fwf – Nathan Power

On The Passing of Time

This year starts to lose steam. As with every year before, the time between Christmas and New Years is a blank vacuous space. A day-less, date-less expanse where I attempt to make plans but fight diminishing energy levels and low motivation and a lethargic food-induced stupor that pins me to the couch, the bed, the grassy knoll.

Someone recently described this time period as the perineum of the year, a succinct but all too graphic description that fails to take in to account the fear and self-doubt and sheer terror that the passage of time brings on. Humans invented time, codified it, tied it neatly into little boxes that fit in to the rows and columns of a million calendars. We adorned these calendars with images of cute animals and sexy firefighters and Leunig cartoons, little realising that in the codification of time we had crafted our own fate. Now we mark the aging of our bodies by ticking off the years, posting snapshot photos of our decline to social media and signposting the major world events in retrospect: there the year man walked the moon, here the year we struggled through a global pandemic.

On Christmas

I remember Christmases, scattered across the globe: childhood Christmas in Yemen with the tiniest sprig of a tree, wrapped gently in a single layer of tinsel and hand-carved ornaments. Presents built from backyard scraps, nailed together into the shape of boat or a bow and arrow or a bedside table. Presents burnt from friend�s CD collections and repackaged with hand-written labels. Presents bought in Australia and carried thousands of kilometres, hidden in luggage, stored away for nine months in cupboards waiting for the holiday season.

I compare my childhood Christmases with the consumerist bunkum of the Western world in the 21^st century. Yemen hadn�t embraced consumerism at the time, although there was an abundance of cheap plastic trinkets shipped in via shipping container from China. Similar to your Kmarts and Targets of Australia, although without the advertising budget and weekly specials. This is not to say that the Arab world wasn�t fully in the grip of rampant aspirationalism. The land of high-end luxury cars and watches and fashion (think Dubai) lives neatly entwined with the land of crippling poverty and subsistence wages. Even from a young age I was somehow aware of which cars were in high demand. Yemeni men had a habit of nicknaming car models after famously beautiful women, and the Laila Elwi was considered a prize across the Arab world. Imagine the uproar if Elon Musk named the new model Tesla after the body shape of a Hollywood celebrity�.

On Self-Reflection

I’m relatively bad at self-reflection. Which seems like a strange statement to make for a man who posts a weekly blog on his website about his thoughts, but here’s how I’ll justify it: I often write my feelings down, but I seldom return to these written thoughts to think about them. I’m starting to acknowledge that this is a weakness of mine and that it’s relatively easy to fix. Like everything in life, you just need to ‘do the work’ (hello objectivism, see Ayn Rand for more details), but as always, talking about the work is easier than doing the work, hence this blog post.

On The Future

I write my way to the end of term, finishing off the�year with a blaze of thoughts that burn themselves through�the night, lodged deep in the tinder of my brain. They spark and spit through this week, crackling their way to an ultimatum: the same ultimatum I come to every time this year… what next?

Most years I’ve planned out my summer six months in advance. I’ve scheduled in a summer�tour, booked a couple of days at the beach, found some time in December to catch up with�most of the people I’ve neglected all year. I roll through the summer and back in to work life balance in February without taking too much stock. I might pause briefly for New Years Eve, spend a day or two examining�the year in retrospect, but for the most part I just keep rolling. Days stack on days and the weeks disappear�and suddenly its 2019 when the last real thing I remember doing was back in 2010.

On Writing (part 3)

Write for the cool clear days of winter.

Every day a crisp clear reminder of this year that has been. Brilliant blue skies and bold colours, washed down from the heavens with the brisk pull of rain. Illuminating morning beams thrown light across the back yard, every blade of grass a reservoir for a floating water droplet that kaleidoscopes across a microcosm of hidden worlds beyond the human gaze.

We stamp our feet for warmth, tuck frozen fingers in to armpits, blow clouds of warmth out in to the cool. I turn my car heater to its highest setting, spend the first few moments in aching agony as it starts blasting colder air across the car and then slowly streams into warmth. I pump the space heater at my feet while I write in the shed, cocooned in scarf and beanie, slowly leaking warmth and words on to the page. Every activity is accompanied by a cup of boiling water, carried around the house, carried across the backyard, carried in to the shed, clasped in one cold hand while I write with the other, then hands clasped together to pass the warmth between them. Every conversation punctuated by the same refrain it�s a bit cold, the same knowing response just another couple months, the same shared experience of a cold that isn�t much on the mercury scale but seems to hit much harder than many other places on this planet. I�ve wintered in Canada, Scotland, Iceland, and each of these places holds a much stronger grasp to the miserable title of winter, but somehow Melbourne�s winter still hits me the worst.