Up For The Challenge?

(Or, How Difficult Do You Want To Make This?)

There is a difference between setting yourself a challenge to which you can rise, and making your life difficult. I am rarely sure which is which in my life. I set challenges for myself, I strive to meet them, and I frequently wonder why I bother.

Striving is in itself a strange verb [Middle English striven, from Old French estriver, from estrit, estrif, quarrel. See strife.] which doesn't find its way into every day conversation.

"Oowite mate?" "How you doing?" "Still striving?" "Yes but the pay is shit" - you don't hear that very often.

Life, it may be observed, is for most people at least a struggle, if not a painful process of serial disappointment, without the added pressure of striving. I have adopted an entire methodology, no, perhaps a better, simpler word would be attitude, of insouciance, which I wear like a comfortable linen suit in need of laundering, not because I am naturally slack, but rather to counter-balance my own talent for over-achievement.

I am aware that this will appear to be insufferable vanity to some modest types. All I can say is, vanity is something to which I aspire, and if I keep going on boosting the old self-esteem, there is a slim chance that by the time I leave you this evening, I may have developed just the tiniest shred.

I noticed after a while (I must have been about 30) that a lot of people seemed to have a very different strategy to mine when it came to self-advancement. Their aim was entirely based on becoming Comfortable. They were looking for their Niche. They wanted a Career Path, with Good Holidays and regular Salary Reviews. After a period of Youthful Discovery they intended to find their Ideal Partner, Settle Down in a Nice Place and Breed. During their long, fruitful lives, they might Scuba or perhaps, Trek in some exotic location, South East Asia or South America, perhaps. They would develop a taste for Wine and join a Wine Club. When bored in later life, before settling down to Golf and/or the odd game of Scrabble, they might risk an illicit Affair, and depending on how it went, another, or even perhaps, Divorce and Re-Marriage, all of it safely within the predictable lines drawn out by RoSPA.

By the time I was 40 I had worked out that I had this apparently irremovable habit of making my life difficult for myself, and that I was spending a lot of time recovering from hitting the high-jump bars I was attempting to leap over. "Set realistic goals" became my mantra.

"Oowite mate?" "How you doing?" "Still striving?" "Yes, but now I set realistic goals, the pay has improved" - I don't say that very often.

The things is, comfort for me is not based on any of those things. I wouldn't mind the trek or the scuba, but remaining in one well-paid place doing one kind of thing for 44 weeks a year in order to get those brief moments of release is on the one hand, too comfortable, and on the other, ridiculously demanding.

I used to work at the Tate Gallery and a more enlightened employer it would be difficult to find anywhere in the world, but one hot summer's day, I upped and left, in order to go and find a woman I was infatuated with at the time. It needn't have been a woman, it could have been a song I needed to write, or a picture I needed to make, or a tree I needed to climb. I shall always remember Ian McN's raised eyebrows as I walked out, clearly unable to take the cool corridors full of tourists and guards for a moment longer. Conversely, put me in a club so hot that the walls are constantly wet with human moisture, controlling a sound desk with a PA so loud that it exceeds the legal noise level of a jet aircraft at take-off, struggling to satisfy the band, the band's manager and the club owner who are all making different demands upon me at five minute intervals, and I will thrive.

Someone once said to me that they thought it was important to me that I was first, but it's really not about that at all. It's about being in a different game altogether, one which doesn't seek comfort as a reward, or even, reward as a reward. It is about being there in that moment when after a week or a month or a year of struggle, without a worry or care of consequences, I realise that I have come into that place where all disappointment falls away, all pain is nullified, and the simple process of following the path I have created is enough.

If other people are with me, joy, but I no longer demand or expect their presence.

I am rewarded by that in a way I cannot explain.