Sudden Salmon

I read somewhere once that when swimming upstream salmon can suddenly and erratically change direction. This can be due to obstacles like rocks, aligning their bodies with the current, avoiding predators and even rapid changes in water temperature. To the casual observer the apparent sudden and erratic change of direction can seem perplexing, but to the salmon, who can see what’s going on in the water, changing direction seems perfectly reasonable, if not necessary for survival. When I quit my job a few months back it was because I was suddenly a salmon. I couldn’t continue swimming upstream with all of the crap in the water, people standing on the riverbanks with nets and fishing lines, or large birds like hawks tracking my course, my every move, ready to strike.

“ENOUGH!” I cried in my big-lipped salmon voice. “I’m changing direction.”

So I did.

Our grasp of what we want in life can sometimes be ambiguous, excuse-ridden, imaginings rather than doings. It’s easy to fall into that place where we convince ourselves that due to practicalities or fear or both it is not the right time to reach for what we want, for our dreams. And time just keeps ticking on by.

So in my sudden salmon mindset, sick of swimming, fed up with external factors driving my decisions, realising I was a salmon staring down the barrel of old age where I could no longer keep up with the current, I shifted direction and swam a different way.

I’ve written all my life – plays, poems,songs, short stories, long stories, novels. Some have been published, most haven’t. I have six finished novels sitting on my desktop waiting to be revised and edited. I wrote this blog in its original iteration for ten years. I am no stranger to stringing a sentence together, but I am a stranger to getting a novel to the stage where I feel it is fit for publication. I don’t want to be that stranger anymore.

So here I am writing and editing my main novel every day, living on my savings. At first I was slightly panicked, doing endless budgeting, fretting over when the money would run out, giving in to the fear of uncertainty. The anxiety pitted in my stomach like a fist.I told myself that I was making a mistake, that it wasn’t going to work, that I was too old to be so reckless, that no one would want to read my novel anyway. But that was how I thought in my old life when I was a younger salmon swimming upstream, battling everything around me, always talking myself out of things. In my new life as an older salmon I’ve found myself in a sun-drenched lake. There are tributaries that take me to larger bodies of water should I wish to wander but I prefer to stay in the lake where the current is mild and the insects and larvae plentiful. So I swim in the lake, chilled, barely remembering the old life and its old fears, going with the flow of possibility where a creative life is not a stranger.