Day 168 - Sydney
- Surprising fact about Australia #1: It has seasons
- Surprising fact about Australia #2: Some of those seasons are cold
- Surprising fact about Australia #3: I was in it. And cold
"But we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" --Fitzgerald, 1925. It seems driven by a difficulty in accepting ourselves as we are, as we ever were, as we ever will be. Travel is the perfect foil to this frustrated vision. Another place, another person. Throw off your rusted shackles, climb from the indenture of your rut, feel the warm sunlight of possibility upon your face. We all seek our own particular brand of reinvention. Mine is best described as wanting to look into a mirror and see myself and not a vampiric transparency. But the only mirrors I look into are those in friend's and foreigner's faces and the reflections define the person I see. It is a self-worth dependent on others, it is an unhealthy stare. It is rabid insecurity alleviated by adulation. I once suggested that praise fell on me as lightly as snowflakes but I was wrong. It nourishes a ravenous beast, a dead-eyed monster with poisonous fangs. I don't know if that is a harsh assessment composed of words better suited to hyperbole than honest analysis. I don't know if this is catharsis or needy evisceration. I don't know if it is harder to forgive oneself or others for character flaws and failings. I often find myself trapped in the foolish notion that every feeling ostensibly manifested must be the opposite inside, that every weakness we perceive in other peeple must be present tenfold within ourselves. We care so inextricably deeply about what other people think of us but to successfully reinvent yourself it is only necessary to change the opinion of one person. And that person is you.
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