5/13/2023 0 Comments The Spare Room by Helen Garner![]() ![]() ![]() The fact that the footy season exists, that it’s coming around again. ![]() The under-16s footy coach leaning on the fence and muttering between clenched teeth, “ Don’t turn your back on the play.” “Resentment is like taking poison and hoping that someone else will die.” Maybe they’ll lead me somewhere good before I shrivel up and blow away. I plan to keep writing them down, praising them, arranging them like stepping stones into the dark. Hand-lettered signs, quotes from books, offhand remarks that make me think of dead people, or of living ones I can no longer stand the sight of. Words that people choose, their accidentally biblical turns of phrase. I’m going to settle for small, random stabs of extreme interestingness – moments of intense awareness of the things I’m about to lose, and of gladness that they exist. So I’m not going to spend what’s left of my life hanging round waiting for it. And before you’ve had time to take a big gasp and name it, it’s gone. It’s something you glimpse in the corner of your eye until one day you’re up to your neck in it. It exists all right, it will be given to you, but it’s fluid, it’s evasive, it’s out of reach. It’s more like the thing that Christians call grace: you can’t earn it, you can’t strive for it, it’s not a reward for virtue. W hat is happiness, anyway? Does anybody know? It’s taken me 80 years to figure out that it’s not a tranquil, sunlit realm at the top of the ladder you’ve spent your whole life hauling yourself up, rung by rung. ![]()
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