I deeply over-adore the line that says every exit is an entrance somewhere else. But I deeply over-adore it because it comes from Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” play and every syllable of that is one I wish I’d written.<\/p>\n
What I feel just around precisely 100% the opposite about is all of the other lines in the world that are similar but presented as instead as life lessons. Every cloud has silver bollocks, or something similar.<\/p>\n
They are always said in an encouraging and well-meaning way, and they are often addressed to someone who is in far too bad a state to argue the semantics of it all. They often go on posters.<\/p>\n
But.<\/p>\n
Earlier this week, again in the middle of well-meaning-ness-osity, I read someone saying that there is a reason why you meet everyone you do in your life. Something about how either you are there to affect them, or they are to affect you.<\/p>\n
Explain to me how that applies to a domestic abuse victim. <\/p>\n
I don’t just mean that there are exceptions, though, I mean I think, I insist, that the entire concept is dangerously flawed. The real truth is that there are people you meet and people you don’t, and that’s it, that’s all.<\/p>\n
There is no fate-based supernatural guiding force that means we were born to interact with this person and not that one. <\/p>\n
So I just had a half-hour talk with a producer I really like and with whom I could talk TV forever, especially once I learned we both loved Northern Exposure. I am influenced by her, I see she will have a direct and visible impact on the script of mine we were discussing, but she wasn’t drawn to me by some fateful guiding hand.<\/p>\n
No, I sought her out. <\/p>\n
You seek out some people, some people seek out you, you meet others by chance, others meet you by chance, and there is a world — literally — of folks you never meet, see or even hear of.<\/p>\n
All of this and the entrance\/exit line put this in my head: there is another one that goes something like “every time a door closes, another one opens.” Myself, I’d be looking at the draughts in that house.<\/p>\n
But also it’s cripplingly trite and I think damaging. Say you’ve just lost your job, you’ll doubtlessly hear this said by someone and if no other door has yet opened, you don’t think they’re wrong, you think you are. <\/p>\n
I’ve lost jobs countless times and as it happens, so far, each time I’ve ultimately been glad and even wished it had happened sooner. Sometimes a lot sooner. But that’s not because some other door magically opened or I bumped into someone who transformed my life that same afternoon.<\/p>\n
It’s because I sought out what I did next. <\/p>\n
We seriously deny ourselves some praise here. There isn’t a deity sorting out our P45s, there isn’t a reason you and that neighbour nod when she’s out walking her dog. There is just you and me, getting on with it, getting on with our lives, and managing to do something about whatever happens to us.<\/p>\n
That said, I’m glad I met you here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Cows coming home, clouds having liniings, we are better than this. Continue reading