to repeat here, because even if it's terribly written it represents a sense something I want to hold onto, of how to go on:

Actually I don't know what the answer is except to keep on getting up in the morning in the hope that you'll eventually get used to things not making sense until suddenly, you find that they do. Stopping seeing life as a problem to be solved (preferably immediately, via self-analysis and sudden enlightenment) but as a mystery to be lived. Harder than it sounds and involves a frightening amount of acceptance.

I'm so scared of becoming complacent - or more truthfully, perhaps, of becoming commonplace - that it's simpler to challenge everything. Revolution! Change the world! Don't believe anything they tell you, do your own thinking! And so forth until I miss out on the small acts of acceptance which make it possible to go on. Sometimes, you really just can't do anything about it. I'm not very good at sighing and putting up with it. I vent and fume and write long dialectic LJ entries as if being self-aware and intellectual about things will stop it hurting so much.

Love is one of those few things that makes me wish I was old already - old and patient and able finally to just accept some things and with a small amount, perhaps, of wisdom. I'm so young and I can see my own naiveté and impetuousness most of the time and it just frustrates me. Half of me thinks I should enjoy it while it's excusable and the other half wants it all just to be over already, and for sex to stop mattering so much and the most important things to be companionship and respect and appreciation and understanding and small acts of kindness. (And it's naive and impetuous to want to skip out on life and be at that stage already, isn't it? Argh! I can't win, I don't have wisdom no matter how hard I try...)

And I don't know. Patience is a difficult thing to learn, but realising why you need to has to be a positive step. Just keep holding firmly onto the tangible things and struggling towards tranquillity. Never mind all this nonsense about a "sense of self" - sometimes, it's just getting on with things that's the important thing, in the hope that the rest will slowly begin to make sense.