Eyes of A Child

Are you an abandoner? I’m not asking whether you leave a trail of weeping hearts in your wake (though more power to you if you do!) but rather if you start things and erm… ahem, don’t finish them?
I ask because Finley is driving me nuts. He is a consummate abandoner and a person has to worry if he got this worrying trait off his Mother.

Well of course he did.

If ever there was a woman with commitment problems it is I. Though I can stick like glue to human beings, show me a project and I will show you the remnants of enthusiasm gone so wild, I had no choice but to devour it endlessly until the taste of failure bored me and I it was necessary to move on to the next delicious fad: a trait I share apparently with that naughty Charles Saatchi, who is said to fall in love with projects and people only half as quick as he sets them aside and moves on to something less boring instead.

Though I am rather offending myself by drawing comparisons with a man with a penchant for chocking his wife in public, and then announcing his quick sticks divorce in a Sunday rag, truth is I really rather do sympathize with the feeling that when he’s done, he is done. I feel no obligation to the great unfinished: the diaries and journals I have abandoned, the knitting projects that bewildered me, the food fads that have come and gone, the tchoickes that now live under my bed because I fell out of love with them or the books I give away half read, never again to wonder how they finished because I couldn’t give a damn.

“God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things” – Picasso

I used to worry about my lifestyle commitment issues and then the universe delivered Finn and in among all the many, many lessons he has taught me in his (almost) ten years on this planet, was this one: like Picasso, Finn recognizes that there is art in the search for that which fits our most authentic self. So while I might be having hissy fits, left,  right and centre about all the cricket gear he insisted on having when he was mad for cricket- the games, the books and other sports gear he has accumulated and abandoned in his wake, I know he is just experimenting: finding what fits, what feels good and floats his curly topped boat.

I see that he is just totally madly passionate about the world in which we live, that he sees opportunities for joy around every corner and wants to keep on experimenting and practicing until he happens upon that which feels right for him…

Life is terribly short isn’t it? So the only real way to live is with the eyes of a child: eager and un-embarrassed about failure. Not willing to keep on keeping on trying at something that just doesn’t fit, but absolutely willing to see life as one big, beautiful experiment on the journey to our precious, authentic selves.

This week then I am taking up cross stitch, veganism and dumping last years journal in the skip. 

Me and you? We are works in progress. Gorgeous, precious works of art. Make no apologies for it Sweetheart…