Changing over time
‘On Transients’, Artwork by Trevor Neal
WHAT TO DO?
I had a conversation with my dad, a school teacher who’d helped me navigate the ‘what-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life?’ aspects of teenagehood. We sat in the garden of my childhood home —I’d returned for the weekend feeling antsy with the need to work it all out, the pressure of finishing university closing in. Crunch time. “Why not a retail manager?” he offered. And at that I lashed out. I was finishing a degree. Sure, I wasn’t as intelligent as the lawyer, banker big-time acquaintances that I’d been surrounded by at the University of Melbourne, but didn’t I need to be more? Ignorantly, I felt insulted. At some stage during my tirade, I drew breath and Dad had a chance to remind me how much I’d loved the retail work I’d done while studying. I had loved chatting to people about interesting things and objects in store, seeing some of them awkwardly shuffling, trying pieces on and shyly, peaking in mirrors, wondering what’s ‘them’, whether they dare. The golden moments were seeing them leave a little more confident in their own skin. Maybe derived initially from an outfit that made them feel that a little of something trapped inside had broken out, but it’s a feeling that had legs. I’d loved it. “We just want you to be happy,” Dad sighed. Insult turned into relief. But I still had no idea what I wanted to do. Was it retail I liked or something else it brought out in me? Rather than work out the answer for myself, I booked a series of sessions with a career advisor instead.
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THE CATALYST
Years and several jobs later I reconnected with our family friend Trevor Neal. As a child I’d perused Trevor’s home shamelessly. Full of art, ornaments, photography books and interesting pieces of furniture. Everything, just-so, came together in a naturally welcoming way. I’d ask questions. What’s this? Where’s it from? And everything had a story. Trevor had begun professional life as a teacher before embarking on a 14-year career that led him to senior management in the global pharmaceutical industry. But one day in 2012 he resigned and found himself running down the stairs of his Vienna office building. A weight seemed to lift, “Thank goodness that’s over.” At the time he thought he was referring to that particular piece of office life, later he realised he was feeling the release of saying goodbye to corporate life all together. He became a maker and artist, spaces he’d been forever tinkering in, though not devoted to. A budding art and design lover myself, I wanted to know all about his work. Through a meandering set of conversations spanning years, I worked out that it wasn’t just his work, but how he came to it — that was what I really wanted to understand. I was still looking for career advice. Or so I thought…
Upon returning to Australia, leaving corporate life behind, Trevor started his furniture business ‘More than Palatable’ —and he literally started with palettes. “I’d take the tram from Mooney Ponds Junction, where I was renting, up to Highpoint Bunnings, picking up an old palette and other rubbish. So, I’ve gone from this senior corporate role to being at the back of the tram surrounded by rubbish.” His first wheeled coffee table sold on Gumtree for $150. “I’d had vastly bigger pay cheques but never one that had been more satisfying,” he recalled. ‘More than Palatable’ grew utterly into its pun, as Trevor’s work was no longer about striving for a typically ‘palatable’ version of success.
A couple of months of email threads passed before I visited Trevor over a weekend in his home on the hills of Gloucester in NSW, where he lives with his partner. Merrick, a gentle giant of a wolfhound-kelpie cross keeps company, peering out from under his eyebrows, sticking to his owners like Velcro. In the living room of a morning, a ceiling-height timber, deco-style divider made by Trevor houses mementos within its nooks, while Melbourne duo Vika and Linda plays through an upcycled retro radio. “The things in my home are emblematic of my experiences and make the house a home, a place to belong. The furniture I make is an extension of this, functional for life while simultaneously reminders of journeys taken…it’s the nature of recycled materials,” he pinpoints as inspiration.
A little way down the hill, Trevor has built his 140sqm workshop; charcoal-painted steel with a timber deck and immense sliding timber doors, timber recycled from a Mornington Peninsula demolition. Inside a dining table is a work-in-progress. Crafted out of wood from Daylesford’s old Rex Cinema. The piece is an example of the way Trevor moulds materials into a new chapter.
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Credenza and artwork by Trevor Neal, image by Caitlin
Merrick outside Trevor’s workshop, image by Caitlin
AS UNEASE DEVELOPS INTO A SENSE OF SELF
Some artists leave the womb with a compulsion to create, driven by necessity. It’s all they can do, and nothing else will do. For others the need to create isn’t as obvious but it emerges more gradually from a restlessness. Describing this growing unease with my professional life to Trevor, he recalled author Stephen Covey’s theory: the feeling is a little like you’re playing a role in a script written by someone else.
Catching the late morning sun over the rolling hills of Gloucester, coffee in hand, lounging on the timber decking in seating that Trevor had handcrafted, I asked why we fear change and why it feels risky. In one email he’d discussed how his sense of self developed, as the years went on, he became aware of the institutions framing society and that often a sense of self develops either within or despite those surroundings, “For me, for as long as I could remember I had this feeling of not fitting. I did almost everything that my family, community, society asked and expected of me and always within myself I felt unfulfilled. My sense of self was not just eroded through participating in a life that wasn’t fully owned by me but even more so through the knowledge that I was allowing it to happen. On reflection, just about every institution I can name was stifling me.”
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DEFINING THE NON-NEGOTIABLE
Making a significant change to pursue a creative life takes guts, considering our bank accounts and the fact that we’re fundamentally connected to other people in life. Feeling these pressures, I put them to Trevor. “We all have to make decisions for ourselves in the context of the responsibilities we carry. If we were to wait for just the right conditions to come along, we would most likely never get the chance because we couldn’t ever take the chance. In my experience it’s not possible to have it all. Only the thing that is most important to you can ever be for certain. Everything else carries a value to be negotiated, including your commitment to living your own truth.” As someone easily (though gradually less so) influenced by others’ opinions of me, I pushed Trevor further. When you know you need to make a change, and you’re clear on what your non-negotiable is, how do you manage other people? In some ways Trevor could relate to my angst, “There were people who had an expectation of me that was purely related to their own needs…So for my own survival I had to say ‘I can’t carry the responsibility for your life’, and it’s a sad goodbye. But people of great value who love you for you — not what you do — find a way to come along. Those are friendships that go through transitions well because those friends need nothing from me.” He referenced a poem by David Whyte that he found comfort in, Sweet Darkness. A poem that made clear to me that authentically feeling like you belong can’t be faked.
During COVID-19 I had that moment, staring out the window, realising that what I was doing with a majority of my week wasn’t what I wanted to do for the next 40+ years, so I made my own change. Part-time work with dedicated week time for freelance writing. Some friends told me I was ‘brave’, but a friend who has known every version of me since childhood was awash with relief, telling me she’d never felt prouder of me. She wasn’t proud of something I was doing, rather she recognised that I was being more myself than ever.
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‘On Darkness’, Artwork by Trevor Neal
TO YIELD TO RISK OR UNCOVER COURAGE
When acquaintances asked me what I do (because we always ask that, what someone ‘does’ implying work, not what they’re interested in), and I explained my freelance arrangement, the word ‘brave’ continued to come up. The word ‘brave’ then started to niggle at me, heightening my sense of risk. I asked Trevor about how he views ‘risk’ in this context? “I think of risk having a negative connotation, of being fear laden. I learnt that some people aren’t capable of walking with you through big change and their responses are more about their own fears and anxieties. It can have a harmful effect on one’s sense of self because of one’s own heightened sense of vulnerability… Even commentary around being brave can be laced with similar meaning. That said, I’m more interested in courage because it’s fundamental to make your own journey. I also think one emanates more so from the mind, while the other is of the heart. A creative journey has to be mindful of both but I think by definition it tends to be heart-centric.”
When I think of heart-centric creatives, I think of the Patti Smiths of the world who came from nothing and unconventionally floated through phases of life instinctively before forging their very own, specific version of it. For some, being inspired by seemingly fearless artists, understanding the path they followed, can be a reassurance that creative life is possible. At least that’s how it felt for me, until Trevor, inadvertently, caused me to reconsider.
Early on in our emails I’d asked Trevor the age-old question flung at creatives– who are you inspired by? “Well, the ones I admire most are the ones we’ll never know the names of. Not a dollar to their name, but they are living their truth regardless. They get by, they own their life and accept full accountability for that life and they call themselves a … musician …because they are.” Trevor’s words took me back to an essay I’d read by Joan Didion, On Self Respect, where she argues that “character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.” I later realised why I’d found Trevor’s response disconcerting, and why it changed the way I considered inspiration. It underlined that you can be inspired by others, but you can’t follow them. There is no map and no guarantees. Instead, courage and self-respect erode the need for them. A little light-bulb moment — we were no longer having a conversation about working, but about living.
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Image by Caitlin
AN ANTIDOTE TO EXHAUSTION
In Trevor’s loungeroom, a large photograph hangs above his hand-crafted credenza. It depicts an old furniture store in Berlin. Only the façade is left standing, with chairs now littered haphazardly around it. Shot by Trevor, this photograph is one of many of his own pieces of art in the home. Several world-wide adventures have seen him produce vast, powerfully contemplative landscapes. These, thematically, are an enquiry On Darkness, On Journey and On Transience amongst others. Pondering Trevor’s work, I’d mentioned a perennial kind of fatigue that I felt was blocking my own artistic practice, that I couldn’t wait for an upcoming month of overseas travel I’d booked to re-energise me. He gently recalled a story he’d heard poet David Whyte tell, “David tells of a regular meeting he would have with a wise old friend, a Benedictine Monk. And on this particular occasion, David was feeling absolutely exhausted as he greeted his friend at the door. As he ushered him inside David asked him straight out, ‘Brother David, tell me about exhaustion…’, to which Brother David replied, ‘The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest.’ David Whyte responded, ‘The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest. What is it then?’ Brother David says, ‘The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.’”
A story that has weighed on me since because what my version of living wholeheartedly looks like may be something I can only understand incrementally. Although I’ve made a change to my career, am I ‘living’ day-to-day doing what I love most, or do I now just have a more creative life on paper? I can choose to feel disheartened by questions like these, or use them to inform my next move…sitting comfortably with the fact that living wholeheartedly, for me, may be an everchanging notion, as much about journey as destination.
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RECOGNISING THE VALUE OF TIME
Recently I’ve read a touch of philosophy. In a year where a pandemic continues and war breaks out, the Stoics seemed like somewhere to turn to for perspective on my smaller problems. Although I’m sure it’s been shouted often enough from the Ted Talk stage, this time I heard clearly. And for some reason I needed to hear it from Seneca to realise that despite words like these having been spoken for thousands of years, society’s values still largely don’t accord. In c. 65 AD, in a letter to his friend, Seneca wrote:
“What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily?... Hold every hour in your grasp. Lay hold of today’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon tomorrows. While we are postponing, life speeds by. Nothing…is ours, except time…What fools these mortals be! They allow the cheapest and most useless things, which can easily be replaced, to be charged in the reckoning, after they have acquired them; but they never regard themselves as in debt when they have received some of that precious commodity, - time! And yet time is the one loan which even a grateful recipient cannot repay…For, as our ancestors believed, it is too late to spare when you reach the dregs of the cask. Of that which remains at the bottom, the amount is slight, and the quality is vile.”
In the weeks after I leapt off my own ‘corporate hamster-wheel’, the change I made attracted others and creatively minded people told me about their side projects, about what they wished they were doing with their time instead of their employment. They asked what made me actually ‘change’. I kept relaying a version of Trevor’s story. So, in one way or another, this meandering essay of an interview, is putting pen to paper in an attempt to adequately answer that question. Although I’m not ‘there’ yet, still somewhat compromising, our threads of conversation have woven together to leave me with some certainty. My struggle to achieve work-life balance was always doomed because time is, for me, a ‘non-negotiable’—because every moment of time is simply life, and finite. Not a morbid thought, unless I find myself living as though it’s slipped my mind.
Image Provided by Trevor Neal
Image: Caitlin Leishman