Autumn Gold

Hagley Park, Christchurch

The South Island does Autumn well (colonial landscape though it may be): the colours of the leaves, the angle of the light. Some of my earliest memories are of this part of our world.

Passing through Cheviot. It was sheep country then, and it’s sheep country now. The farms more like gardens with their neatly nibbled pastures, their just-been-shorn shelter belts. Did you know that Cheviot is not named after the breed of sheep, but rather the Cheviot Hills on the England-Scotland border (ahh…where the sheep come from)?

Maybe it was a reward for being brave at the optometrist’s, but one time, when we stopped at Cheviot for a break, I was allowed a raspberry milkshake and a bag of raspberry lollies…predictably (surely?) spewing the lot, shortly after, on one of the bends in the Hundalees.

In Caroline McHugh’s TED talk, The Art of Being Yourself, she says that—when you’re a kid—you’re fantastic at being yourself. The world hasn’t caught up with you yet. You haven’t been to the optometrist’s. You are just you. Here I am, aged (nearly) six.

Christopher. Nearly 6.

Everyone is born creative…says Hugh MacLeod¹ . Everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then, when you hit puberty, they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc.

Caroline McHugh says that when we’re older we have another opportunity to become authentically ourselves…in the ‘Autumn’ of our lives: when we are finally brave enough to no longer care what others might think…

But now that I'm sixty
(Wrote Christopher Matthew in his re-work of A.A. Milne's Now We Are Six)
I've got to confess
That more often than not
I couldn't care less.

…when we are brave enough to ask for our crayons back. She says:

When you figure out how to be yourself it’s an incredibly liberating untragic way to go through life.

And so, who was that boy, who was nearly six? What did he expect of life? And what does he now expect of me? I can’t say, specifically…it wasn’t until he was older that he had any particular hobbies, or interests, so I don’t think he expects to me to build model planes, make marionettes, or write plays.

To discover what life expects of us, Caroline McHugh suggests considering what’s the closest thing to who you are you’ve ever done?

Pick a word… she says.

Curious. Looking at him now, I think he was curious. Wanted to know how things work, how the world works, why things are the way they are. What’s with the freckles? How come my ears are so big?

We’re fortunate, aren’t we, to live at a time and in a place where we have the luxury of thinking about such things and that we live long enough to explore them.

I intend to be curious. Come with me if you like.

Bring your crayons.

Autumn Gold.

1. Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity