I have spent most of my life at a precipice, overlooking a life of choices not made. For a long, long time, I loved the view. I’d always preferred the infinite, out of reach. Rather than the finite maintenant —in my hand. The present always seems like it lasts forever. I’d sit on the edge too frightened to move. Swinging my legs, over a sea of possibility and waves of emotion, my heart beating breathlessly. The sorrows of my past appear to sink, and for now my happiness too. I remember how alive i felt to sit there with you.
I’d been looking out to a horizon, a field sown with parables. Slow and steady wins the race. If you want to walk the line, don’t look down. Forgetting that ploughing a field is not a single line. Eventually you have to turn back.
As the trickle of years start to flood, finally I’m passing back over old ground, in my home town, after 13 years. The metaphors start to fold together, a paradigm collapsing. I have always been lost in a story of my own narration. Do I understand what I thought I was doing all this time? It’s time to write and see.
One of the anchors of my personality is passed to me by my mother. An identity formed through stories, photos and fragments of re-imagined memories. She recalls the time i spent as a child at a door, fixated on the mechanism. Pull down and the catch withdraws.
Another idea I used as a waypoint is a fulcrum, like the hinge on a door. I imagine we stand at the threshold of an infinte doorway, the frame of which opens in all directions. The fulcrum is the present. Around which the narrative construct of past and present revolves.
Push or pull, wait and see…