It's OK to not know what you're doing all the time
On emerging at different stages in life, being open to the unknown, and the value of kinship
I recently had a poet staying in my attic. Well, you’d probably call it a loft conversion, but attic sounds far more literary, conjuring images of beautiful artists in Parisian garrets. I didn’t know this poet very well before they arrived, we’d exchanged a few voice-notes and seen each other’s faces in small squares on Zoom, but really, we were strangers. I just happened to be a stranger with a spare room, and this poet needed somewhere in London to stay for a few days. Our backgrounds were wildly different, our ages a generation apart – me being 17 years senior – but what had brought us together was this: we were both reading our work at a book festival in an event showcasing us as ‘emerging writers’.
It was interesting to me that we were both considered emerging. Me as a fiction writer for my very-much-work-in-slow-progress novel; them (‘they/them’ being their preferred pronouns) as an emerging poet with a pamphlet on the way. That despite me now being able to tick the 40+ category on forms, I was still seen as a person of potential in the same way as this poet in their early twenties. Especially when my Spidey sense tells me this brilliant poet will have indisputably emerged professionally way before they reach my grand old age, if not by the end of this very year.
The more I considered this word emerging – from the Latin ēmergere to “rise up or out” – the more I realise so much of my life is a constant flow of emerging and emergence, whether I am emerging from a period of rest, or isolation or stress or socialising, a health state, pregnancy, maternity leave, the return to work, a career shift.… I am constantly emerging from different seasons of my life and I don’t see that as a negative. In fact, I think it’s something we undervalue.
There is a relentless focus on destination arrival (as in, the point at which you are considered fully ‘emerged’, rather than still ‘emerging’). A gamification of life as levels we need to complete to be considered a success, to such an extent that we rarely celebrate enough the present, the process, the journey or the thrill of possibility. Would we even know when we have ‘emerged’? Would we feel it, be content by it? Or would we always keep wanting more, or feel pressured to achieve more, regardless?
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