Bohemain Cafe - Be inspired

Catching Crabs

I watched a documentary when I was younger about how fishermen catch crabs (no! not them kind). I viewed with awe as these leather-faced, salty men of the sea lowered a mesh basket onto the ocean bed and, in no time at all, a couple of unlikely crabs crawled in via a small hole in the lid and made their first (inadvertent) step from basket to crabstick. What fascinated me most was not that they had crawled into what seemed an obvious trap; rather I was disturbed by the fact that they did not crawl back out again- even when the fishermen removed the lid. Eventually the basket filled to the brim with crustations yet they still didn't escape.
After a few minutes it became clear why.

Every time a crab tried to crawl from its trap the other crabs (the blighters) pulled him back again. I was amazed! Aghast. I was watching my life's metaphor. Every time I ever tried to leave a bad job, to break away, my peers, like the crabs, pulled me back; 'what do you want to leave for?' They would ask patronisingly, 'this is a steady job, it's safe' then the cup de grace 'there's no security out there you know!'
'But I hate it here', I'd whine.
'You haven't given it a chance! You've only been here five minutes' (I'd been there six years) came the verbatim reply.
'So how long have you been here then'? I asked one day, tired of the perennial narrative. The old guy, face like a walnut, thought for a second 'Oh about thirty years'. He replied.
'And what do you think of it?'
'It's crap,' he said without hesitation, 'I hate the place'.
Similarly when I told my (ex) wife that I wanted to leave a steady job at the chemical factory her face turned rolled-in-flour white. The old crab, claws raised in the offensive, went straight to work, 'but what will we do, what if we don't make the mortgage, what if it doesn't work out, what if…'
It only usually took a few 'what if's' to get my bottom twitching.

As I watched the documentary I noticed that after being pulled back a few times the disheartened crabs not only stopped trying to escape, but they also joined the other crabs in pulling back those that did try.
I'd been pulled back so many times in my life that I also felt disheartened and self depreciation became a part of my inner core. The moment an entrepreneurial thought swam into my mind it was drowned out by the voice of my inner warders. Many times I picked up my biro in a fit of inspiration to write my way out of the factory by penning (what I dreamed would be) the next best seller only to be thwarted by a faulty internal dialogue that was stronger than my will to continue. The pen would be discarded and replaced by bicycle clips and a ride to the factory for a night shift that I abhorred. Even today, twenty years on, the very thought of that long ride still inspires a depression that makes me feel so grateful to have found a way out. I used to sit in the works canteen in the dead of night when every one else was tucked up into bed and think 'what can I do to get out of this nightmare?' I felt so trapped. I had a family, a mortgage, HP payments, three children, a cat and a Raleigh Racer to keep. So many things that glued me to a job I hated. And the longer I stayed the more glue I attached. I could never think of anything else I wanted to do other than write, but I had allowed others to convince me that I was dreaming and this was not a real option.
I resigned my self to a 9-5, Monday to Friday life of oil and grime.
But (I convinced myself) it wasn't my fault. I was stuck in the factory because my wife wouldn't let me leave.
Then one night, after my usual session of Sunday evening blame, she did something unprecedented, she retracted her claws, told me to shut my moaning gob and get a job that I did like if I was so unhappy. She gave me her permission. Well, I nearly fell over with the shock.

That was when the realization hit me like a hefty tax bill. She wasn't holding me back at all, my nightmarish employ was no more her fault than it was the fault of the old timers or my peers, the fault was entirely mine. I was up to my kneecaps in the brown stuff out of choice. Blaming others was my way of hiding from my own fear; they only stopped me from climbing out of the basket because I let them. I realised at this point - looking in the mirror not at a hard-done-to 20 something but a frightened youth - that if I didn't want to stay in a job, if I really wanted to leave the factory, leave the city, or even leave the country for that matter nothing and no one would be able to stop me. If I put my heart and soul into doing something, and believed it could be done, had a little faith in my own power, even mountains would tremble.
I could do anything, I could be anything. This was my world, my incarnation, and the free will I had given over to my influences I snatched back.
Shortly after the realisation (and the shock) I left a steady job of seven years, and entered the real world of opportunity and excitement; I have never looked back. It was brilliant, exciting (and dead scary) so much to do, so many places to go. I made a decision; I climbed out of the basket.
A few years later my mates were all made redundant from the 'secure' job-for-life in the factory. Me, I realised that the only security I needed was the knowledge that no matter what happened I could and I would handle it

We're all dying!

I have some good news for you and some bad news - as the joke goes. The bad news - and I'm very sorry to be the bearer - is that we are all dying! It's true, I've checked it out, in fact I've double and triple checked it, I've had it substantiated and, well, there's no easy way to say it, we are dying. It's something that I always kind of knew, but never really chose to think about too much. But the fact is within the next seventy or eighty years - depending on how old we are and how long we last - we are all going to be either coffin dwellers or trampled ash in the 'Rose Garden' at some local cemetery. We may not even last that long, after all we never quite know when the hooded, scythe carrying bringer of the last breath might come-a-calling. It could be sooner than we'd like. I have watched death from the sidelines, quite recently in fact, and nothing underlines the uncertainty and absolute frailty of mortality more than the untimely exit of a friend.

Scary!

So, now that I have depressed you, the good news! Knowing that we are all budding crypt-kickers takes away all the uncertainty of life; we already know how the story ends. The prologue and epilogue are already typed in, all that's left is the middle bit, and that's down to us, we get to choose the meat of the story.

So, all those plans that you have on the back burner, you know, the great things you're going to do with your life 'when the time is right' - the time is never quite right I find - need to be brought forward and done now, this minute, pronto, in a hurry, as quick as your little leg's will carry you. The novel that you want to write, the trip to the Grand Canyon you've always planned to take, your minds-eye dream-job, the west end play you want to direct, you have to do them now. We're dying see. It's official!
So putting your dreams on the back burner until the circumstances are right means that they'll probably never be realised. Our only regrets in life are the things we don't do. We owe it to our selves to go out and do them now before it's too late. Tomorrow? It's all a lie; there isn't one, only a promissory note that we are often not in a position to cash. It doesn't even exist. When you wake up in the morning it'll be today again and all the same rules will apply. Tomorrow is just another version of now, an empty field that will remain so unless we start planting some seeds. Your time, which is ticking away as we speak (at about sixty seconds a minute chronologically, quite a bit faster if you don't invest your time wisely) will be gone and you'll have nothing to show for it but regret and a rear-view mirror full of 'could haves', 'should haves' and 'would haves'.

Have you every noticed when you go to Pizza Hut how they give you a bowl the size of a saucer and then say 'have as much salad as you like - but you can only go up once'. Life is like that small salad bowl but like the hungry people waiting for their main course we can cram as much into that tiny bowl as we can carry. I love watching people ingeniously stack the cucumber around the side of the bowl - like they're filling a skip - and then cramming it so high that they have to hire a fork lift truck to get it back to the table. They're not greedy! They just know that they only have one shot at it.

Fill your bowl, we come this way but once so lets make the best of the short stay. Like the once a year holiday to Florida or Spain fit as much into the short time as you can. Make sure that you go back knackered because you got so much done.
If you don't want to be a postman then don't be a postman, give it up and be a painter, a writer, a Tobogganist, whatever, just don't be something that you patently are not.

And now is the time, not tomorrow. There is no time like the present. If you can't have what you want this very second the very least you can do is start the journey, now, this minute, while the inspiration is high. We all have the same amount of minutes, we get the same 24 hours as Branson and Gates, it's just what we do with our time, how we invest it that determines where our lives may lead.

So what I'm thinking is (and this is not molecular science) if we are dying and our allotted time is finite why the hell aren't we doing all the things we want to do NOW? What's all this 'back boiler' stuff? And why are we all waiting for the right time when we already know that it isn't going to show? The right time is the cheque that's permanently in the post, it never arrives, it's the girl that keeps us standing at the corner of the Co-Op looking like a spanner, and no amount of clock-watching will change the inevitable, she's stood us up.

We wait; the right time never arrives.

So I say stop waiting and meet providence half way, start filling your life with the riches on offer so that when the reaper arrives you'll have achieved so much, crammed your time so full that he'll fall asleep waiting for your life to flash before you.
Act now or your time will elapse and you'll end up as a sepia-coloured relative that no one can put a name to in a dusty high-days-and-holidays photo album.

Better to leave a biography as thick as a whale omelette than the epitaph

'Joe Smith…mmmn! He didn't do much did he!'