Pointing, Purpose and Plans
It’s a Friday evening and I’m back from work. A new job. A freelance gig to supplement my income and do something different. When I told my mum what I was about to do, she was horrified. Ma fille…. She’s always wanted me to be more ladylike, more feminine, than I turned out to be, adorning my room and me as a child in pink, flowers and loveliness. And then, there I was, getting into sports, photography, cycling, van-driving, van-living and now…
Stonemasonry.
Ok, I wasn’t engraving headstones, though I did ask if their business did that ever and I was told that that was a separate industry of its own. No. Today on my first day, I spent my time pointing. Not my finger. Not trying to indicate anything of particular interest. No. Pointing, it would appear, means:
The act of removing mortar from between the joints of a stone or brick wall, and replacing it with new mortar; also, the material with which the joints are refilled.
I did the latter, using wood ash mortar. Pointing requires great concentration, patience, attention to detail and when you’re slightly OCD like me, it turns out I was a dab hand at it. My one gripe for the day was the bitter bone-reaching cold that was upon us in the UK today. Nearly mid-May, my feet having once been the happy inhabitants of Birkenstocks come the start of May when I lived in Italy, doth protest. I’m still wearing my winter hiking socks here! What is going on?!
I’ll admit, I had rather mixed feelings at the prospect of doing this work. A part of me was excited - a new experience, work which was away from my computer, from the ever-encroaching digital world, outside and manual. I’ve always been quite the “intellectual”, a bit of a “nerd”, with my head in books, my mind wrapping itself around language and communication, my heart expressing my art through music, photography, theatre and the written word. What on earth was I doing in scruffy clothes, visor and big gloves?! On scaffolding at that! It wasn’t high, but still, I was well and truly out of comfort zone.
I remember when I started working in cyclotourism and I first had to deal with broken bikes, flat tyres and loading van roof racks with bikes, I was so proud of myself for being able to do so! And not only that, for enjoying it too! I loved the manual aspect of that job. I loved getting my hands covered in bike grease, knowing I was fixing something, making something go from broken to working! I’d never been very good at these manual tasks, so this was huge for me. Still is. And so, my current experience of this side hustle is allowing me to expand, once more.
I certainly can’t say that my life has been boring. A part of me does long for that stable job, stable relationship, same home where I can settle and put down roots (and maybe get a cat). However, like a good friend of mine pointed out to me yesterday (the only kind of pointing I’d been familiar with up until today), I haven’t wanted or manifested a life like that for myself. Wake up. Go to work. Go home. Watch TV. Long for the weekend. Get to the weekend. Fill the weekend. Dread Monday morning, deep down somewhere, but numb it with Sunday evening TV. And repeat. Nope. I have certainly not had a life like that. And it’s hard. It’s unstable and unpredictable. I’ve freelanced so many different kinds of jobs, in languages, teaching, music, performance, touring, travel, events, coaching, voiceovers, writing, photography, theatre and now stonemasonry.
And all in function of my purpose: music. My one true love. The one path that keeps pulling me back to it. Over and over. As hard as it can be at times. I have no choice. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. As I was working today, I was listening to an interesting podcast on Alfa Vedic on Art, Artists and Creativity. I’m halfway through. It’s quite out there with the ideas it presents, but regardless of whether one agrees with it or not, it makes one vital point (there’s that word again, never noticed it so much as today!):
We are creative beings. Art is essential to maintaining our divine connection to source. Having a 9-5 job which does not allow us to express that innate, divine creativity is, quite literally, soul-crushing. Art. Music. Singing. But also Stonemasonry, Poetry, Oenology. We are surrounded by the possibility of being creative, it’s just it’s hard to find a way of being creative and paying the bills, making ends meet. And so, like many freelancers and entrepreneurs, you learn to adapt and diversify. You humble yourself and you do what needs doing in the tougher times. And right now, the universe is asking me to not only downsize and declutter (see my previous article), but also to refine my purpose. Much like the mortar I’m refining, as I listen to this podcast, to music, to silence, I get into the zone of the work I’m doing and allow my mind to meditate:
what is my purpose? Am I sure I’ve found it? And if so, what are the next steps on that path?
That brings me to my third and final word in the alliterated title of this article, of which I’m really quite chuffed: plans.
I was chatting with the owner of the stonemasonry company at the end of the day and I asked him how he got into this line of work. His path it seemed had had its own twists and turns. He started out as a civil engineer but could feel his life force energy being sucked out of him every time he went to the office, so he quit and through some unplanned events, he discovered he was great at being a clown and enjoyed bringing joy to people in that role, so he became an entertainer and essentially joined the circus, from what I could gather. He ran a successful business in this for many years, and along the way picked up stonemasonry, I imagine to support his creative endeavours. And then 2020 hit. His entertainment business suffered and his stonemasonry business grew exponentially. He went from being a one-man show to employing ten people and seeing continued growth. We concluded in our chat that sometimes the best things in life aren’t planned. I would also argue, perhaps they can’t be planned.
Whatever is the right way of looking at it, life is certainly a bizarre ensemble of moments of expansion and of contraction; synchronicities and surrender to the divine; and perhaps also a decent pinch of good luck. Is life what is done to us, what we make of life events or what we manifest? Or perhaps, a delicate, inexplicable blend of all three. And in the words of Steve Jobs at that famous speech he gave at Stanford:
You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever, because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.
What’s been your experience of making sense of the dots which lay upon the twisted path of life? Comment below if you feel drawn to do so, or meditate upon this as you see fit. I will more than likely be doing so the next time I’m poised on that scaffold, working on my pointing skills.
