Reinvention tension

When I win the lottery I will stay exactly the same. Nothing will change. This is the refrain often spouted towards the cameras as the so-talented beneficiary celebrates their good fortune. Personally I swear now, here, in public - I will definitely change as many elements of my life as I feel necessary. Please don't misunderstand me I won't swap Val for a younger model or insist on silicon implants (to either of us) but I will reconfigure the environment of my life.

The term is Reinvention and it comes with many problems. I don't mean the small changes like giving up smoking or even eating meat, or the style changes for image purposes. Those well-worshipped celebrity changes ; Madonna's chameleonesque transformations, Bob Dylan's decision to use an electric guitar, or Kylie's iconic shiftings from girl-next-door to siren to show queen. The true reinvention is a spiritual and psychological decision to restructure and reshape your life. Yes I would give funds to the hospital that granted me my kidney transplant in 1995 and buy my brother the house he will need when Noah is born but that is only the doing of things. With reinvention comes the chance to BE different, to be MORE, to be how and what you feel you could be.

For certain individuals this move may be brought upon them by personal crisis by the death of a loved one or the betrayal by a supposedly loved one. These reinventions are born out of pain and misery and at the time they feel only like survival - of moving from day to day and going through the motions. My own divorce involved no children and for the two of us the reinvention was helped by the fact that we realised the intelligent person we once loved was still intelligent but had simply made a decision. A decision that allowed friendship to remain and reinvention to begin whilst gaining the knowledge of who and what we were, are and might be.

Reinvention is about a realistic understanding of personal identity. It is about self-knowledge and self-worth. It is not the mid-life crisis or the adventures of hormonal change it is a thought process that, for me, would be a pleasure to undertake. In the (statistically unlikely) event of that monumental windfall or the (astronomically improbable) urge of a benevolent patron of the arts with a spare ten millions pounds to see me as the next great MABA (Middle-Aged British Artist [think Damien Hirst with Stickleback rather than Shark]) then my reinvention is going to be slow and steady. It will probably only begin when I retire whilst hopefully the body will still be holding together. This is the curse of the Working Man to (heroically) man the barricades day by day whilst internally one's mind is circumnavigating the globe or saving the rainforests.

I hear the brave people out there with courage to back up their conviction muttering about seizing the day and grasping the dream and perhaps in my unwillingness to alter my circumstances lies the very foundation of a conventional stagnation. This blog comes out of that stagnation and although it makes make little claim to be either a mission statement or a strategic plan there lies within it the potential to be both. Perhaps everybody somewhere sometime has these ideas unless their life is perfect and that seems to me to be unlikely. In the meantime plans are forming, seeds are growing, intentions are made or muddied, the world turns and gravity holds us in position. Reinvention is the mother necessary to change that position.

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