Unbearable Lightness of Plans

I think I have a plan. It is a vague one, but I just about see the outline in the smog. My life has been devoid of plans for a while. Quite some time ago, I had a fixed long-term plan and it fell through, not dramatically - it quietly crumbled without so much of a care from anyone, except for me. It was, as is often the case of plans that crumble quietly, a life changing plan and its demise caused my grief alone. Sadness held alone is a lonely affair. Perhaps I didn't mind, at least not as strongly as I first felt and with the joy of hindsight - I was quietly relieved that the plan had been wrong all along. The aftermath of a plan failing is that you live in a state of loss, feeling awkward and embarrassed that you ever afforded yourself the belief, time and money to pursue a goal that led nowhere. It is hard to lift your head high when your self has been so wounded.  But time ticks on and you have a choice, accept your lot or continue to tug at that string that things as they are - are not quite right for you. I tried to leave that thread but it is bright and shiny and tuggable - my defences are down.

And so, I find my self tentatively making life changing plans. Quiet unassuming ones that at this present time I share with just me and I know if there is loss I will carry it alone. This plan requires me to take a step backwards and remember a part of me that once was.  A part that was a little less burdened by the practicalities of the present and a little more imaginative. A part of me that would admit that I am creative, despite the fact that I don't have the patience for making things (making and creating are not necessarily synonymous but this is a subject for another day). So I am trying to evoke spirits of yesteryear. Yesterday, I spent time scanning the bookshelves that are filled with books bought by someone else, and whilst many seemed interesting, I felt I would be reading because 'I would learn something' or 'it would do me good' and I am so tired of this kind of reading. I picked up a book that I know I have loved despite not remembering what I really loved about it or what really happened. I picked up the Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.

The strangest of fiction can have the most wonderful of impacts. I have a fondness for  'Lolita', that I have kept secret due to the controversy of the subject matter, but for me it was life-changing work. Before reading I had no idea that a human could act naughtily or morally wrong without duality; in other words I pictured sinful ideas as presenting themselves fully formed in a mind, flag-posted as sinful, the perpetrator would choose the sin with full moral knowledge and in a considered and defiant way. There was, in my poor indoctrinated head, no excuse to fall in the way of sin. Just make sure at the point of presentation you choose what is good. I had no idea that a mind would not 'flag-post' or that ideas when first considered, were not always presented in their true abhorrent consequence. I had no idea that sin could present itself as beautiful or right, even if just within a mind. And yet as I read the pages the author some how made me feel empathy with the most difficult of characters, and the most awful of moral actions. I was also introduced to the narrator's solipsism, the inside of another's mind was so powerful - I had never been in another's mind before!  It forced me to reflect on the power of my own thoughts (which were a gilded cage at that time) and how much of that was really my own. There was, after reading Lolita, a world opened outside my narrow interpretation and this was a great and important lesson to be learnt.

Some lessons are only needed to be learnt once. I have no desire to reread Lolita. Which leads me back to browsing over the bookshelf and trying to find something that would aid my tentative plan. I am a quarter of a way back in to '...Lightness of Being', I remember the ease at which it can be read. I remember the author breaking through the fiction and reminding us that the characters are imagination (the fourth wall I believe?) and I remember the ordinariness of the story: husband, wife, mistress and dog. I also remember the magical-ness of the ordinary, the characters' actions so light in the event of their being but so heavy in the dent of their (and the reader's) soul. I remember that it was at this point a small kernel of an obsession grew- I  knew then, even before I was ready to give up such ideas, that my life would be impossibly ordinary and that there would be for me - no greatness or gravity to my being, yet here was a book reminding me that our weight (and our magic) could be captured in words.