It's still true today...

I wrote this back on July 12, 2017, but it’s just as true today as it was then - and my time here in England currently reminds me so:

Something of the old working-class Derby boy in me tempers everything I do with reflexive, hard-wired chastisements – don’t get above your station, lad. Don’t go getting a big ego on you. Nobody likes a show-off…

My mode is to question everything, learn from it, and then to try and reach higher, and work harder. It is intended to improve what I do, but never to attain personal accolade. It’s not about me. I don’t seek admiration for myself, but I judge the merits of my work on how it is received – after I have already torn it to shreds critically! – and I do have high hopes for it. I want it to be good. No. Better than that. I want, one day, for my work to be great.

Just recently I’ve been caught in a tide of extraordinary coincidences of timing, resulting in my work receiving an unexpected amount of attention. The part chance played in this cannot be ignored, and often sad things led to astonishing silver-linings. When all those years of relentlessly chipping away finally led to a breach in the edifice, the light that shone through was more blinding and beautiful than I could have anticipated. I’m still processing the way everything unfolded, because it really does seem that sometimes talent and hard work are not – ever – enough. To extend my analogy, I’m not completely convinced the breach was there through my chipping. It feels more like it was always there, I just didn’t know how to find it.

I have so much to tell about this recent experience. It will read like a fiction, because it is too preposterous, too filled with coincidence and kismet. I find myself repeating that old cliché like a mantra: the stars aligned, the stars aligned. But they did not. This was nothing like a straight path, or the steady strength of a guiding hand. It did not feel fated, and it came with its share of pain, frustration and hardship. And yet something undeniably magical did happen to me. Something profoundly shifted, like the universe noticed and for once nodded a more benevolent head.

May you all find these moments. And may you have the sense to take note of it, and the humility to gift life, and simply living, the necessary plaudits. For once there seemed to be a little natural justice, and a reprieve from an overly-long existential crisis I had almost started to take for granted and to accept as terminal. I’m glad I was wrong.