Most all of these success stories will someday end up as features on the glossy sheets of a magazine, touting their rags-to-riches story for the world over to lust lovingly at their fame and beauty, all the while wishing they were the ones being documented.

But here’s the thing. One day that magazine will be old. One day the pages will get ripped out, scrunched up and used to wipe the smears off hotel windows. Or perhaps that glossy parchment will fare a little better and be stored under some books at the bottom of a bookshelf. Or maybe it’ll end up as a fire-starter in a regular old fire in a regular old house of a regular old lady.

So, now we come to this awkward conclusion: Success doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevant. Hyped up, media-biased, irrelevancy. These people–with their great deeds, songs, works of art, speeches and flash houses–will eventually be superseded. Someone will outshine them. Something will coerce the guy with the spotlight to shine it elsewhere. Someday it’ll all end. And when it does . . . that’s when there still needs to be something left. We all want to succeed at what we do. It’s natural to want to live the best life you can. But success gains you nothing. Nothing of importance, that is.

It’s easy to wish away the moments right here, right now, in favour of the intangible future wafting somewhere overhead in la-la land. That thing that seems so close you can almost taste it, yet it’s not quite here. It can feel like you’re on the verge of something exciting–constantly in *transition* into something new and more desirable. Forget about that. Dream, yes, of course. Always dream. But tell a story that holds meaning now. Not tomorrow once you succeed, because remember, success is ultimately irrelevant. Nobody cares about the rich guy with the notorious lack of character. His story is lousy. And nobody remembers the guy who stole from others to gain monetary success. This guy didn’t sacrifice anything for others or go without so that someone might be fed or give anything away. For him, it was all about taking.

True success comes down to two simple things: 1. There’s no better time to live than today, and 2., there’s no better person to live for than someone other than yourself.

As an avid Mentalist watcher, I know exactly what you’re thinking. About time! And indeed it has been another ginormous gap between blogs. But I’m back (for the millionth time) with some poetry. Maybe listening to Adele has been a little inspiring.

Flee the White City: A Book of Poetry

Here’s a poem. Take it as an offering for not blogging in so long.

Blue Behind Rain

Alone he sat, on the brink of fear,
surrounded by a sea of charcoal and
concrete under a smoke-grey sky
Alone from the world under a smoke-grey sky
Lost to the world under a smoke-grey sky
Troubled for the world under a smoke-grey sky

Quiet he stood, on the edge of depression,
surrounded by a storm of pale and
plastic under a blood-red sky
Quiet to the world under a blood-red sky
Tender to the world under a blood-red sky
Patient for the world under a blood-red sky

Secluded he walked, on the verge of discovery,
surrounded by an ocean of glitter and
gloss under a robins-egg sky
The charcoal and concrete passing him by
The wilting of searching drawing nigh
‘Ere a butterfly chose to fly

Breathless he stood, on the water’s edge,
life just a stone throw out to sea,
surrounded by rivers of charcoal and
concrete under a smoke-grey sky
The butterfly there, alive, right before his eyes
Happily contrasting the grey of the sky
Quietly contradicting the death in the sky
Subtly conflicting with the insipidity in the sky
Perplexingly invisible to the masses walking by
Unseeing eyes heavy under the weight of the lie
Yet there it flew, that lonely butterfly,
the truth quelling the lie

It was the art in a storm
The blue behind rain
The joy in suffering
The beauty in pain

It was spring conquering cold
Relief after a scare
The blind receiving sight
The coward divorcing fear

It was the silence after the clatter
The dawn after the dark
The stream through the desert
The sweet, sweet song of the lark

It was the calm after the fight
The young honouring the old
Truth transcending the lie
Creativity fleeing the mould

It was the sun cresting the horizon
The laugh after the cry
The crescendo of an anthem
The ocean touching the sky

It was the leaper being cleansed
Love waking the dead
Blood covering sin
Poverty being fed

It was deity becoming man
Heaven kissing earth
Hope amidst wickedness
The mysterious virgin birth

But mostly it was peace during confusion
Desperation discarding warning
It was beauty for ashes
And joy in the morning

It then does not particularly stand to reason that one of the very first things this angelic and strangely mysterious new life does after taking its first breath is to cry. It’s almost as if the poor child is protesting being brought into this place we call earth. A place governed by death and riddled with decay. Those tears could just as easily be summed up as a newborn’s dependency on its mother for food, comfort and love, which is true; but to me it seems that at all stages of life, humans have a perpetual sadness hidden somewhere inside them. It’s as if we’re born with a knowledge ingrained in our very DNA that something is not quite right with the world. Something is muddled, unjust, fanciful, fractured, fictional, flawed. Then comes the journey through this flawed set of circumstances called life with the ups, the downs and the somewhere-in-betweens; then, frequently, a pensive, retrospective deathbed where one wonders what just happened. What was that flower that just faded? Where did my life disappear to?

Usually at this stage of thinking one turns, perhaps even subconsciously, to the atheistic argument that “If God designed the world, he wouldn’t have designed a world so frail and flawed.” Which, to be quite honest, I would agree with CS Lewis’ sentiments when we states that this is the strongest argument for the case of there being no God. Because–and herein lies the real rub–there are also the newborns who never get a chance at crying or even seeing or hearing, because they are born mute, blind or deaf. Injustice. It’s what makes us relate to movie plots, buy into advertising gimmicks and get our hair ruffled and have our blood run hot at the deeds of evil men. It’s what can, if left unchecked, spiral us into the choking abyss of unforgiveness. Simply, it’s a cause to stumble and fall while trying to marry in your mind a good and just and true God with a distraught world.

My sense of justice piques and my heart breaks at the fact that there are people, this very second, being sold into the sex trade, dying of hunger, mourning the death of a loved one, gritting their teeth at a natural disaster which just took out everything they own. It’s my sense of justice, the same as yours, the same as every mans, that tries to convince me the world is a cold and bitter place. Yet, to put God on trial (which everyone does at some stage in their life) seems a preposterous endevour. If he is the God we paint him to be, then he is omniscient and omnipotent, which, by definition, means he did not and could not have designed the world this way. There must be another explanation.

Holding my newborn nephew in my arms, his tiny hands clenched into balls, his minuscule feet twitching, his miniature eyelids closed in peaceful sleep, I couldn’t hold back the tears. Because right there, in that moment which appeared as the embodiment of serenity–perfect peace and joy and safety seeming to shimmer in his complexion–I knew this was a picture, or perhaps just a blurry reflection, of the pure waters of life before we muddied them with evils unspeakable. The moments of deep joy when we are not simply alive but truly living for the first time make me realise that there is a God. And He loves deeply enough to rescue us out of our concrete prison with mud and vomit and tears smeared all over the walls.

No, I can never prove God–I can’t pull him out of a hat or conjure up a magic prayer to bring him to earth–and I don’t fancy the thought of getting red in the face attempting to do so, but I can testify to the joy in my heart, which can never be taken away, though all the tragedies of the world and the injustices plaguing each and every life on earth will surely make an attempt to.

But really, could there ever be beauty without pain? Is the world a complete screw up, or is it perhaps a masterpiece idea, set in motion by a great mastermind? A miracle that no one truly understands?

Often I find myself loving the ones who are easy: the ones with immediate affinity to personality types I enjoy, the beautiful, the lovely, the caring. But sometimes it’s the most unlovely, who, once you discover what makes their world turn, offer you a special colour and part of life you could never have discovered any other way.

I find it so fascinating and strangely humbling to consider that every life on earth gives off a ripple that affects others. Sometimes this ripple merges with other peoples’ ripples when their stories collide and they become part of each others’ lives. But then sometimes this ripple rebounds off certain people because they seem as insignificant supporting characters to the main story. These are the types of people who rarely get discovered, but, in my conviction, hold the rarest beauty. So many things determine who we meet and who we pass by, but the thing I desire is for the ones who seem impossible to love to be the ones which my ripple doesn’t reflect, but attract. I don’t want to conform their story to fit the characters in mine; I want to let it play out and let the untold part of the narrative speak for itself.

This little fascination of mine gets even scarier when flying in airplanes. Cars, cities and regions turn to matchbox-size toys as the plane gains altitude and enters the low-lying cloud wisps. My canvas seems to shrink as I rediscover again how big the world is, how small we are, and how many people I share this thing called existence with. But if you look at us from above, you’ll see that our lives are structured around not meeting others, but keeping our closely boxed in properties and routines and lives jealously guarded and made more and more comfortable. Don’t get me wrong here, I realise this aerial view doesn’t conclude how everyone lives their lives, but this is just how things appear from 10,000 feet.

There’s this person I met just recently who has quickly become one of those rare things called best friends: the ones you can stay up late with and share about deeper things without fear that it will be gossiped in another conversation at a later date. I recently discover that this new friend and I have had a friend in common for the last seven years. The implications of this, when I considered it, are really quite profound. Would my life and the life of my new friend be different if our mutual friend had introduced us seven years ago instead of us meeting just recently? What if we had met earlier, completely hated each other, and this had in turn pushed us in two completely different directions to where we are today. We possibly wouldn’t even recognise that theoretical life if we had the chance to see it because of how different it would be to what we now know as normality.

This mind-boggling, Inception-like thought pattern only ever seems to let me draw two conclusions. One, our choices we make every single day really, really, really do matter. Two, love is a risk which should be taken more often.

But what does love look like that invests into others’ lives on a regular basis? Will this age-old philosophical word ever be all we crack it up to be in poems and songs and snippets of idealistic behaviour? To be quite honest, I don’t know. That’s it, nothing more. I don’t know.

But I’m willing to give finding out a go.

The interesting thing about my grandmother is that, even though the experiences with her I can recall the easiest are the ones when she was afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease, that’s not what I remember her for. I don’t remember her for her forgetful ways or strange behavioural patterns while she was sick; I remember her for her beautiful heart, caring words and loving ways from when I knew her as a child.

This realisation plagued me while thinking about this, because, to be completely honest, a lot of my priorities right now aren’t to do with the responses I bring to the trials I face. And, as big as the problems in my life seem right now, in the space of a few months they will be irrelevant, but my reaction to them will carry on for generations.

One day our children’s children will be having conversations about you and me. What will they remember us for?

Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
Psalm 90:12

There’s cursing and lying, it’s a nonsensical playground harbouring the foul fragrance of bitterness
There are fingers and toes performing devastating woes under the influence of derrogatory undertones
Where are the hearts inside these bitter shells
The hearts and shells are breaking against the rocks tonight
Fossils line the shore, can’t you see we are finite beings

Do we know, and do we care that we don’t know
The gaze of the nation is in love with the quick, and the dead it brings to the compassionate ones’ very doorsteps
Or were they all too busy watching the passing lanes, the mirrors and the time-savers to care
Our impatience has temporarily been abated, while our sneakers bear marks of stress and struggle, striving for hope, a goal, a dissatisfied distraction

From somewhere an unspeakable urge comes to run out of this concrete maze
There is someone here who can show us the way, believe me when I say
They think he is weak, a feeble man, giving in to imagery and magic again

Is it his loss of blood that confuses the logical mindset prevalent to us all?

Stop blaming the cure for disease and crimes stimulated first by gunpowder and steel and tactless foolishness disguised as wisdom so brittle
Biting the hand that feeds and placing more fast food into greedy hands, to give the strong man a chance to cheat life just one more time
There’s killing, there’s laughing, there’s crying and then there’s living
Why should I detest the miracle, the living love, the fine form of simply being without hate
Remove hatred’s thorn, remove that bitter barb, death’s sting stolen by that thief in the night

Boredom has the heart in a headlock and happiness is baring its diseased fangs again
It comes for a minute or an hour or so before evaporating into sulfuric dust flakes
But raise your head and raise mine with your words to save the nations raging
Once more putting actions to this love we have heard of and hold so dear to our hearts

Let’s drink together and offer this to everyone and all men: life, free as a fair-headed stallion

We’ll never thirst again

The Astronaut

Floating out here, isolation my closest
friend of nothing, the reputation of no one
Not that it matters out here, anyway
Thoughts come in drips and splashes; I
can feel something, some kind of significant
presence, thick in the air

Floating out here, isolation my closest
friend or foe, the floating turquoise and jade sphere, impeding
my precarious emotions like a monster
Floating out here, isolation my closest
friend, I look down and spy you there on that
insignificant ball, spinning lonesome like a star in the night
sky, your thoughts and intents a pinprick on the grand plan

I can’t see the sparkle of whitewash, or hear the
ambience of crickets chirping, or smell
the exotic, cultural nuances of the oriental markets, or taste
the exquisite cuisine at my favourite restaurant
It all seems so superfluous up here, anyway

Spinning out in isolation, my closest friend
and nearest companion the stillness in this pale, colourless cabin
Filled with awe, because I could trace this as the most
defining moment in my life
I’ve heard talk of a God who made the world in my
sojourns back on the surface of that distant place
Never would I have believed He was true till
now, seeing home so small, so fragile, so distant
I can put my finger to my eye and blot
it from ever breathing

Floating out here, isolation my closest
friend, I’m lost in the deepest resonances of thought,
my soul is stilled
Every moment sees me feeling smaller and
smaller, because I know someone sees
and He loves
How He loves
those
little
tiny
people