Day 20

'Direction', Pencil on Paper

Another image linked to my tour of the Ulster Museum last weekend, a Navigational tool from the 'Girona' a Spanish Armada galleass that in Oct 1588 sunk off Lacada Point, County Antrim, Northern Ireland. It would have been used to make or take measurements on marine charts when plotting a course or setting a destination.

As I write this due to the fact it is now fairly late in the a.m. I'm now officially 25 years old, which is actually quite a frightened thought. The thought of plotting a course or direction then seems quite fitting at this moment in time, as I'm sure that most of you have went through a similar process to myself whilst growing up... That being that when your young you can't wait to be older and as you get older you start to wish you were younger again. The wonderful thing about being young is that you tend to be full of dreams, hopes and aspirations of what you want to achieve, you have that naive energy that makes you unable to feel like you could ever falter. However as get older you realise that for the most part you just ended up being full of shit, the reason being that all those things that you thought you would have done or achieved have tended to be forgotten about... maybe because something more necessary or immediate got in the way, maybe because you realised that you'd rather take a different path or maybe you just decided that you were never going to achieve what you wanted. It then seems that as each birthday rolls round you end up getting a little touch of those birthday blues as you begin contemplating in what direction your actually moving. I suppose that's the main reason I started to do these drawings and the main reason why I really don't want to fail with the task I've undertaken as this is the direction that I want to move in. Although some of what I've said my seem a little negative as if dreams and hopes are futile, it's by no means meant in that way. Instead what I hope to highlight is that we sometimes lose direction, travel on the wrong course completely, or just run aground due to our own mistakes or inadequacies... it's only by realising this though that were able to readjust and take action. There is something I once read that has always stuck in my head and probably sums this notion up better than I can,

"nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely" - Auguste Rodin

It's true... even though something seems like a waste of time after it's over we know that we either never want to experience that thing again, if we did we would do it differently or we would take the positives from what we've learned and apply it else where. So if at any time you feel things aren't going the way you planned, just remember that the world is round, not flat... as a result if you travel far enough in the wrong direction you'll eventually end up back where you started, at that point you can use your experiences to make sure that you move in the right direction next time.