Lifetime

Today, on my return from a refreshing walk through a rainy town to pick up some fresh vegetables and fruit from His Majesty's Fruit & Veg, I will once more attempt to offer you a piece of writing flowing from a single word. I have selected a book entitled Tarot, penned by a mysterious lady who refers to herself only as "Soraya". I bought this book with Ben during our last holiday back in Johannesburg, during which both our interests were peaked by the mystery of the tarot... Recently, we've been neglecting this hobby - but I still find it immensely interesting not so much as a divining tool, but rather as a psychological tool that should be used in combination with a lot of introspective thought - more like a guide to your own imaginings on the path you take to examine your feelings, thoughts, and ideas than actual predictions for the future.

When I flicked through the pages of this mystical book and prodded nervously at one of them, I looked down to see that fate had offered me the word "lifetime" to chew on. Strangely enough, about five minutes before I did this, I updated my Facebook status to contain the following quote by novelist J.M. Barrie:

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story
and writes another, and his humblest hour is when he compares the
volume as it is with what he vowed to make of it.

How is that for yet another coincidence? It doesn't shock me too much, as I understand the power of the mind to make a strange coincidence (is it still considered a 'coincidence' if we attach meaning to it?) out of almost anything at all. I will tell you all about my specially formulated Coincidence Equation at a later date!


To open the discussion around this word - a deeply meaningful word for most people, since they are inevitably living theirs as we speak - I will first discuss this quote. People are always telling me that life is what happens while you're busy making other plans (John Lennon, you plagiarisers), and I find it so saddening that so many of us don't heed this warning. Spending a lifetime planning a lifetime is no lifetime at all - that's what makes life so amazing, so special, so unique and so wildly unpredictable. I often fret about my life-diary and what it is I want written in it. In my most honest and most vulnerable moments, I look back at what I have written so far and I feel ambiguous towards it - I think I haven't had the time to make all those big plans yet, so I'm not too disappointed. A source of regret in my life, however, is the fact that it seems quite empty of anything very meaningful - precisely because of the lack of plans and goals (and therefore the lack of plans well-executed and goals reached). I guess that's life, huh? One spent without too many plans seems like a good deal to me.

As you probably know if you read this blog often, however, is that I love dreams. I don't equate my dreams to plans, because my dreams excite and invigorate me and they never settle down - always flitting from one vision of colour and texture and excitement to the next, they are what keeps me happy and motivated and they form a very real part of my life, even though they have not yet been (and might never be) implemented. So, I guess I would say that planning nervously and despairing when your plans fail is a horrible way to spend a lifetime, but a lifetime spent dreaming and weaving these dreams into your reality as a source of inspiration and excitement is one well lived.

In other news, it feels as though these exams have been going on for a lifetime...