Free Firsts

By Antonio Albert

Some very small pieces written on reflection and on seeing myself in how things pass.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Antonio Albert
• Release date: Mar 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9780463429471

Antonio Albert

I live in the middle of my country.I was born at the edge of it, by the sea, but now I live in its middle.And the names by which I am generally known have followed a similar journey: I started with a first name and a last name at the ends of my identity and spent most of my years being known by these. In the middle of these names are Antonio and Albert. A saint name and a family name.Is it the same for you, if you have middle names? They are as much you as the public face of a first name and a last name but hidden.Nowadays, as the looking inward becomes my more constant companion than looking out, I notice the two names which I always had, right in the middle of me, rather more fully than in my youth. Where they came from and where they could go.Losing sleep over whether I am part this nationality or part that background seems pointless. I have sailed through life with stories in my head about my identity and for what? A ‘cross-breed’ is not a fifty-fifty affair, and the glorious mongrel which I know I happily am is far too interesting to start limiting to divisions of character and identity born out of the poor eyesight and imagination of the body’s tenant. But some facts may help unravel things, because they do matter, after all.My first middle name comes from where my mother came from and my second middle name comes from my father’s name, and he told me that way back our family through his father came from Switzerland or Austria or Germany, somewhere in the Germanic Alps. My last name comes from there I found when I was there.I have always liked both my middle names but never used them. Antonio is my saint day, though I have never been baptised, but he seems to have been an admirable fellow in many ways. And Albert is a good name for a good person. It is nice to have the name of a saint and the name of a good person given to me, and I now look at them as welcome guides.Like you, I am hurtling toward the end of my life at neck-breaking speed. It feels like it is all getting faster in proportion to how more slowly I look at things and live with them. An interesting see-saw, I reckon. Early life’s full speed ahead-ness while life stretches out into an impossibly long infinity giving way to a slalom last stretch where you notice the trees and the taste of fresh air and the eyes of a lover more richly and fully than ever before only to have all of it snatched away, bit by bit. Life laughs and we can but relax and join in.Its cruelties seem limitless and lacking in any glimmer of remorse. Most pointedly when the painful ironies of life emerge without anyone knowingly intending them to appear and flex their muscles. We can laugh or cry and often do both, though years apart. Life’s pretend paragraphs merge and grow from one into another over time.The further we travel from the smell of our own delicious armpits, the more we suppress our own smell . . . the further we travel away from our own nature and truth, and we open the door to the Pandora’s box of limit and of the crude, narrow-mind attempts to calibrate the seamless, ever-flowing, ever blending and never still or confined or defined realityLove your armpits. They are you. Never suppress them. Allow them to breathe. Observe any Delilah tendencies you may have as being hostile. Allow yourself to breathe. We all need to cool down sometimes and we all need to invite connections with those who can catch our scent. That’s what I think.And so, I write from me and for me but offer these things to you to take or to leave. My words matter no more than yours. I write because I want to, to say things I have thought of and felt and to say things I have only noticed through writing. Sometimes it is the act of writing which forms things on the page that maybe we have unwittingly been waiting to have in our lives.I hope you find something here useful and that you return sometime and find that I have added to things with something new.All the best in whatever kindness you do.

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