Freedom From Funny

I’m thinking a lot about my age at the moment, maybe you can tell. Not in a sad way, or even a nostalgic way, heck it’s not even nearly my birthday. I’m just thinking. “Your twenties are for learning, your thirties are for earning” they say – um, yes please 30′s! I’m going to write more about all this I can feel it, but let’s get back to today. I learned something recently that I wanted to share, & not only because it made me feel quite grown up!

It’s quite popular to have a questionnaire or a quiz at 21st/ weddings/ baby showers these days. You know the kind; you fill in the blanks about the guest(s) of honour, answer a few fun questions & then they get to keep the whole stack to remember their celebration. They take them home & carefully stick them in an album, or they string them together to glance at and smile for years to come. Not for everyone, but they can be great (like the one below).

A few years ago I was at one such wedding & diligently filled mine in soon after I sat down. Then, being the ‘sticky beak’ that I am, I looked over other people’s as they lay completed on the table. I was struck by how funny the others were. And then by how funny mine wasn’t. Many of them were the kind everyone passes around during the meal, or that someone reads aloud to the crowd to make everyone laugh. Mine wasn’t.

This happened another couple of times in what felt like quick succession. And it made me sad. I started to dread those games, tried to get away with not filling them in at all. Sometimes I’d read the others first so I could copy parts of them & seem funnier in my answers. I even started to clumsily tell jokes & re-use comical expressions that just weren’t me in conversation.

I wouldn’t say I was a naturally dull person, but I’m no comedian. Sometimes I’ll give you a bit of a laugh – probably more of a gentle chuckle though. I love language & clever word twists, so every now and then I may dazzle you briefly with my wit or a good pun.  But bear in mind that the people I was filling in these fun forms for are people who know & love me. They already know if I’m funny or not. And yet somehow I felt like I needed to impress them. With my humour. I needed to compete with people that I know & love, for… what? 

Am I the only one who does this? This nonsensical competing, with everybody & with nobody, for nothing’s sake. 

My grown up news of the day is that I no longer feel the need to be funnier. I can’t tell you when it happened, but it did! I guess I got to know myself a bit more, got to like myself a bit more. Realised that I was other things that funny people weren’t, and that it wasn’t about them in the first place.

Slowly coming to terms with the way I was designed & the quirky combination of things that make me me is quite possibly my favorite thing about growing up. Being ok with being me, dare I say enjoying it!. Remembering that God is celebrating it. I certainly haven’t got it all figured out – but I do have freedom from being funny – and I’ll raise my glass to every small victory!

So hand me a quiz friends, and you do one too.  Be silly be kind be deep be poetic be cheeky be nostalgic be true. Go on, be funny or sarcastic or even a bit suggestive, but don’t compete to be someone else. Be a grown up. Be you.

*click on images for credits.

At My Age

Browsing pinterest earlier in the year – in my pjs with a cup of tea, hair piled atop my head, a sketch caught my eye. I followed the rabbit trail and what I found has stayed with me for months. It hit me exactly where I am at and articulated something I couldn’t, or at least hadn’t. Some simple thoughts on people, and life, and aging.

I thought I’d share it. In case you too are wondering how you are now genuinely, no matter how reluctantly, grown up (and still eating brownies for breakfast). Curious as to how one can possibly have pimples and wrinkles on the same face. Wondering about starting a degree or starting a family in the same breath. It made me miss my high school class, & wish for a proper reunion so I could remember those friendships and be proud of the women we’ve all become.

“This is the thing: When you get to 28 or 30, things begin to divide. You can see very clearly two kinds of people. 
On one side, people who have used their 20s to learn and grow, to find … themselves and their dreams, people who know what works and what doesn’t; who have pushed through to become real live adults. 
Then there’s the other kind, who are hanging onto college, or high school even, with all their might. They’ve stayed in jobs they hate, because they’re too scared to get another one.They’ve stayed with men or women who are good but not great, because they don’t want to be lonely. … they mean to develop intimate friendships, they mean to stop drinking like life is one big frat party. But they don’t do those things, so they live in an extended adolescence, no closer to adulthood than when they graduated. 
Don’t be like that. Don’t get stuck. Move, travel, take a class, take a risk. 
There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. 
This season is about becoming. 
Don’t lose yourself at happy hour, but don’t lose yourself on the corporate ladder either. Stop every once in a while and go out to coffee or climb in bed with your journal. 
Ask yourself some good questions like: “Am I proud of the life I’m living? What have I tried this month? … Do the people I’m spending time with give me life, or make me feel small? Is there any brokenness in my life that’s keeping me from moving forward?” 
Now is your time. Walk closely with people you love, and with people who believe … life is a grand adventure. Don’t get stuck in the past, and don’t try to fast-forward yourself into a future you haven’t yet earned. 
Give today all the love and intensity and courage you can, and keep traveling honestly along life’s path.”

*I am sad to say I don’t know who wrote this, I wish I could sing their praises & recommend their other work to you. Alas the all knowing internet has failed me. If you do know, please let me know so I can update this! The image I can trace as far as it been pinned, from this tumblr.

Evening

There was a moment, earlier, when I looked out the window at a patch of evening sky between the trees. After a long, but good, and somewhat emotional day, my mind was uncharacteristically blank. The sun is setting earlier as summer wanes & I was grateful to get home before dark.

As the light sank further away, few wisps of cloud popped out at me against the deep prussian sky.  Their colour can best be described as “neon from the nineties” pink. It was so brief I barely thought to draw anyone else’s attention to it – let alone capture/ facebook/ Instagram/ tweet it.

I wonder if anyone else in the world noticed? Is it selfish to think it’s more beautiful if no one did?

Life Motifs

 I grew up listening to my dad learning to play the saxophone.
Today he flies in from Zim for the first time in 2 years, & someone is playing the saxophone outside the studio. Thursday you are awesome.   (facebook status 28-2-2013)

I work in a busy noisy part of Woodstock; usually full of the sounds of taxis & renovations, but this day something else caught my ear. At first I thought I was imagining it, but somewhere close by someone was learning/ practising scales on the saxophone. I recognised that melody more than any song they could have played.

My Dad didn’t have any musical training, but he always loved music. I grew up surrounded by his vinyls & CDs – Cat Stevens, CCR, ZZ Top & Hot Chocolate stand out in my memory. In his early thirties he learned to read music for the first time, then he started playing the alto saxophone. Now fifty he plays both the guitar & saxophone confidently & has dabbled in drumming. Never too old to learn indeed.

Many an early weekend morning I lay in bed with my book, listening. To the sounds of scales floating down from the balcony; deciphering what he was trying to learn, loving the smooth notes as he danced with ease through a familiar piece.

Since those scales caught my attention again I’m aware of the significance of the saxophone to me. Maybe it’s not even the sax itself, but the significance it has in my story. The fragments of memory it conjures & the peace that sound gives me.

I can’t remember what song I walked down the aisle to as my Dad ‘gave me away’. I do know that is was a live alto saxophone echoing through the room as I took those considered steps.

One of my most vivid & treasured memories, from a trip we took as newlyweds, puts us under a bridge. Late one night we sat on a busy street corner under a bridge, listening to a busker on his saxophone. He had a beautiful style, I made my Mr. give him all the change in our pockets. In a surreal scene, we sat overlooking the ocean & the Sydney Opera House, listening. Marvelling.

I feel like I’m just thinking out loud a bit here – rambling through some memories & enjoying the soundtrack. What I’ll take away from this external processing? As in music & literature, so there are motifs in life.

A motif: a “musical fragment or succession of notes that has some special importance”, “any recurring element that has symbolic significance in a story”. *

You can listen to a song & not pick up the motif of notes woven in, making a seemingly upbeat song leave you with a note of melancholy. Many read through great works of fiction, of comedy, & miss the crow that sits on the wall in the background, foretelling the tragedy that looms.

Isn’t life just as delicately constructed as these works of art? People, moments, songs sights stories that we somehow keep coming back to. I can’t help believe it is.