Anything You Want To Be.

It’s a new year.  A time for making decisions.  These are the times when the world is full of choice.  Your own decisions.  Whatever is happening right now in your life is what you have chosen to happen.  If you want anything you can have it.  If you want to do something you have the choice to do it or not to do it.  That’s it.  You can do anything you want to do.  You can be anything you want to be.  Choose it.  Do it.  If you want it bad enough, it will happen.

Unless of course, it can’t happen.  And unless of course you can’t do it, and unless of course you can’t be it.  There is a young woman for example who lives in a third world country who has recently been made redundant.  She’s one of the lucky ones.  She has a university degree in Marketing and actually had a job for four years as a PA to the CEO.  The company went bankrupt and now there’s nothing.  Does she want another job?  Has she tried to get another job?  Oh yes.  Can she get one? No.  At least not yet.  Not soon enough.

She wants to relocate to New Zealand or Australia, to land a good position in a stable firm, to advance her career and settle into a life less desperate.  But with her father murdered when she was a young girl, her mother barely getting by as a caregiver in Dubai, and her left support her younger sister through high school then varsity, her options are narrowed.  Those blessed with the natural born freedoms, do the kindness of urging the less fortunate: "do what YOU want to do,  be what YOU want to be.  It's your choice."  Meanwhile, the real people of the real world be who they have to be, in order to do what they must.

Feet On The Ground, Head In The Clouds.

On a sweltering Sunday afternoon in Auckland, my friend and I sat, alone, in a tiny basement theatre watching Land of the Long White Cloud, by Florian Habicht.  It is a beautiful, beautiful film about a fishing contest on Ninety Mile Beach.  For five days, the “contestants” (for want of a better word) stand toe to toe with the toheroa and tuatua casting their lines into the boiling west coast surf.  They peer into the ocean . . . concentrating, meditating, waiting.  They dream of catching a fish.  The biggest snapper.

Pieces to camera present these “simple” folk as thinkers, philosophers and theorists.  Sure enough, their social and political commentaries are informed by meaningful things - the roar of the breakers, the huge cloud-filled sky.  A local man shares the secret to his wisdom, his key to a beautiful life: “keep your feet on the ground and your head in the clouds.”    Ossie Perie a large, grey haired man finally catches a snapper. After eight years without a bite it's not the big one, not even a big one, but it's a snapper nonetheless.

Just over an hour later we emerged into the city and it’s bristling, cloudless summer.  The streets were pouring with people, the road choking with motor vehicles.  There was movement everywhere like white noise . . . static.  My head began to burn and I found myself asking why.  It all seemed profoundly unimportant and I wished myself onto the windswept sands, to stand beneath the colour chromatic skies of the far north.  Just to catch a fish.