Category Archives: Ideas

Joy, Work and Home

Ideas, ,

I am reading Le Guin again. The Dispossessed – my favourite of her books. In the strange limbo of relocating to a new city, it seems appropriate. It feels like home. That strange, slippery concept of home, always just beyond my grasping fingers.

In Le Guin’s fictional anarchist world, the language has only one word for work and play. They are the same word, the same thing. Today felt like that for the first time in years. It feels good to come home to the work that I love. After Korea, after so many months of doing work that was not mine. That work was work. It was counting the hours and getting through the days. It was living for the weekends when I could put on my red boots and pack my little backpack and see new places and discover new things. Or spend hours in coffee shops and bars and discover friends and acquaintances. Not that there was anything wrong with the discovering and the travel and the friends. But the work hours felt wasted. Work has always been central to who I am, to how I enter the world. I lost that for a while.

Today I felt like I had found it again. Today I sat for hours, hardly noticing time, and the words and the numbers danced and played and became the thing I wanted them to be. But not just any words and numbers. Words and numbers about the things that I know and love. Things I think about just before I sleep and when I wake up in the middle of the night. The things that engage me, like food security and development and poverty and aid. Words and numbers that are ideas made tangible. The visible parts, the bits that are useful and relevant on the page right now, but that are part of a bigger picture, of a slowly twisting whirlwind of ideas about security and poverty and development and hope.

There is a joy in doing real, hard, relevant work. Thinking work. Work that is bigger than who I am, that is part of a larger moment, part of a giant, swirling atmosphere of ideas. It feels like being connected to that ethereal whirl of ideas. Like spending a day of hard, intense work dancing in and out of that mist of thoughts to catch in your net, just the right concepts and phrases and arguments for now.

This work, the work I love, is not just a part of who I am; it is my home. This whirling unreal reality is where I live. It is where I thrive, where I find the energy to keep going, to keep doing. It is where I meet the people who excite and inspire me. It shouldn’t be called ‘work’. It should have the same name as play. It challenges and energizes and stimulates me as much as the rush and the swirl of debate.

Perhaps tomorrow I’ll feel differently. Perhaps one flurry of thoughts is only the illusion of a whirlwind. Perhaps ‘home’ is as ephemeral as that exquisite moment when all the words dance into place with a gentle sigh of peace. But that is a beautiful place. Home is an idea. It is a difficult, fleeting idea for those who have chosen against the settled comfort of suburbia. Perhaps the compensation is the thrill of an intellectual-emotional home just a wish away from the work that, if you are lucky, you do each day.

Anticipate

Adventures, Ideas, seasons
It’s a cold, miserable, rainy day. Properly cold. Cold like it hasn’t been for months and months and months. It is as easy to forget what cold feels like in a South African summer as it is for hot to become a distant memory in an icy northern winter. I’m not entirely pleased that it has returned.
But still, I thrill with anticipation. Next week I travel to the Western Cape. It sounds so odd to be excited. I have visited Cape Town so often in the last few months it is almost a second home. But this time still excites me. Every time still excites me. But this time is especially good. This time I am not traveling for work. This time is exclusively exploring, being a tourist, seeing friends and a few days in Stellenbosch with some of my favourite people.
I grin every time I think about it. I randomly find myself starting to put aside clothes and consider what shoes to take. I wander the shops and wonder if there is anything I need for my travels. To go, to move, to learn…
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life!
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

It’s a cold, miserable, rainy day. Properly cold. Cold like it hasn’t been for months. It is as easy to forget the cold feels in a South African summer as it is for hot to become a distant memory in an icy northern winter. I’m not entirely pleased it has returned.

But still, I thrill with anticipation. Next week I travel to the Western Cape. It sounds so odd to be excited; I have visited Cape Town so often in the last few months. But it still excites me. Every time still excites me, but this especially so. I am not traveling for work. This time is exclusively exploring, being a tourist, seeing friends and a few days in Stellenbosch with some of my favourite people.

I grin every time I think about it. I randomly find myself starting to put aside clothes and consider what shoes to take. I wander the shops and wonder if there is anything I need for my travels. I wait in anticipation. To move, to go, to learn…

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!

As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains; but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

The last time I saw Autumn…

Daegu, Ideas, seasons,

The seasons are beginning to turn again. Mornings are chilly and the late Summer mists have come to Stutterheim. I watch the swallows patching up their nest and wonder how much longer they’ll be here. Soon it will be Autumn.

Autumn is the last season that got lost along the way in changing back and forth between south to north. The first was Spring. I left the south in crisp mid-Winter and went to late Summer there, and then Autumn and the Winter. No wonder, looking back, the Spring was so, so precious when it finally came. Autumn was lost in my return. I’ve never been a huge fan of Autumn. The end of Summer, the cold’s return. But you get to missing it, when it’s been such a while.

Morning spider-webs outlined in late Summer dew, beads of glistening beauty strung between the branches. Autumn. The last time I saw Autumn, it was pretty spectacular. The colours of Autumn are beautiful in places with summer forests. The leaves all change at the same time. I spent many weekend days visiting parks and places full of autumn colours. The reds and yellows and oranges were so much more spectacular than I had known before. More trees, more trees turning at exactly the same time. It was a sight to see. And colder, more quickly. Colder than some winters here.

The last time I saw Autumn feels like a lifetime ago. Who was it who talked about the idea of the double joy of the travel itself and remembering the travel later? I’m finally far enough away to remember without the bitterness and the homesickness, perhaps with rose-coloured glasses. This new Autumn that is beginning, will never match up to that one, that time, that place.

Summer is so precious here. This past Summer has been one of such joy – the hot, dry summer, the perfect beaches, the summer thunderstorms, the joy of Africa. The Winters I love will always be white-dry grass, frosty mornings and red, red aloes. But Autumn belongs to Korea. To bossum and buying warm coats and hiking boots and tree-covered hills and the slanting light of the setting sun through oranges and reds and yellows at Duryu Park.

Autumn comes slowly, gently to South Africa. Colours change in fits and starts, some trees rushing ahead, others still finding their colour by the time winter is half over. It’s still pretty and its coming brings the circle to a close for me. Autumn is always a time of endings, of contemplation. My Autumns are now a time of memories, of taking out my year abroad and polishing it up and revisiting the pictures and the words and putting it away again, in perspective; an important, if difficult, time, a year of autumn leaves and icy days and snow and new friends, a home I can return to in my mind. A home I carry with me and remember, especially for Autumn.