Fences and Themes

Your favorite book or movie is brilliant because you strongly identify with the theme, and it has made an impact on you. And in some way you have made it a part of your worldview, so you carry that story, and the essential nuts and bolts of the theme, with you everyday. It has changed you as a person.

But in the nasty, brutish and instant reality of day to day life, that theme is tested and pulled apart often enough for you to question it. And as life thunders and rolls by each day, you move away from one theme, and closer to another.

One of my motif themes was the inviolability of family, a pretty basic theme, common across all cultures and throughout time. Without some kind of family kinship, you're up against the world by yourself, which doesn't do much good for your chances of survival. Plus, it gets lonely trudging through the snow all by yourself.

So the last few weeks, where my family has folded in on itself for the sake of petty rivalries, is a genuine world-view-changer.

Family, of course, is a lovely ideal, an institution worth fighting for, worth sacrificing for, worth sort of making your basic motivator for almost everything.

Just talking with the in-laws, and staying resolutely on task, (which metaphorically enough is pulling down an old fence and rebuilding a new one) whilst another part of the family seethes and schemes and sees to their twisted agendas. It is a theme shifter.

My old theme was a glorious mash up of Family Ties, the entrepreneurship of Cocktail (and the alcohol stuff was beguiling) and the studied modern non-conformism of Brave New World.

My new, evolving theme is a tinkling stream of clear water, birdsong silence and the pure humanist wisdom of the recovering alcoholic. With plenty of help from an invisible frog chorus of online friends and confidantes.

The old fence was a prison, holding me back from the quiet sober moments of revelation that life unfurls at the most unexpected times.

The new fence is light, thin aluminum, almost imperceptible against the garden, for security and reassurance, but not overt and threatening.

Themes. Lessons. The gist of the story. Not being attached too strongly to a theme, and letting it drift away, and a new theme to flitter in place.