One April Morning

The photograph above depicts three asylum seekers detained at Villawood Detention Centre in New South Wales, Australia. After it was taken, a group of detainees, some of whom had recently had their application for refugee status denied by the Australian government, set three buildings within the compound alight.

I won't launch into a tirade about immigration policy and human rights. The canvas is too grey and murky to get very far; the arguments just go around and around in circles, exhausting everybody involved. 

All I can say is how tragic it is that these detainees feel that they have to remind us that they are, in fact, human. It is so easy for privileged people - particularly middle-class Australians, who live such sheltered lives - to hide behind hyperbole. The truth is that the people in this photograph are likely to have been privy to horror and tragedy far beyond anything that we will never have the misfortune of experiencing in our lifetime. I don't understand how people can believe that they are more deserving of a peaceful, prosperous life than others, simply due to the good fortune of being born in a rich Western country. All I can think, when looking at that picture, is that could be me. And if it were, wouldn't I be desperate enough to do anything I could to reach safety and freedom? After all, isn't that what everybody wants? No matter where they are born?

We are in the midst of a political climate fixated upon dehumanising people; so we, as a society, need to demand a shift. From the impersonal to the personal. From the brutal to the gentle. From the xenophobic to  the tolerant. We have to take it upon ourselves to rally for the individual. To empathise, to feel compassion, for the outsider, the marginalised, the person without a voice. Because when we fight for somebody else's rights, we are also fighting for our own.

P.S. I found this article on hard-wired political views comforting. Quoting it would only rile up my adversaries but it is nice to quietly keep it at the back of my mind, as self-affirmation.

I found this photograph on We Come From a Sunburnt Country.

"You’re not a kid anymore. You have the right to choose your own life. You can start again. If you want a cat, all you have to do is choose a life in which you can have a cat. It’s simple. It’s your right."

Ping.

That is the sound that reverberated around my head when I read this piece of wisdom. (I'm not sure why my brain chose to make this particular sound. Perhaps because it is the sound my imagination decided would indicate a "light-bulb moment"? Nevertheless...)

Ping. 

Because Haruki is right. It's simple. We have the right to choose our own lives. They are ours, after all. 

In that vein, this year I am taking a year off, from my (official) studies. To write. To dream. To work. To save. To travel. Not to find myself. But just to be me.

A few days ago, I discovered that I am a scanner. "A scanner", self-help author Barbara Sher explained in an interview with Sarah Wilson, "is genetically wired to be fanatically interested in multiple things at once". As Sarah relays in her Sunday Life column:

Gretchen Rubin (of The Happiness Project) just sent an email sharing this quote:

Happiness, for me, is private. Others may not see it but, as Virginia Woolf says, it's safer that way. Because when it is hidden, when only I (and the people I love) can touch it, nobody can take it away from me.

Late last night

I imagined

myself

as this

.

and 

the trajectory

of 

my output

as this

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