These are the opening pages of my current journal, which I started a month ago. It’s already half full.
When I put this collage together I didn’t think my daily entries in the then-blank pages would contain supermarket shortages, travel bans, borders closing, quarantine, lockdown, social distancing, international chaos ... but here we are. Finding a new way forward.
Happy fourth birthday to The Latte Years!
I am so grateful for the love and support this little book has had since it came out in 2016. The “latte years” themselves were a very long time ago now - so long that when I occasionally reread the book I barely recognise myself in the story.
But I have been reminded over the last year, since returning to live in Australia, that one of the most miraculous things about human beings is our ability to heal. It really is possible to recall painful episodes from the past and for the sting to be gone. You will marvel at your resilience. You might even laugh about it, as I did when I flicked through the book the other night!
Even now, four years on, I still get messages from readers of The Latte Years who have felt fired up and inspired to change their lives and chase their own dreams, and I can’t tell you how much this means to me. There is no greater gift for a writer than for their work to be read generously.
So thank you friends, to all of you who’ve bought, read and supported The Latte Years - I am so very, very grateful.
I had every intention of starting 2020 with the old year reflected upon and released, and the new one all manifested and mapped out. But life (my life certainly) is never that neat.
To be honest, the last days of 2019 were just spent soaking up the company of my husband and our family; in the sunshine and the ocean; singing in the car as we drove to the beach; in my garden, watering and weeding; in my kitchen, cooking; reading, listening to music, chilling out and dreaming. Marvelling at how different our lives are compared to two years ago (or even one year ago) and the courage it took to make those changes. Feeling grateful for everything. All the opportunities, all the surprises, all the leaps and risks that paid off, and even the ones that didn’t.
My aim when I started a daily meditation practice was to be in the present more. To dwell less on the past. To not live so much in the future. I guess I got my wish!
But what I know for sure is that if you want to set a goal and make a change, you don’t have to wait for January 1st to do it. The power to transform your life is always inside you and you can access it any time you like.
So here’s to 2020 and all the waiting blank pages. I wonder what they will be filled with.
I have wanted to do my PhD for a very long time. Apparently I even talked about it at school! In my last year of my BA I remember it being all-consuming, and being devastated when, convinced I was speeding merrily along that path, I reached a dead end after my Honours year.
But life went on. As some things ended, I found new beginnings. I moved interstate, then overseas. This time last year, more than 15 years had passed since reaching that dead end. Tom and I were packing up our lives in London, our flights back to Australia booked, his visa safely approved. I was in a routine I’d been in for years, though admittedly at the tail end of it. The daily grind. Happy enough but wondering if this particular dream would ever see the light of day after the best part of two decades in a cupboard.
If anyone had told me a year later I would be enrolled in my PhD and attending seminars at University of Technology Sydney, meeting my supervisor who is one of the most creative, motivating and intelligent women I’ve ever met, well....I would have wanted to believe it. But I still thought it was unlikely.
I entered the UTS building last Thursday and thought I would explode with joy. I sat at tables with some of this country’s brightest minds, most respected historians and highly praised writers and thought.....I belong here. Not in an arrogant way, you understand. I am honoured and beyond grateful to be here, but I also know this is where I’m meant to be. These are my people. This is work I understand and want to do with all my heart.
But this isn’t happening because I was ready. I thought my PhD was still years away. I’m here and doing it because life decided I was ready. After all these years, the space suddenly opened and when it did, I didn’t question it. With encouragement from some wonderful people, I jumped.
This feels like the biggest journey of my life. Bigger than the move to Melbourne or London, bigger than the quest to get fit and healthy, bigger than the marathon. This is the keeping of a promise to my younger self, my most essential self. I want to look back on my life and know that, despite taking the scenic route, I did not fail her.
So if you’re reading this, wondering if your own dream - the biggest dream of your true, most authentic self - will ever happen, please take heart.
Trust yourself and the timing of life.
And never, ever give up.
This is a piece I wrote for my old blog Green Ink, about 10 years ago. As today would have been Margaret Scott’s 85th birthday, I thought I’d republish it here.
When I was sixteen years old, my school held a kind of activity day in late October in the lead up to the end of the year and the Christmas holidays, when attention levels were drooping and we were in need of some fun, with the HSC (Oz equivalent of GCSE) exams on the horizon for most of us. The day was filled with workshops in various recreational activities designed around the theme of "Let Your Lives Speak", as per the Quaker ethos.
I signed up for the creative writing workshop which was to be run by Margaret Scott. Margaret was a poet, novelist and well-known intellectual, both throughout the state and on a national scale, and at this time she was a regular on Good News Week. Students and teachers alike were abuzz with excitement about her coming to the school - I, on the other hand, almost exclusively inhabited the world of nineteenth-century literature at that time (oh, how cool I was!) and didn't really know who she was. I was just interested in doing a creative writing workshop!
She gave us a topic to write on and we were given fifteen minutes to write a piece, and then we went around the room where everyone read theirs aloud. I was surrounded by students who I think quite fancied themselves as the top dogs of the arts at the school, and most of them eagerly volunteered to go first, with Margaret offering some brief comments, but nothing along the lines of "oh my goodness, that is amazing for one so young", which I think they were expecting! (I'm sure you all went to school with people like that!)
It came to my turn and I read my piece. When I finished, no one said anything.
Margaret started saying something, but then she trailed off and looked directly at me. Her eyes were so perceptive I felt like she could see right through me.
"Would you read that again?" she asked.
Being an insecure teenager with no confidence in my abilities, my immediate thought was "why? What's wrong with it?!" I felt very stupid! But I seem to recall the rest of the people in the room looking at me with a mixture of awe and envy. So, I read it again. Of the whole group, I was the only one asked to read again. And then the piece was discussed for almost the rest of the session, until one of the teachers supervising remembered that there were a few more people to get through! I can't even remember what it was about, but I seem to recall everyone's comments on the hidden symbolism in my piece making me sound far more in command of the craft than I actually was.
I never told anyone about it at the time because as I say, my first reaction was to be embarrassed, but I look back on that episode now with pride. Sometimes in my low moments I think back to it, and think that if a piece I wrote made a fine writer and scholar such as Margaret Scott have to think twice, then maybe I do have something.
It's a memory I treasure. Thank you, Margaret.
She passed away in 2005. It was only in the last few years of her life that I got to know her through her work, not just this memory. I love her poems, particularly the housework ones (which I'm trying to find a copy of) and I recommend trying to find her novel Family Album - if you're in Australia you should be able to get a copy from most libraries. It's a lovely book.
Do you have a moment like this that you look back on, to spur you forward?
~ ~ ~ ~
CASTAWAY
Sometimes a neighbour's look, a post-card, a telephone call
will carry you up the shore of another life
and leave you gaping amazed at sudden jungle
a world away from the dolorous desk
the spruce back-yard, the brick-and-tile in Rosebud.
This glimmering shade's cacophonous with
unfamiliar names of long-dead pets and teachers,
side-streets in distant cities and faithless lovers.
The canopy's alive with flitting shapes unknown
beyond the confines of this island.
Here is the castaway's camp, his palisade,
contrivances he's fashioned year by year,
stores he saved from the wreck of his old ship
before it sank from sight beyond the reef.
Fragments of once-proud sails now patch his roof.
A saw, a pannikin hang by the bed
where every day he wakes alone at dawn
to a view of mountains. Those peaks rise
over the trees in a blue scrawl whose message
you seem to have read from a different angle
on the wall of sky to the east of your own island.
© Margaret Scott
