A Piece of the Puzzle

It is all very well that I should tell you about all this, but in your minds you probably still haven’t found the answers to the whys and the hows you’ve been asking yourself. Why is he here in the first place? How did he get here? A piece of the puzzle is missing.

In the 90’s, between ourselves, my wife and I juggled six jobs as life sped onwards in fast-forward, our babies growing quickly into not-so-little girls and the dreams we had for them decidedly not agreeing with the bills that had to be paid. My wife got the harder end of the deal, she worked half-days at a local school, half-days as a tourist rep and somehow managed to fit in an extra half-day working for Expo 98 during the six months that it went on. I was more fortunate - I translated books for a few Lisbon publishers and ran a gallery to help with the bills and still managed to keep things going on the painting front, but these were all things I enjoyed doing.

At some point, most fortuitously, in the midst of our comings and goings my wife came upon a small advertisement in the corner of a magazine publicizing openings for government jobs in Germany. We discussed the possibility, analysed things from all the angles we could think of and she even sent in her details, but we failed to act on it, we let time go by and allowed the mechanics of our sunny existence in Portugal to go on. It was only a few years later when the ministry followed-up on my wife’s initial application, asking if she was still interested in taking the admission’s test, that we felt that it would be unwise not to give it a try even if we still weren’t sure precisely what the job and the move entailed. Having established that the thrills of adventure outweighed the possible disadvantages we took the gamble and set out for Berlin where my wife joined the diplomatic corps being posted one year later in the Sultanate of Brunei.

There is some irony in this, a sense, too, of the inevitability of certain things – the impossibility of escaping particular patterns in one’s life. I grew up in diplomatic circles and studied to become one myself only to drop-out in my last year in Law-School to become an artist – a move that I felt liberated me from a course that, having been of my own choosing, felt increasingly not to be truly mine [especially in post-revolutionary Portugal and a rapidly shrinking world when diplomacy lost much of its mystique in favour of what I call ‘diplocracy’ in which true diplomats were subtly made redundant, replaced by technocrats and the wonders of IT communication].

Art gave me wings and a feeling, arrogant perhaps, of having taken the reigns of my life back into my own hands. I believed that I had managed to escape from the conveyor-belt on which I had been trapped and moved along for so many years as if in sleep, and to finally awaken and DO – to reshape and redirect my life through new conscious action towards a different ME. But for how long can you keep up conscious action? How long before that too finds its way back into the mechanic drone of everydayness that inevitably wraps us up in the end?

In the first years after leaving that other life behind I was at times assailed by doubt, not the hindering kind, but there were thoughts in my mind, conjectures of what it might have been like to live it out, and what kind of person I would have become. How can you ever be sure that moving away from what you are isn’t actually running straight into the pitfall fate has laid down for you all along – and that staying on course, for once, would have been victory. Had I really taken the reigns of my life into my hands or had I given up on a promising career and succumbed – brought down once more by the downward pull of human nature – to a condition of dilettante mediocrity?

To this day I take some comfort in the belief that the Life-energy and joy I get out of creating Art and being exposed to the public’s response are indicators that the move was not completely misguided. Not an easy move, mind you, never an easy move, but one that makes me feel much more alive than when I contemplate myself in the parallel world I still find myself revisiting in my mind every now and then. Life on this side of the tracks still feels very much like an adventure I don’t wish to know the end to. And then there are all the ideas, knowledge and understanding of things I came across and gained and that I know full-well I would never have had the time or disposition to investigate or live as profoundly as I did had I decided to stay on course.

And so, finding myself so close again to aspects of that other life through my wife’s new job, I can’t help but feel fate’s mockery over my childish attempts to free myself from its claws.