Here comes Winter...

Maybe it's obvious, but I've spent an inordinate amount of time sitting in a various rooms all over the world, thinking about things.

Sometimes it's been pretty good, especially when I've been to The Netherlands in the winter, hiding from the kind of freezing precipitation that gave birth to Bob Mould (from Husker Du)'s 1990 album release.

Sometimes I feel like I should have been a little more attentive though, when I've been somewhere exciting, and the weather's been good. It's not every day you're in Egypt, unless it is, and you are.

I've been thinking about life.

A long time ago, I was walking through the Industrial back-blocks of South Auckland in New Zealand. Between the State Housing and the endless factories, there aren't many urban landscapes more bleak or depressing. Once-were warriors-ville, all the way. I was with my friend Peter Yee, who was about the most original breed of kid I have ever met. He had tight and curly blonde hair, and intensely pale white skin. His Father was a Chinese taxi driver, and his mother was a raven-haired Scot, so impossibly beautiful and dark, it is impossible to describe her by heaping words on each other. Maybe I'll talk about her some other time. God knows there's a lot to tell.

How his parents came up with Peter is beyond the scope of modern genetics. But this isn't about him, and it's barely about me.

As we walked beside a parked car, we saw a kid of about six sitting in the passenger seat, all by himself. He poked his tongue out. Peter returned the gesture, and this kid went nuts. He let out a battle cry (I have never heard one before or since), and threw something at Peters head. At first we thought it was broken glass, and our first impulse was to run out of range. But as I took a closer look I saw it was a DIAMOND.

It was the size of four coke bottle tops stuck together. It was enormous.

Peter and I looked at each other in complete amazement. We could buy a lot of candy with a diamond that big, and by 'candy', I mean candy. Like, the kind you eat. We were thirteen.

We were about to hot-foot it out of that suburb, before the parents/jewel thieves came back outside to see thir six year old throwing all the loot out of the window of their Ford Anglia, when he threw another one. And another one. And another. Pretty soon, Peter and I had about twenty gigantic rocks each, which we decided was more than enough to set us up for life.

The sight of those rocks sailing through the air, set against the dark grey sky, kicking out rainbows as the faint sunlight refracted through them, was about the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

Exit stage left.

Of course, when we went to the jewellers to sell them, we got laughed at pretty hard. They were cut glass, and from memory we were offered about fifty cents for the lot of them. The jeweller must have felt sorry for us.

But this story isn't about diamonds either. or jewellers, or glass.

It's about life.

In just the same was as you don't just sit and look at a waterfall of diamonds cascading toward you, it pays not to sit in rooms thinking about life too much. It pays to grab at as much of it as you can get, even if it only turns out to be worthless junk. As everyone's Mother used to tell them "You'll never know unless you try."

Sitting and thinking, and reflecting, and remembering, are all worthwhile things to do once in a while. But doing it every day takes you out of the running for experience, which is what life (along with contrast) is all about.

Sometimes I think I have lived, despite my life, seeing as I spent so much time hiding from it. Because once in a while, after putting myself out there and having the balls to face the scary parts, I've been given an experience or an opportunity of the kind I could have only dreamed of in the past. Sometimes they've been cut glass, and sometimes they haven't. But I'm glad I was out walking, and stopped to pick them up, because a couple of them were diamonds. For real.

It takes a lot of courage to love something with everything you have. It takes a lot of determination to stay on course and stick with it, no matter what. It takes a lot of selflessness to give yourself over completely to something that is bigger than you are, and it takes a lot of strength to not give up or run away when the storms roll in. It takes a lot of trust to not believe the spies who whisper in your ear, everything you fear the most. But we should all try it anyway.

The good things are never easy, and if they are, they're probably not so good. You have to work and sweat and bleed and yearn and suffer and cry and hurt and break down and risk everything, every day, until the day you die.

Because the payoff is LIFE.

Less thinking and more living.

This is knifey, from 'the internet'.