Welcome back to Bluezone, I want to start by thanking the 2,000 of you who’ve signed up to this newsletter—I'm genuinely grateful you’re here. Thank you! This week features the film which inspired the post, ‘Conversations I Never Had’
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People are always trying to make things mean something. Can we never live some inexorable time without calling it a phase? Must we elect a ‘vibe’ to the time we just had, however stripped of vigour it was? When we search for meaning in the meaningless, we are trying to love the things that can’t love us back. Like a millionaire reaching for more, there’s safety in a love that only goes one way. It can’t come back to bite us, no monsters in the dark. It feels more secure to live in the mind of a person who’s love can only extend, extend, extend, for touch makes us afraid, afraid, afraid.
When we try to label a period in our life, we are attempting to contain it. When we recall this moment, we remember the words, the packaging, rather than the gift of its truth. When you ask an older person about their first love, they may shrug and maybe smile, but if they talk about it, they will talk about it as if those experiences occurred to someone else. They have thrown the ball of their emotions into an endless pit and attempted to subtract themselves from it. Those feelings aren’t theirs, they think. To them, they only mean something in the confines of the past tense, even if to us, it is written on their face.
Too afraid to let love touch us, we place it neat and tidy inside a box. To atrophy the heart in such a way is to make it impenetrable, untouchable, irredeemable. But intimacy, real intimacy, is messy. It requires a willingness to let yourself be seen. To exist within the ever stretching moment as something undefined. To not contain it with a title, to not abstract it with language, but to let it move through us the way the sky lets the weather move through it. It’s fleeting, but it’s real. The same way the heaviest storm leaves no scar across the sky. You don’t need proof to know that it was there. You don’t need to give it a name to know that it was real.
We choose control over surrender because it’s easier for us to understand than it is to become undone. Complete surrender, which in its fullness probably only occurs during times of crisis, is akin to death. It is a loss of oneself. To give in to resistance and to love the things that will, or will not, love us back—means to risk losing your beliefs, your composure, your certainty. To fall apart like a sandcastle. To simply feel. This is harder than it seems. For most of our waking hours, we are primed to fight. We are always fighting for something: for the job, for the relationship, for the goals we’ve set ourselves, for the expectations upon us. We think we’re most powerful when we are in this state; active, grinding, acting with conviction. We think we’re powerful because of what we achieve rather than who we are.
No one tells you that you must let yourself be. It’s not a doing as much as it is an un-doing. It’s a passive state of magnetism. A surrender to the plain immediacy of the moment, and a faith that the cards will land where they may. Consider the momentous collection of instances that had to have happened to allow you to arrive at this very moment. How much impact did your efforts have on your circumstance? Some, that’s for sure. But not all, not even close to it. In the same way we must work hard for our goals, we must be willing to let go of them. Too much fixation on action makes us miss the mark. We must let go of our desire for what we want to occur, even for the things that mean the most to us. Especially for the things that mean the most to us.
The practice of surrender is energy retrieval. It allows your inner power to return to yourself. It’s the difference between believing you are working to make the sun go down, and standing back to watch it set. You need both. I need both. I am a naturally ambitious individual. So much so that I can overexert my effort as a means to combat the fear of uncertainty. Surrender can be a form of confidence. It can be knowing that whatever occurs without your impact, will work out for you. Even if you do not understand it. Even if you do not want it to occur.
Can you allow yourself to be in the moment without assigning a name to what it is?
Can you observe your desire to control?
— About the Film —
This winter, I took part in the Straight-8 Film challenge. The idea is to shoot an entire film in 1 roll of Super-8mm. Once you complete the roll of film, you send it off to the festival without an edit (!) and send a corresponding audio track along with it.
What that means is: you get 1 take for everything you choose to capture. No do-overs. No adjustments. It’s like writing a book that you can only read once it’s been published. As soon as a word is typed out, onwards is where you must go.
The craziest part is that you don’t get to see the film until you’re sitting in the cinema watching it with everyone else. You have a rough idea of what you’ve captured of course. You’ve done the math on what moment occurs when in order to roughly align your audio with it, but you don’t know how it looks until you’re watching it.
In order to do well in this competition, you have to have a solid plan, but ultimately you have to surrender to whatever occurs on the day. It’s an exercise in embracing your failures and trusting your instincts.
If you’ve been following bluezone for a while, you can see how much I learnt through this project because it’s been reflected in the pieces I wrote since I shot the film. Pieces like, Courage For Failure, Conversations I Never Had, and Don’t Try are all direct life lessons that I learnt from this challenge.
Conversations I Never Had is a direct response to the film. This documentary follows Abs, my old concierge, who opens up about being so used to taking on other people’s problems that he bottles up his own pain and is pushed to verge of suicide. Ultimately, all he wanted was someone to ask him if he was okay. For someone to give him the permission to be able to open up.
Considering the tough stature of this man, his strength and vulnerability shines bright. It’s an important story to tell, and one that I feel honoured to capture.
This week, I attended the premiere of the film and watched it in the cinema for the first time along with everyone else. Now that I finally have the film, I’d love to share it with you.
For my paid subscribers, it’s viewable below.
If you’re not ready to become a paid subscriber, just send me a message and I’ll be happy to send you the link.
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