Beginnings

A month ago, I left a museum job that I had occupied for 5 years, walking directly into a more boundless existence. A lot of my 20s had been defined and structured by the museum: plunged head-first into museum work, museology, art, the art world, etc., so naturally I was saturated in a rich marinade of knowledges (postcolonialism! historicism! ecologies! art practice!), networks (who knows who knows who) and gratuitous institutional legacies. As it turns out, saturation can sometimes lead to drowning. Not a swift death, but something more akin to quicksand that continues to give way and liquefy with the tiniest of stressors until one day you realise that it has solidified around you, constricting you, and it's hard to remember what drew you in in the first place.

Only in clear-headed moments - that's when I remember - there is/was a certain bliss too. A kind of euphoria that only comes with discovery and encounter. It's that first refreshing wave that passes through you when you see something beautiful and trace its movement. Ink on paper, dye on cloth, enamel glaze on ceramic, carving on rock, broken corners and torn fragments. Then as you peer further, the work generously reveals itself to you, speaking of persons and histories, communities and materials, each articulating volumes about the spaces we inhabit or even ignore. It continues to marvel me that more often than not, something so little can yield so much. Hunched over, squinting at fine pigments and lines, you can know the world. (I feel compelled to add that this only happens for good works of art that are then situated within clever curatorial lines of narrative and inquiry. Bad works of art / exhibitions elicit more feelings of "meh" than "yeah".)

A year ago, I was neither here nor there. The ground had stopped giving way, yet I was still stuck. There are two things that I have realised as I stood at the precipice of adulthood: the first is that growing up means having to make difficult decisions. The second, relatedly, is that there are many decisions to be made and most of the time, if not always, there is no one to make them for you. The latter is not always so obvious. The city grinds and moves with a steady rhythm that is easy to mistake for your own pace and trajectory. Even when you choose to have moments of respite, the perplexing speed in which everything else moves pushes you along, and decisions are made for you. It is also easy then, to pass off the decisions of others for your own, vacillating between what has been necessitated and what appears to be necessitations of your own making.

At this point, I laboured to balance moments of euphoria against the little deaths of museum work, and across another axis, struggled similarly to sift between true circumstance and projected anxieties. It was a time of reckoning entirely cognisant of my own privileges and the opportunities afforded to me. From this starting place, I dreamed and waded through what this season in my life was pulling me towards, what it meant to continue repairing and sharing with others the things I have benefited from through my life, where I had built tents of gratification to cover up insecurity, laying out with some hesitation the things that bring me unspeakable joy which I could never quite claim with absolute confidence, tearing old scripts up over and over and over, calling being into question, calling everything into question.

Questions mean disruption. Where routines of dinner and Netflix had otherwise taken over, I borrowed and bought books to read as furiously as I could after work. I tended to my garden at lunch. I tried softer not harder (thanks to a crucial book by Aundi Kolber). I walked often and freely. I also took breaks and vacations often and freely, soaking up the sun the sky the stars the sea, letting vastness nourish me. I let resistance take me where it led - sometimes to petulance against the strictures of work demands, other times to a place of passive nonchalance, and occasionally to spaces where I could choose the work, texts and art forms that I still devour with glee. I allowed myself to inhabit my body rather than escape on flights of fancy, and I felt every bruise, every ache and every bit of awe and wonder with the unrestrained delight and grief of a child.

And then I quit, because that was where I had arrived at. That arrival also reminded me of Rilke's poem Want the Change which I had come across by chance when I first begun this journey, before quickly forgetting its original text and meaning. The last line in particular however, has stayed with me: "And Daphne, becoming a laurel, dares you to become the wind." In Greek mythology, Daphne, a nimble and beautiful nymph pursued by Apollo, defies his advances by transforming into a laurel tree. Her beauty can no longer be possessed. Yet, she beckons, inviting you to find your own mutability that you may attempt to dance with her. Here the world and the Spirit that upholds the world beckons, that I may too be a pliant witness to ungraspable beauty that comes and goes with all of life. This is where I begin.