living the quiet life




Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business  
and to work with your hands...  
 1 Thessalonians 4:11


I love that scripture. For me, it embodies the kind of life I would love to live.

But it remains an ideal.

The environment where I live and work is quiet, and most mornings I am woken by the sound of birdsong. That's just before some idiot, somewhere in this town lets his damn car alarm off, for at least 1/2 an hour every morning at 6am. I keep planning to drive around and find him, but that means actually getting up and dressed before 6am, which is seriously unlikely to ever happen.


Mind your own business.... hmmm. Sounds good. But what happens when you are a journalist and "your own business" is the business of others? I prefer to interpret this as "don't gossip" which is generally much easier for me to live by.


I wonder if working with your hands includes working on the computer, because that seems to be all the handwork I have time to do at the moment.


But one day! One day I will be living somewhere wild (by the sea, in a forest under a mountain... and yes, I do mean all three) which I have bought due to (by then) being a best selling author. 

Then I'll be quiet, mind my own business and spend my days making pots, painting landscapes and making apple pies.

Comments

Island TEFL said…
Hey Lynne
Nice reading your posts..
so bizarre, on the other side of the world, yet so easy to stay in touch with all thanks to social media. Go blogging!
xx
Rosanne
24 September 2010 at 13:40
Lynne said…
and twittering too... thanks for following me there too Rosanne!
24 September 2010 at 14:07
julochka said…
except when the paparazzi come by. they're quite disturbing. or so i've heard.
24 September 2010 at 23:18
Lynne said…
I'll just feed them apple pie
25 September 2010 at 16:04
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

signs on the way

Image
We saw some fun signs while we were away. Like this one at Letaba Camp in the Kruger Park: here's what a sausage fruit looks like, in case you were wondering. and this one at the God's Window lookout at the Blyde River Canyon was my favourite:
Read more

the writer formerly known as...

Twenty years after I was born a Brooks, I became a Wilson in one of those happy-ever-after fantasies that didn't quite work out the way I had planned. But Wilson was a nice name, and eminently preferable to Brooks (which in Afrikaans means underpants or knickers and led to horrible teasing at school) and I quite enjoyed it. It was one of those anonymous names that everyone could spell and I liked the fact that it was totally normal at first look, but had a secret history. The great grandfather of the Mr Wilson I married had emigrated from somewhere near Moscow to the US and like so many others with unpronouncable or "difficult" names (I think it was Tobinofsky) he was given another one. One of the legends is that Wilson was chosen from the phone book, another is that he particularly admired a Wilson (couldn't have been Harold). So, for the next 25 years or so, I built my name and reputation as the journalist Lynne Wilson ... until I met and married my new happy-ever-a
Read more

Like faded flowers, thrown away: Steve Biko and the Boer women

Image
A Boer woman with her dead child, the last of her children to die, photographed by Emily Hobhouse The women are wonderful. They cry very little and never complain. The very magnitude of their sufferings, their indignities, loss and anxiety seems to lift them beyond tears… only when it cuts afresh at them through their children do their feelings flash out. Some people in town still assert that the Camp is a haven of bliss. I was at the camp to-day, and just in one little corner this is the sort of thing I found – The nurse, underfed and overworked, just sinking on to her bed, hardly able to hold herself up, after coping with some thirty typhoid and other patients, with only the untrained help of two Boer girls–cooking as well as nursing to do herself. Next tent, a six months’ baby gasping its life out on is mother’s knee. Two or three others drooping sick in that tent. Next, a girl of twenty-one lay dying on a stretcher. The father, a big, gentle Boer kneeling beside her; while,
Read more