A stirring in the soul

I’m waiting for a bus in a country town south of Perth when the police pull over a car and it stops in front of me.

I’d say this made me an unwilling witness to the events that followed but I was deeply interested, though of course I whipped out my sunglasses so I wouldn’t get caught staring .

There’re two women in the car. The one on the passenger side has short blonde hair, a buzz cut. She lays her seat back and theatrically pretends to sleep. I know she’s pretending because her arm is out the window and she’s tapping an impatient rhythm out on the door.

The driver, meanwhile, has burst into tears and fluctuates between swearing loudly and sobbing even more loudly. She bangs her hand on the steering wheel in frustration. JESUS JESUS JESUS, she wants to be heard. I’m not sure this is the best approach if she’s hoping to emit an aura of innocence. I keep that observation to myself.

One of the police, a woman with a degree in eye rolling gestures to her partner, then touches her nose, mimicking a snorting action.

When is your bus due?, one of the officers asks me, contemplating the clearly inadequate space for a bus to pull up should it arrive in the middle of all this. I interpret this as a suggestion they could be some time.

I start to get nervous. I’m hoping, because I’m paranoid and prone to melodrama, this isn’t a Day of the Jackal type scenario where the women are not possibly on their way to score meth from a skinny bloke called Troy or Ryan in a car park out the back of the local tavern.

Maybe they’re in fact, well disguised assassins on the lam, maybe they just pulled off a hit, a sniper shot at an impossible range, maybe at least five kilometres, maybe the woman pretending to sleep is actually trying to casually disguise the fact that her handbag is a high powered shot gun. Dismantled, obviously.

This could totally be one of those Eddie Redmayne scenes where everyone gets it, including the annoying sticky beak who is rubbernecking from the bus shelter a metre away from the kill zone.

Turns out it’s only an expired rego thing and they’re free to go and the speculation is more about me than them.

The woman who’s been crying punches the air in vindication, gives the cops the finger, then she and her mate drive off in a roar of defiance. My bus comes and I find a seat up the back, I jag the last one free so I don’t have to share with a stranger.

Before I got distracted by a routine traffic stop I was sitting at the bus stop practicing my new year resolutions, I was attempting to meditate in this instance via the medium of box breathing. It doesn’t feel natural. I’m easily distracted. I’m not good at the rhythmic counting. In four, hold four, out four, hold four, start again.

I was congratulating myself for successful efforts so far to adopt a new, low stress lifestyle. Last year was a bit of a cow for various reasons and I thought I’d front foot 2025 by trying different ways to rest my brain, especially the pursuit of creativity for its own sake and other general practices to slow down.

Slow down, you might reasonably ask in tones of rising disbelief. Didn’t I chuck my full time job in four years ago? Don’t I barely work? Even my writing hardly qualifies as an effort, my stories are like, 100 words long, if that. I swan around talking about books on social media. I fan girl authors at Festivals and call reading “research.” I claim selfies with celebrities as tax deductions.

Yes, I respond, bristling – all that stuff is very wearing on my brain. It takes concentration. And effort. And now that I’m pursuing a creative life, I need to do more arty stuff. Arty stuff that doesn’t require so much “learning” and “talent” and “skill.”

This is all a long winded way to both pass time on a coach from Bunbury to Perth and to announce I’ve taken up painting. Yes, I have. I’ve been reading up on the creative brain and apparently applying yourself to a creative pursuit of some kind without purpose or expectation of a finished product is Good For The Soul. Art for art’s sake. God forbid it makes any money or is of sufficient standard to be enjoyed by anyone else, that’s beside the point.

I am completely on board for this. I read the brilliant Holly Ringland’s book, The House That Joy Built and came away very inspired on the subject of creativity for its own sake. Highly recommend.

And only today, The Guardian reported on a bloke in Stoke-on-Trent who took up painting terrible pictures six months ago. His work is crude to say the least, he is proud to say. He’s got no talent but he enjoys himself tremendously. He’s inundated with commissions. Obviously I shall soon be joining him with my series of stripey paintings. There are two so far, illustrated here. Stripey One and Stripey Two.

Apparently, (and I would include the research if I wasn’t on the bus without access to the book, having narrowly escaped a genuine gang land criminal stand off in the mean streets of Eaton) apparently it’s very helpful to engage new areas of your brain, delve into uncharted areas of cognition as such. And it doesn’t come more uncharted for me than painting. I failed both art and tech drawing at school, spent a few months with watercolours painting buttercups badly in France once but I have never had a lesson. I am a bonafide novice.

I’ve been hanging out with my dad a lot the last year, and he’s the opposite. He’s educated in the field, he’s a beautiful painter. He has easels and canvasses and brushes and paint. He paints salt lakes and the red desert landscapes of his youth in the Goldfields. He’s not been too well so he hasn’t picked up a brush for a while.

Never one to let opportunity pass by, I decided to kick off my art for art’s sake campaign at his place. Some of the materials are a bit dusty, the paint tubes have mostly dried up from disuse but you’d be amazed what you can do cutting them in half and jabbing about with water and an old brush.

I can’t draw. Which is obviously a win given what I’m aiming for. So I am going for a loose interpretation of the form. I confess to googling some basic instructions – I look up ‘easy abstract painting ideas’ which was very useful I must say. There’s a wealth of information out there for the talentless and those devoid of ideas of their own.

People, I am a convert. I had so much fun. Who knew splashing paint around for nothing more than the thrill of it could be such a blast. Sure, my spirits were slightly crushed when dad tottered out to look at the result, snorted, and suggested I tried working on something good. Drawing a shape, for example, he said.

Out of my way old man, I said coldly. I am an artist. I am supported by science. I am being Mindful.

Then he asked for a pencil and showed me how to think about perspective and talked about vanishing points in visual art and he drew examples in my notebook. Precious times. I promised to practice then carried on slapping paint around regardless. It was a joy.

I’m here to tell you if 2025 looks a bit tense, I highly recommend finding a pastime you don’t need to master. Find something you aren’t going to be good at. That has no purpose. No potential for commodification. Do something solely because you might enjoy it. For fun. Chances are after a while you’ll start to experience something magical, a gentle stirring in your soul.

I am starting to remember what that stirring is, and why it’s lovely.

I think it’s called…play.