Gaining confidence

_________________________________

Confidence/n. Firm trust; feeling of certainty; self reliance; boldness.

1.Trust, belief, credence, faith, reliance,

2. Self-assurance, boldness, courage, self-possession.

_________________________________

Olive, my baby black rat, is curled up in the pouch of my jumper. Every now and then she pokes her head out and runs across my lap, sniffs at my desk and scampers back inside my pocket. It makes me coo and ooze sweetness like a new mother. Olive, with her patchy white belly and tiny hands is miniscule but daringly fast. If she were to somehow make it to the floor it would be nearly impossible to catch her. She’s wary of me, always ready to bolt. I have only had her four days and I am still gaining her trust. She approaches my hand slowly when I beckon to her to come out of her cage and speeds away when I try to pick her up, but if I lie down on my bed she will climb on me, sniff my face and nestle against my arm. She is very distracting, even just watching her sleep with her tail curled around her and her nose tucked down is addictive. Perhaps I just need a better way to utilise my time, but it occurred to me today as she tentatively approached the Milk Arrowroot biscuit I offered her, that just as Olive is gaining confidence in me, I am rediscovering my own confidence.

For instance, yesterday I made vegetable soup from scratch, i.e. without a recipe to follow step-by-step. (Do I hear applause?) As it turned out to be not only edible, but quite yummy, it shall go down in history as my first really successful cooking venture. If nothing else, it was confidence building. Now I’m sure I could make anything, in fact I am certain that my culinary expertise shall soon be sought after throughout the world by connoisseurs of humble veggie soup. This is doubtless an overreaction. Nevertheless the point is I am learning to not be afraid to make mistakes. I have been changing my mind a lot recently. When I finished uni I quickly jumped on the Tafe wagon. (More studying, just a different name.) Now it’s 4 weeks later and I’ve dropped out, because it’s not what I want to do or where I need to be, and I have finally gained the confidence to realise that, and trust my own decision. I thought i'd share that because it’s a feeling that makes me want to embrace the whole world with my outstretched arms in a happy, contented hippy-love-fest kind of way and grin like a Cheshire cat as Olive sits in the palm of my hand and nibbles away at the biscuit I offer her...

Peace out ya’ll

The life of an Idea

At its first conception the Idea is faultless. It is fresh and novel, invigorating like a cool morning flooding into your every cell, infectious in its inspired perfection. Your mind overflows with urgency, suddenly overrun by the need to make the idea become a reality. But as you iron out the details in your mind you begin to notice the ideas numerous flaws, just like a sentence which flowers beautifully in your head but comes across clumsy and clichéd on the page or a person who you had thought flawless that is somehow pushed from their pedestal. As the euphoria wanes the idea fills you instead with trepidation and doubt and if enough time passes before you cast your mind’s eye upon it again, you can barely begin to understand how you ever thought it was a good idea.

Tuesday
in three parts

It’s only the earliest days of August yet the deepest dark of winter has fully abandoned us. Perth’s winter days are often cold, clear, blue and cloudless but of late the weather has been gentle and warm like a beautiful September afternoon. Despite the prevailing good cycling weather, part of me has begun to despair for the rain that refuses to visit us and to fear the return of summer’s sickly stick before I am good and ready.

I currently dwell in the realm of an all surrounding, ever abounding happiness. But for some reason I fell into a god-awful mood this morning. Recently I have been plagued by such unidentifiable mood swings, easily stressed over goodness-knows-what. I have begun to wonder if the issue is that my life, shorn of any sense of pattern or regularity, is making me dizzy. Or perhaps my ups and downs are more due to the battle between self-confidence and self-doubt that rules my inner world as I strive to figure out what to do “Next.” Sometimes I honestly feel perfectly content with my present life. Sometimes I turn soft and mushy on the inside, letting other peoples words and expectations drip like poison into my heart where the seeds of doubt sprout and grow to forests that preoccupy my mind.

My girlfriend tells me I need a can of toughen-up.

And so, for that matter, do Australian politicians. Politics, being of vital importance to the present and future of our society, generally interests me. I like to be in the know, you might say. However, election media banter has begun to bore me incessantly. I have been listening to politicians vomit shallow policy at the mouth, and slowly slowly, the more attention I pay, the more apathy takes up residence in my heart. All I hear is “vote for me, because I’m not them”. Or better still, “they are sooo stupid”, therefore by implication, you should vote for me. I think I’ll vote green because purple isn’t an option and abstinence is not the best policy.

And when I doze in the kindly afternoon sun with Baloo, I’ll dream of a world in which politicians cease to be nauseating and I have the fortitude to stare down self-doubt. I suspect such a world would be populated by a modestly clad people known as Utopians...