NEW DIRECTION

⚪️🔴🟠🟡🟢🔵🟣⚫️ NEW DIRECTION Ed. No. 148 - ON RISK TAKING & MR. VALUE

GOING AROUND IN CIRCLES

PIC: The Goldfish Tank at Bankstown Heart (Cardiologists)

All Photographs by Neville Williams (2025)

©️Arts Law Australia

Beautiful and calming to watch.

They swim round and round in circles all day every day.

It's a bit like how some people conduct their lives.

The same routine day in and day out.

Goldfish have a simple brain. They know their place but humans would seem to be sending ourselves stir crazy doing exactly the same thing.

Perhaps though some may be perfectly happy repeating the same routine over and over?

And a simple life is not to be frowned on. Though all the evidence suggests that we humans are designed to have a need generally requiring more creative stimulation.

I wonder where creativity is starting to go?

I question whether we truly value creativity anymore?

We're more interested in gain than any giving. And giving is what creativity is about. To be sentient beings there needs to be a balance between the give and the take.

We are the ones who let our cerebral recesses become our Master. And we think we can think our way to well being! All that path is doing is making us go round in circles goldfish like.

Is this making us unbalanced?

All our posturing and ambitions, wants, desires,

our investments, 'wheelin and dealin' and mental games will never get us into our own heaven. But we do so persist in cyclically repeating our programmed belief behaviours.

Perhaps sometimes we need to take more risks with our lives

and break out of our self manufactured ruts.

I took a risk the other day and stepped away from routine.

Let me take you back some 20 years when for the first time I invited someone who I was interested in out for a coffee. I didn't know that person other than following his life through the media. He wasn't famous or anything like that. He just had a profile. One of those people whose life has purpose. You would find him popping up volunteering at the frontline in the background somewhere or other.

Some people just know what they are about and he is one of them. The guy's got real cultivated value in his eyes. He's culturally and humanely stimulated. In turn this makes him stimulating to talk to. He's creative.

All those years ago his response to my invitation was... "I don't even know you. Sorry no."

He was not only the first person I asked out.

He was also the last person I asked out for twenty years. On reflection how sad is that? For so many rejection can be a very confronting thing.

How silly can we be? We take things so personally.

Pride is a most terrible thing. "What do you mean he can't see my perfection".

Oh Puh-leese!

I happened to cross paths with this same person when he was leaving the gym the other day.

I called out to him by name. He'd forgotten our earlier interaction.

We did have a pleasant conversation.

And he did say "I'm glad you called out".

But he deferred the offer of a coffee once again.

You know what after 20 years it was like water off a duck's back to me.

It doesn't matter. I must have matured a lot in those years.

Fact is if we haven't found 'self love' within ourselves then we're not going to find 'love' in another. (Isn't this what is at the core of domestic violence? Each empty vessel demands the love from the other because each thinks they have the right or entitlement. The next thing you know you've got fireworks.)

I used to help out with an organisation called the 'Children of the Green Earth' that was begun at the 'United Nations'.

Their motto was "Know what happens if you don't take a risk? NOTHING."*

You never know what you might be missing out on unless you take a step.

But you've got to at least make an effort.

I'm glad I called out to Mr. Value. He's worth it.

No doubt we'll run into each other again. He'd make an interesting and suitable subject for an Archibald Prize entry (Australia’s top portrait competition). Just got to find the energy in this creative desert I find myself to do it.

Based on our track record he may well say NO anyway. But there is absolutely no harm in taking the risk to ask.

No use blaming anyone else for our own expectations of life not being fulfilled.

We make the quality of our own lives. Neville