Author: noexpertbut

My legs are knee deep in swampy reed infested water. I wade through hoping soon my efforts will take me to a place of respite. A simple cool but dry patch of earth is all I seek. A space where my body doesn’t need to struggle to achieve basic functions, like walking.

‘Do Sumo Wrestlers float?’ This amongst many other questions and various sound affects that come from my 10- year-old boy are part of the swampy waters my mind moves through on it’s path to an island of clear thought. What is it exactly I want to think about that is so important anyway? My next book, that cool short story idea, my next blog post, online marketing, self development? It all swirls around and is blocked by ‘Do sumo wrestlers float?’ It’s a fair question. My 10 year-old is trying to make sense of the world in the same way I’m trying to make sense of the world. Are Sumo wrestlers strong from muscle or from just being big and fat? Does having more muscle make you sink? Does being fat make you float?

I want to answer the question but I don’t have an answer. I tell him sumo wresters aren’t just fat. They are really strong. I tell him perhaps we shouldn’t use the word ‘fat’. Is over-weight any better? Being over-weight implies there is a correct weight and that someone has gone over it. How is that better than using the word ‘fat’? I don’t want him taking people’s differences and defining them into negative stereo-types, but how am I, as a parent, supposed to fight against media propaganda, against a sea of messages that are conditioning and shaping all humans, including my son, including myself?

It doesn’t change the fact that at the core are two very good questions. 1. Does muscle make you sink and does fat make you float? 2. Is this question any more or less of a distraction than any other question?

A distraction from what? That’s a third question. A distraction from thinking what you think you want to think?

While writing this I helped my son with homework, I made both my kid’s lunches. I had a coffee. I tweaked my website, I texted hellos with my girlfriend. My mum came in to get help connecting to WIFI and to ask my teenage daughter if she wanted any washing done. My daughter needed help with directions to work experience and I also had to stop her from sticking chop sticks into the toaster to retrieve oversized burning bread. The bread wasn’t fat, it was oversized. I didn’t have time to do the dishes or work on my novel before leaving for work.

The Sumo is still in my mind as I move through the swamp. I think about looking up the answer to the question but it’s one of a thousand questions that my son has asked me. What about the other multitude of questions racing through his mind that he’s not asking me? I’ve decided not to ponder the question any further? Pondering the reason the question is being asked is more revealing. What I had decided was a swamp of unwanted information that was hindering and halting my progress is just a means I’m using to filter incoming data. I can look at all these activities and thoughts placed before me as burdens, as obstacles, as a swamp to wade through or I can appreciate them as the rich texture of my experience.

The need to shape and form and organise information so prevalent in my son’s relentless questioning is something I’m happy I’ve passed on to him, even if it was just via DNA and not as a result of my parenting style.

My intuition tells me that Sumo wrestlers probably float and then after a while sink, just like the rest of us, unless they take some action to get out of the water they’d probably drown. Then of course they might float again.

Perhaps that’s what I’ll tell my son. Of course by the time I see him after school and offer my answer to the original question it may well have been replaced in his mind by another flow of seemingly unrelated questions. My best course of action is to enjoy where his mind takes mine. My thoughts will be waiting for me when I choose to see them.

Why is it that fiction sits so fundamentally at the core of our society? We invite fiction into our lives in many forms and as a species we always have – from cave painting, oral storytelling traditions, through music and song, visual art, books, radio, cinema, television to digital media. We accept storytelling as a means of both sharing ideas but also as pure entertainment and while clearly defining content into two categories of fiction and non-fiction a fundamental commonality remains. Fiction or non-fiction, our brain likes stories. We respond emotionally to what we call reality in the same way as we respond to what we call fiction. We laugh, we cry, we learn.

Is it such a stretch then to propose that fiction holds its place of importance because our lives are fictions too? That does not mean we can’t call our lives real, or take them seriously, but our lives are essentially the same as that of a character in a book, an extremely elaborate and detailed construction. When you realise your brain’s powerful ability to create and accept fiction, I think you can start to see how to control it, how to shape it into what you desire rather than going along with it as a passive passenger.

I started writing my novel ROAD TO NOWHERE in 1996 as a reaction to stories of global warming in the news. It struck me as alarming then, that as a species we were being very very slow to act. It alarms me even more now. I remember learning about green house gases in primary school and being taught about the life cycle of the sun and what life would be like for people at its different stages. These early encounters with popular science stayed firm in my mind and somehow colluded with a number of other ideas to form this book.

ROAD TO NOWHERE was written over a number of years as I balanced or rather imbalanced my life around work and family. In 2010 I started a new novel, but suddenly put it aside in favour of completing this book. Hitting my mid 40s I felt a great need to actually finish a project especially one I had already invested so much time and energy in.

I’ve experienced a great deal of change over the years of writing this book and that is reflected in its pages. Some aspects I’ve kept to remain faithful to the author I was at 28 when I first outlined the novel. Other elements have pushed their way in over time and finally my current headspace had a good deal to do with rounding it out and finishing it all off.

http://www.cilentopublishing.com/#!evan-shapiro/ca0q

This morning I saw a post from a teacher I know in Nepal. It showed two young children sleeping in the streets of Kathmandu. I found the image heartbreaking. I don’t know who these children are, if they have been helped or if they continue to live life on the streets. Having worked on projects that help disadvantaged children in Nepal I know I have helped some children and I know other people doing the same, but here are two children that I can see but have no way of helping. It seems to me that if collectively we put the rights of children at the forefront of every decision made, and I mean every decision, then this situation would change. It sounds idealistic but surely it is something that as a species we could get our heads around. I don’t need to imagine if these were my children or not. To me it feels like they are my children. They are human and I am human, it is no more complex than that. They are young and vulnerable and deserve protection and nurturing, not the opposite.

Ok, so there are a few things that I am actually an expert at, but there are many more fields of expertise where my skills and experience fall well short of expert classification. Fortunately my opinion and enthusiasm remarkably fill in the gaps. What you will discover here, over time, are things that I’m in no way an expert of. I don’t feel the need to point out my true areas of expertise, as they will be uncovered as an obvious by product of this exercise. For now I’d like to explore what an expert is. According to the dictionary, an expert is a person who is very knowledgeable about or skillful in a particular area. For our purposes an expert is someone that has an informed opinion. Why mess with the dictionary you say. Well why not I say. Was the dictionary always the same? No it has developed and evolved over time. Regardless I’m happy with the definition of expert for the time being. I’m no expert but… therefore refers to a common phrase where by the person speaking the said words in that order is declaring that they are not an expert however their opinion that will soon follow the words ‘I’m no expert but’ are deemed by them to be far greater and wiser than a true expert. Herein lies what could only be described as irony. Unless of course you’d like to describe it as something else.