LIFE LESSONS

LIVE UNCONVENTIONALLY

Live unconventionally so that you die having lived.

What do I mean?

There's a joke in our family: "She's off to Europe to find herself." It's a 'thing' here. A gap year between the years of schooling stretching behind, and the years of Tertiary 'studies' stretching ahead.

Off they all go. Some to Europe, others to Asia, others still, on various 'volunteer missions' to this starving nation or that under-developed one. Hoping to 'find' some meaning to this thing called self. Not realising there's not only nothing to find but also... that they're perpetuating a cycle of living which guarantees failure to 'arrive' anywhere.

Listen: You have already found yourself. When you exited your mother, it was YOU. No one else. Wasn't some shadow needing to spend the rest of its life seeking a skin and some bones; it was you, complete.

And YOU are caught in a perpetual state of 'getting ready for' or 'searching for' or 'finding...' or "living each day as it comes". Understand this:  It is death coming at you each day you hover, wondering who you are or how to find yourself- not life.

It's not your fault. Your parents did it, their parents did it, the entire human history depended on everyone doing just this: Moving life forward. Sacrificing their lives so that this constancy is maintained.

Oh but! Those who manage to escape! To throw off the shackles and LIVE- not to progress humanity or societal expectations or any particular cause-celebre... or to get mired in "woe is me" but to live their life as fully and as broadly as possible!

I may have mentioned Boyd to you in the past. He lived with us for a year down at the coast, when he was 16 or thereabouts. Then he left. Now, he is back with us, moved into the spare room with his girlfriend, Molly.

Yesterday, a Sunday Morning and the first day with full sun and some meagre warmth, we sat on one of the back porches on my brother's hand-me-down outdoor setting and enjoyed glasses of "Iced chocolate chilli tea", something I'd bought on our most recent supermarket spree and which Boyd and Dylan decided was befitting the day outside.

"Mum, come sit with us. I made you a glass too."

So I emerged and I sat. In my pink robe, hands splattered with white paint from my new bout of repurposing my few 'period pieces' of furniture to suit the new much larger bedoom, a beanie on my head since my room is the last to be reached by the central heating unit in this new home and thus... always on the chilly side- and an organic tobacco mix I'd discovered the day before at a tobacconist.

I knew this was to be no social breakfast gathering. I knew what Dylan wanted from me. And what Boyd needed.

"Boyd..."

"Yeah?" This, head down, fidgeting with one of his now almost at waist-level dreadlocks. He had a fair idea of what was coming, too.

"Why are you broke four days after your last pay? Why did you come to me before and ask to borrow some money till Tuesday?"

"I dunno."

"How much do you make a week?" (He's currently a third-year apprentice mechanic.)

"Six hundred and fifty dollars."

Dylan's jaw dropped. (He gets $260 a fortnight, as an allowance from the Government to help with his studies.)

"That's two thousand six hundred a month. You are nineteen. You have earned... maybe sixty thousand dollars in your three-year apprenticeship? But today, you are broke."