Change the way you look at things and the things you look at
change.
This
is what they call a cliché, an overused and wise phrase translating a clever
little idiom into a saying that has been heard in one form or another too many
times for it to mean anything to you anymore. You know what it’s trying to say
so well you probably just skipped over those italics, your brain ticking the ‘
I know what that means’ box so fast, you probably didn’t even read it.
The
trick with a cliché is to be able to deduct its meaning, because as with most
truisms, they are, well, they’re true.
If
I was asked to choose three words to describe this picture, I’d probably go for
tranquil, green, natural. Maybe calming, peaceful and cool; the point being,
it’s a nice picture and most people wouldn’t mind chilling out around some
place like it for an afternoon away from the busy and stressful lives we seem
to lead.
I
took this picture. And I took this picture in Romford.
Yep,
you heard me right, Romford.
Romford
can be an ugly place if that is what you choose to see, and in all honesty, ugly
is what jumps out at you without doing too much choosing. There’s a lot of
concrete and cars, brightly lit shopping centres, supermarkets and B&Q’s
(where wood comes from, as one of the kids in my class today told me
authoritatively. He was genuinely flabbergasted when I told him that actually,
it came from trees.)
New billboards sprout from the ground
like weeds promising ‘delightful/stunning/beautiful one and two bedroom
properties’ in every spare square inch and sometimes I think I can feel the ground
suffocating. Or maybe it’s just me that can’t breathe.
To find some space in a land where
space has a profit margin can be tricky.
But I have a place that growing up around here for every concrete mixer
that pours forth, for every first-time-buyer plan shoved down your throat, there
are still a hundred trees worth of B&Q wood growing forgotten and left
alone.
The Chase. On first glance, an unremarkable piece of land
wedged between a YMCA and a learner drivers centre, houses looming either side
up to the forest’s edge. My Dad would take us there as kids on Sunday
afternoons, collecting interesting pieces of wood (I still don’t know what he
means by that) and picking blackberries every September, me and my brothers
dragging plastic buckets through the bushes and producing on average 24 pots of
jams a year which then filled every inch of cupboard space, driving my poor mum
crazy until the following April when it would finally run out.
There’s a stream that
runs right the way through from one end to the other, starting as the River Rom
(where Romford gets it’s name from don’t you know) and trailing off into Harrow
lodge park somewhere, and I have swam in that stream where it widens in the
cover of the trees on a summer afternoon as a child with my friends, unfazed by
rats and broken glass, being supervised by my dad who never did seem to have
that built in danger radar that everybody else’s parent’s did. We, aged eight,
thought this was brilliant.
The water trickles through stones and banks giving life to
nettles, flowers and little shrubs, home to a jungle of birds so loud you can’t
even hear the air traffic, trees growing around that line of beauty covering it
completely from all buildings and generally, people. This for me, is my most
favourite spot, because here on a little wooden bridge, it doesn’t matter which
way you turn, you can’t see a single house or even hear the road, and you could
be anywhere in the world but on the
edge of Zone 6.
A huge black sewage pipe crosses the river bank over towards
the YMCA, and looking at the height of it with adult eyes I shudder at the
memory of me and my brothers walking across it as kids, arms balancing us like
three small tight-rope walkers, fearless of the rocks and shallow water below,
because Dad was standing at the other side, yelling ‘you won’t fall!” Parents
are the Gods of childhood, all-seeing, all-knowing, all loving, and since he
sounded pretty sure we weren’t going to slip and crack our heads open, we believed
him. (I’m sure Mum would have disagreed...)
On a sunny day, you can guarantee that shopping centres will be jammed, beer gardens will be overflowing and you’ll be waiting for your food in The Harrow for at least 45minutes, but this green bit of land with no signposts, it is always empty. I’ve never seen more than five or six people at a time from one end to the other, the odd person walking their dog in a hurry, the odd teenager on their bike up to no good in among the dark trees.
It
wasn’t until the second or third time that I wandered through here that I
realised the true joy of what I had discovered- I was in the middle of Romford.
Romford. I was here, right here where
I lived, which was somewhere pretty. My imagination didn’t need to do any work,
I didn’t need to pretend I was in a faraway tranquil place- everything I wanted
to see was right in front of my face.
It’s
not about selective hearing or wishful thinking. I can choose whether to see
Romford as an ugly place to live, or a pretty one because I can choose to walk
through The Chase or down Upper Rainham Road. I can choose how I look at things. And that simple sentence,
whether it’s regurgitated to me in a cliché, a bumper sticker, an Americanised
self-help dvd, however it arrives at my feet, this is one of the most important
skills I am ever going to try and learn.
This
already may look like a small page of cliché ideas; nice-sounding but
un-practical advice that you don’t see being applicable to your unfolding life.
But the truth is every day is compilation of small decisions that physically
shape the day you’re going to have, the life you are going to live, and it’s up
to you what you do with this. It’s up to you whether you keep in your awareness
your attitude, how you treat others and the environment you’ve put yourself in,
or whether you just operate on a default setting. From when you either growl or smile at the guy at the ticket gate when your oyster card doesn’t work, when you decide to either mock or compliment that person you find difficult, when you decide whether or not to buy the beauty magazine that seems to do the opposite of making you feel beautiful, whether you walk on the road or through The Chase, these are the decisions that create your world; the world in front of your face, so do yourself a favour- choose carefully.
You
get to choose how you think about things, the type of people you spend time
with, what you read or don’t read. (No one is forcing you to read The Mail
Online) You get to choose your job, it doesn’t choose you. You don’t owe it
anything- on the contrary, your job owes you a pay check every month for doing
it. But it is you that gets to decide whether to do that same job every day
until your 65, or have 65 different jobs in your lifetime. Neither road is
right or wrong, (whatever anybody tells you) but to dislike the one you’re
walking along and do nothing about it most certainly is.
Life
isn’t a series of events that come to pass with the same amount of fickle
fortune and chance as the weather. You either find something beautiful, or you
find something ugly. They both exist, and choosing one over the other doesn’t
deny the other’s existence, but in choosing you are navigating yourself,
plotting your route towards happiness or misery, towards average or
extraordinary, and that choice never ends. It happens all day every day.
Take
that job on like it’s the career opportunity of a lifetime. Because whatever
your parents or your boss or your bank balance tell you, it’s the only career
worth investing your soul into.
No comments:
Post a Comment