This one is for you, Jon

I have not written one of these essays in a while. There are a few reasons for that — I have been busy, I haven’t set time aside to write, I keep getting distracted by TikTok — but I think the main reason is that I don’t allow myself to do things for the sake of doing them.

What I mean by that is: I rarely put work into things I might not be good at, or that might not be seen by many people. For example, I haven’t properly drawn a picture since school, when I was told I wasn’t that great at copying the picture from the board with my cheap watercolour set that kept running low on blues. I believed I was bad at drawing since and that meant I haven’t seen the point in even trying.

We are not taught the joy of creating things for the sake of the process. We are taught to be good at things. We are taught to do things to get approval — even our artwork gets graded at school. Why do I sit down to write these essays? Nobody but my mum and best friend will read them (hi, Jon!).

I remember writing a pretty pretentious short story when I was about 16, about a middle aged man (write what you know) who lives his life to a tight schedule until his clocks all show the wrong time (I was obsessed with the film Stranger than Fiction). Suddenly his life descends into chaos. Those were the two driving forces I thought dictated our lives: clocks or chaos. Why do we do anything? To avoid chaos. Or to succumb to it. Chaos is the baseline of everything.

If life will descend into chaos anyway, and entropy will always increase, why not make the best of it? If nothing matters, everything matters equally. Sure, in the grand scheme of things, my clumsily written essays are barely a drop in the ocean of stars and solar systems. My entire life wouldn’t even fill a drop. Still, the fact that I exist, and you exist, and we are both here processing these words, can only be a miracle. It matters.

So, I decided to do pottery, even if the endless number of bowls I ended up making all had little bumps and fingerprints on them and the colours all bled into each other. I decided to do some embroidery while watching trash TV even if the stitches are untidy and I’m only following a pre-printed design. And I decided to write these essays again. It matters, because it doesn’t matter. I have things to say and bowls to make. I have work to do. And I can’t wait to see what you start making, Jon.