A door that opens when another shuts

They say when one door closes, another opens. That may be close to the truth, but it doesn’t always happen quite that way. Sometimes you have to find the door and push it open yourself.

  It was a bit of both for me. When the brain tumour damaged the motor centre for my right side, I found that what had been a consuming passion for me was at a sudden end. My powerful and much loved video camera was now impossible for me to use. My damaged motor skills couldn't now cope with the delicate fingertip controls I'd used to film so many productions for the ADMS and the Armidale Playhouse, and in our filming business.

My first ever poster for the Musical Society

  Even the editing of the film on the computer, and the still graphics I was making constantly were suddenly beyond my physical powers, because most operations required both hands, one on the mouse and the other with keyboard controls. Getting out, carrying equipment, setting up a heavy tripod for a shoot... all those were no longer possible.

  I didn’t really think of these things when the effects of the tumour first hit. For many months, we were too engaged in the battle to put the brakes on it even to think of our former existence. But when we came home from Melbourne where I had had radiotherapy and chemo treatment, it slowly dawned on me what I had lost. 

  That was one of the biggest slaps in the face, apart, of course, from realising that the remainder of my life was going to be devoted to coping with the battle against the tumour and the vast change to lifestyle it meant for us all. For Tracey, it meant the loss of her performing and choreography for the stage productions we were part of, and the fun and fellowship of rehearsals and performance. We were both part of that team, and we devoted much of our lives to it. Then my constant seizures made it impossible, and my present medical condition still does.

Still from shooting A Night at the Opera Armidale August 2008

  BUT... what I could still do was write. Type, to be more precise, though I became restricted increasingly to the one hand I use today.

  It took some time to realise that this was an opportunity. The hours daily I had spent in graphics production or movie editing could be spent doing the other thing I always wanted to do, and that was write down stories from my past.

  I wanted to tell childhood stories, in particular. The mood changes when you write about adulthood, or the present. There’s a wonderful innocence about childhood scrapes and silliness that is much more attractive than the follies of adults.

  I discovered this when reading Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs. They were funny and charming when he was talking about childhood, but the going got heavy as the innocence disappeared. I remember only the childhood stories.

  So the fact that I couldn’t do filming and everything associated with it opened that door which, almost certainly, I would have left closed until it was too late. In its way, it has turned out to be as satisfying (and time-consuming!) as filming, film editing and graphics creation.

  Who knows what’s good or bad? Everything is relative. Everything in this mortal existence, anyway.

  "The Taoists realized that no single concept or value could be considered absolute or superior. If being useful is beneficial, the being useless is also beneficial. The ease with which such opposites may change places is depicted in a Taoist story about a farmer whose horse ran away.

  His neighbor commiserated only to be told, "Who knows what's good or bad?" It was true. The next day the horse returned, bringing with it a drove of wild horses it had befriended in its wanderings. The neighbor came over again, this time to congratulate the farmer on his windfall. He was met with the same observation: "Who knows what is good or bad?" True this time too; the next day the farmer's son tried to mount one of the wild horses and fell off, breaking his leg. Back came the neighbor, this time with more commiserations, only to encounter for the third time the same response, "Who knows what is good or bad?" And once again the farmer's point was well taken, for the following day soldiers came by commandeering for the army and because of his injury, the son was not drafted. 

  According to the Taoists, yang and yin, light and shadow, useful and useless are all different aspects of the whole, and the minute we choose one side and block out the other, we upset nature's balance. If we are to be whole and follow the way of nature, we must pursue the difficult process of embracing the opposites."
  — Connie Zweig (Meeting the Shadow)