All a jumble on a Sunday morning

Yesterday we watched the movie F1, starring Brad Pitt and Damson Idris. In my twenties, I was accidentally and inadvertently involved in motor sport, culminating in being part of the all-access team for the Le Mans endurance race. 

As a lifelong athlete, I appreciate the psychology of sport and the developmental incubator it becomes. Great sportspeople are generally great people. They see the bigger game. They see their competitors as the spirit of their betterment. They know that there is no such thing as an individual sport. It is always a team. 

Brad Pitt’s character, Sonny, thirty years after a horrendous accident ended a potentially brilliant career as a driver, had reached a place where the only thing that mattered to him was driving. The glamour, cameras, fame and money meant nothing to him. He was on the other side of tragedy and years of self-abuse.

When he walks into the room and meets the young, talented rookie Joshua, played by Damson Idris, for the first time, the rookie, his ego seriously dented, experiences the walk as ‘swanning.’

You swan into the room, said Joshua. 

I was thinking about this this morning out in the surf. My timing was off. I was reading the waves badly. I was watching another woman surfing, and felt the stab of envy. She was just doing her. Not striving. No pretence. But I was assigning her the place of ‘swanning.’

Just like Joshua decided that Sonny was swanning and arrogant for simply being Sonny walking into the room.

How many times have I done this? How many times has my lack, my self-doubt, my uncertainty, been projected on another, an innocent? 

How many times have people done this to me? Assigned me a label? Categorised my being?  

Very different from assigning a label when you see someone lying, cheating, or bullying. 

I was reflecting upon this over coffee. Thinking about my shitty surf. 

And then I read a paragraph from a man and his family in Gaza City, trying to keep his children quiet as the quadcopter flew overhead, seeking life to target. This endless fear and death, a 24/7 existence.

While the olive trees get bulldozed on the West Bank, as the colonists amplify their pillage of land and homes.

My world of petty concerns against this non-existence. 

A globally sanctioned famine. The world supporting an apartheid, terrorist, settler state.

The most powerful man on the planet, a convicted felon, rapist and probable pedophile, putting military on the streets of his own people, masked hoodlums posturing as police violently removing people from the streets, dissenters of his orders under threat of arrest, convicted felons and sex traffickers given respite and his personal wealth increased since January by more than in the entire 79 years of his life.

Two books form a bookend to my weekend. Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, by Aussie Luke Kemp waiting to be read, and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong. Reading Ocean writing about his family history as Vietnamese refugees traumatised by the war, every word a note of immense beauty and pain, showing that beauty and violence can stand so closely together.

Is this dress fire proof, asks his mother, her life scarred with images and experiences of napalm. 

I am a jumble of all of this. Exhaustion tugs at the corners of my emotions. I felt tears rising, out in the surf, triggered by the frustration, but bubbling up from a pool of too-much-to-hold. Like so many of us feel. Shell-shocked by humanity’s horror toward each other. The numbness spreading like a zombie disease that creates the compliance so desired by the Goliaths.

It is broken. This world. 

I will break for this morning. I will allow the grief to overtake me. I will howl at the wind, at the horror, at those whose souls see nothing but their own glory. 

I will sleep. Find a place to laugh. Dip into Nature and her ever-steady beauty.

And tomorrow, tomorrow, I will return to the fray.

As we must. Those of us who care deeply about each other and the sacredness of life.

Photo Taken June 19th 2025, Article published August 24th 2025