It's a Long and Winding Road

First steps, first words - no matter how long the journey looks, it cannot happen without those beginnings.  Yet those first steps can be so hard to take - even if they are not beginning steps, but recommencement steps.  Especially when they are such - when the first stage of a journey is over, and you have stopped to draw breath, it is easy to notice again just how steep is the road ahead, and recall how rugged were some of the places along the road thus far.

It often seems steeper and rougher after a break than it did before you set out in the first place.  When you looked at the distant peak and imagined yourself at its summit, you could not have known just how many times the road would descend into valleys and dark places before climbing back into sunshine and fresh breezes. Achievements are made, the right words and phrases are found, and victories won - you gain the strength and enthusiasm to push on.

So I am back at my own desk, able to wander out into my own garden - though that keeps trying to distract me with all the tasks that need doing.  If I need a break from writing it is safer to amble along the creek bank.  There I can pause among the tree trunks and wait for the minnows and tadpoles to abandon the caution my arrival has provoked, and resume their browsing in the shallows.

If I stand still enough for long enough the bigger fish might cruise past - striped, red finned shadows, visible only when they move - and send the minnows scurrying for cover again - or the family of Kookaburras who patrol the district may bring their new youngsters to the creek bank to practice their foraging skills.  Standing still allows the mosquitoes to find me, of course - but the presence of mozzies brings those sparkling, translucent, blue-jewelled hunters, the damselflies.

One landed on my shoulder the other morning - my khaki shirt resembling a shrub, perhaps.  It sat there for a while - a delicate, perfectly still moment of transparency framed by fine, black lines, and punctuated by a tiny patch of vivid, sky blue; a jewel with wings  - until I turned my head a little too far towards it.  In the serenity of that shady creek bank I encountered something new - the tiny but distinct 'snap' of a damselfly's wings as it launched itself.  It was back a moment later, circling my legs in pursuit of the gathering mosquitoes - I think it caught one, as it flew off and settled on a twig, with something in the basket of its furled legs.

While I stood and watched the water glide slowly along, other things settled on me, too - memories, thoughts, ideas, and notions that busyness and noise can hold at bay.  Like the damselfly and the minnows, stillness suits them.

 
One of those notions related to one of the current news and discussion trends - manhood, toxic or otherwise; what it might be, how it is constructed and performed.  Is there a single, universal definition of "a man"? There wasn't one when I was growing up and asking myself what I was supposed to be doing to become "a man" - the culture around me contained so many different, often contradictory, versions.

What is "manly" behaviour?  I realised that it was one of the driving issues in the novel I am second-drafting at the moment - though I had not set out with it in mind as a theme.  Each of the five or six main male characters in the book have their own version of manhood, even if they have trouble living up to it. A couple of the characters have significant problems with their own expectations of themselves in this regard, as well as their perceptions of what others might expect of them.

Well - now I am going to have to go back through the draft with this notion in mind, and see what else needs to be addressed.  Is this going to take me into another gloomy valley, or another sunny upland?  On the road again........