Finding myself again

It is at the fag end of a 5-day holiday that I have mustered up the energy and wherewithal to sit down and pen this piece. Hopefully this is the first of many, many more after a long, LONG time of somnolence that seems to have dulled my usually fecund thoughts. I still have the ambition to do something with my creative gifts, ill-treated as they have been in the last few years, so making this small start. Not the great novel that my 20-year old self dreamt feverishly about, but every journey begins (or resumes) with that first single step. And here is to hoping this is mine! 

It would be very easy and convenient to put this hiatus in writing down to life and the myriad things that pull you in different directions and leave you barely any room to breathe, let alone sit down and compose coherent thoughts to blast off into the ether. I do have a demanding job which requires me to be constantly switched on (even in different time zones and states of health) and frankly takes a lot out of me. It has been especially difficult over the last 2- 3 years, with the craziness in the world and financial markets making constant pressure at work pretty much de rigeur. And while I am a good multi-tasker and am able to juggle work and personal fronts pretty well, it does mean that you can never truly detach yourself from office. 

My spouse has remarked on it several times, that no matter how many late nights / early mornings I might pull to ensure that the weekend is free to spend with her and our child, I am never fully there. Office mails will be checked regularly and responded to even on weekends, and some part of the mind will always be pre-occupied with how to hit the ground running on Monday. The compensation obviously reflects the demands of the job and we are able to live comfortably in one of the great cities of the world, but the core question that I have been increasingly asking myself is whether I am happy, that is this the life I had envisaged for myself as a wide-eyed innocent teenager when I had first started scribbling my thoughts on a journal (dunno where that vanished). Don't really have an answer to this question yet, because said youngster probably had water on his brain when he started dreaming, while your current correspondent is more mature, more educated in the school of hard knocks of life, and generally knows what's what (to paraphrase my lovely helpmeet). But then again, if everything was just grand and la-di-dah then I would probably not feel the way I do right now. Which is one reason why I have made this new year resolution (in advance) to resume writing and hopefully discover some answers along the way.

All is not grey and uncertain by the way. I have been blessed by the most amazing and gorgeous partner in the universe, and we have the most magical nearly 2-year old daughter who has simply upended our hearts and turned us into warm goo. A picture perfect family (even with me in it!) and it is just pure unmitigated joy to be with them and experience the world together. There are hikes through dreamy parts of Hong Kong that we never knew existed; interactions with dogs, cats, pigeons and other animals of all shapes and sizes which make us relive our own fascination with the world when we were young; perfect poses by mother-daughter which are quite ineptly captured by yours truly; leisurely lunches followed by frantic diaper changes in all sorts of odd locations; and the list goes on. It was amazing enough finding the love of my life and creating so many fabulous memories over so many years, and now we are truly enriched by this new addition to our life who has opened up our hearts and minds so much more and makes us experience the world in a whole new, magical way. I am a better person due to them, and I hope to continue to be deserving of them.

So where does that leave me, you might ask. Is it on balance sunny side up, or burnt to a crisp? I think that's the wrong question. Life should not be reduced to a pros vs cons analysis and finding relative value in everything. You need to distil this down to what you really want to achieve and whether you are getting there. In my case, I have an amazing family, a good job and the means to lead a comfortable standard of living. To be honest, I have consciously prioritised the latter two since I don't come from a background of comfortable means, even though my ultimate ambition has always been to write. I made that trade-off and it has worked out, but now I find myself a bit deadened to be honest and the words are just not flowing that freely. Somewhere along the way, the barrage of standardised and formal office emails that take up the majority of my waking hours have leached away the fluency and turn of phrase that flowed much more freely in my younger days. But to go back to what I started saying a few paras earlier, this is just a convenient way of absolving myself. I need to want this badly enough to make time and put the energy and effort into it. Sure, you need to be creative and erudite, but you also need to put in the work, to be disciplined enough to write a certain number of words each day, no matter how tired you might be. This is how you maintain the flow, else the spigot will just get jammed up with the detritus of unfinished thoughts and orphan words which could otherwise have been strung together into shimmering phrases. I have been at this piece for more than an hour, but it is only in the last twenty minutes or so that I have felt some measure of true fluency, where the pauses have been minimal and my fingers have skimmed across the keys in a rapid hypnotic dance. I love this feeling; truly, utterly love this feeling. I need to feel this more.

So this turned out to be more an exercise in introspection I guess (and hopefully didn't come across as vainglorious). I am not sure how many people will read this and don't really know whether I care about that at this point. I feel good enough putting something out into the ether once again and hope this is the first of many. This is the first post in what is going to be a completely new blog, for I am a different person now and probably write and feel things very differently from younger me. Hopefully I can match up to the latter's creativity levels also in due course.

For those who are curious, link to my earlier blog as follows - https://lyricalludicrousness.blogspot.com/

Till next time, sayonara!