Reneging: the highlights reel

Recently, I decided to make some Life Decisions.

Immediately, everything took on a different hue. All Important Ideas started with initial caps and some even attained italicised status. My thoughts became punctuated with Loud Talking for the Crucial Bits.

I decided Never to Work Full-Time in an Office Again!

Then I took an eight-week full-time on-site writing contract.

I decided to Stop Editing and Only Write!

Then I got offered two nice, neat, entertaining-sounding projects that are largely editorial but may enable me to achieve some other Life Goals, like floating in a prawn trawler off Darwin, and growing my own bananas.

I decided to Travel to Egypt at Last!

Then HRH started talking about three weeks of free accommodation in Paris.

This is the highlights reel -- there have been many other, lesser Life Decisions that have also fallen by the wayside almost as soon as I finished italicising their Important Bits. It would appear that whatever I decide, the opposite will take place. As you can imagine, my progress is barely perceptible at best, and wildly unpredictable.

There seems to be no solution to this -- certainly making A Decision about it won't help. Instead, I've taken to gazing mindlessly at the Rand McNally map of The Political World above my desk and trying to imagine its two dimensions brought alive with some depth. Instead of reading the words HIMALAYA MOUNTAINS, I try to picture the ridges and creases, the snow, the Sherpas. The ice picks and tiny tents in a blizzard. Sun on the snow caps. The world in three dimensions.

Yet the items on the Reneging Highlights Reel remain on film, two-dimensional depictions of a fantastical reality, imagined but not lived.