Hmmmm, some days it’s harder to write than others, and to know what you are going to write. In an earlier post I described myself as a ‘morning person’ and so, today, it’s a bit odd to find myself, at the end of the day, starting to write my slightly overdue Blog post.
To be honest, it’s unusually busy in me-land. It’s the heart if the busiest term of the academic year, and, among many other jobs, I actually have three seminars on my hand in recent weeks. All very exciting, all very demanding, all very exhausting.
Luckily, a lonnnng time ago, when I first started teaching, I swore never to see my teaching, writing, music-ing and art-ing (and living) roles as being in any kind of conflict. Yes, sometimes, like anyone, you will hear me curse the clash of this or that, or the way that this might compromise that.
But ultimately, and most philosophically it seems to me, you have to see your life as a whole, to see life and the world holistically and understand the way that, un the long run (as they say) everything is connected, part of the same, and therefore not really in conflict. You learn of course, that your impatience and frustration usually come to look like a negative waste of energy and breath once a little more water flowed under the bridge.
Thus, what I teach, I also write, and I have even come to write about popular music of late, which helps me with the potential culture clash between my academic work, Fine art and passion for writing, singing and listening to popular music.
This idea is worth staying with a little longer I think, as, after all, it’s conflict per se that ruins so much of life on this earth and the behaviour of those human beings, who are, of course capable of so many magnificent deeds as well as the most monstrous imaginable.
Searching out the ‘conflict gene’ or becoming attuned to those triggers and moments in which conflict is either perceived or actually arises, becomes a crucial component of every persona and every community.
Sometimes, it’s true, you can’t prioritise 2-3 things you want or feel you need to do, and yet, if you can just resist being anxious about it then you can make the very time and space in which, ultimately, everything gets done – not done in the way you necessarily envisaged it, but (much better) in ways you could not have foreseen it all getting done.
This, my friends, is called leaving some things to others, to time, to the gods, to forces and wills other than your own to make sense of you, your life and your world. It really is NOT all about you, and, we might even dare to assert that there is no such thing as a conflict in the material universe, but only ever in someone’s anxious and impatient and over-wilful and self-centred mind.
Good evening!
'ONLY YOU' – A few words on Art and Life In London, by Art Writer Paul O'Kane 