Just Try

I say this multiple times some days. Some days I even beg. Please, just try.

Doing something and getting it wrong is far more successful than doing a thing perfectly the first time. The first is achievable. The second, a myth.

The only people who can become successful without loads of effort are those with loads of money. In our economically structured world, money speaks. Unfortunately, this is simply how the world is.

But still, you must try.

At eleven years old a book came into my possession. I remember the moment. A box of cleared-away things was being taken to the Opportunity Shop. We weren’t at home, we were at someone else’s house and Mum was getting ready to take their mum to the store to do her shopping, as she didn’t drive. The box had been put on the back seat of the car and for some reason, I was closing the door. Just as I stepped back to do so, my mother asked me if I wanted the book that was on top.

For all of her faults and foibles, my mother understood that I loved books. They were always given to me as presents and I was always allowed to choose one from each Scholastic catologue that came home from school.

I, therefore, readily accepted this new, old book.

I found a place to sit, opened the hard blue cover, and found Cassandra sitting on the draining board of the kitchen sink, writing about her family, her odd, unusual, and outright dysfunctional family.

It was the first time I had ever met anyone else who had sat on the draining board of the kitchen sink. I spent my childhood years being bathed in the kitchen sink, even after I grew too long and leggy to really fit. This is the lot of those of us who lived with tank water—baths were a Sunday night luxury, hair washing night. The rest of the week the children bathed in the sink.

It is the lot, too, of the very poor. I never came across other children being bathed in the sink. I sensed early that it was shameful, something to be embarrassed about. I kept it to myself. Added it to the many secrets I kept.

Then I met Cassandra. She, although not bathing, was sitting on the kitchen sink. She was also poor. She had also faced tragedy and misfortune, and yet here she was, writing it all down.

I got myself a notebook and began to write.

At eleven years old, I had started secondary school. I missed, for all practical purposes, grades five and six at primary school. I was there in body. The teacher was not. He stayed in the schoolhouse next door, setting us to work and coming back an hour or two later. I suppose I learned things. My memory is vague.

But then it would be. I was in the thick of the things going wrong in my world, harmed and unsafe. I hardly remembered I was a real person.

So I wrote it down. Except I didn’t. I couldn’t find words to say those things. I found other words. Words to say how much I loved the sky, how annoying this or that pet was being, words about nothing much at all. Certainly nothing correct.

I could hardly spell, let alone form a coherent sentence.

It was the impulse of writing, the wanting to get it down on the page, make sense of it all, that I was chasing. The same impulses that led Cassandra to write.

If I could write like Cassandra then maybe I could exert control over my life like she had.

And I did.

I don’t know what happened to those early notebooks. I suspect they are here in my grandmother’s suitcase, the one she brought with her when she came to Australia as a war bride, along with the many letters I kept. The love letters. Teenagers cow-eyed about each other writing it all down.

It is that early writing that began the journey to now, to here, to talking with you, forgetting that there are even words involved in the meaning that is flowing between us.

Try.

I somehow want to empower my students to understand that it is the trying that matters.

My score at the end of year 12 was enough to get me into a university I knew nothing about, not even its location. And yet, I went to that university. I learned a few things. I kept writing.

Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it—for action has magic grace and power in it.

Julia cameron, 1998, The right to write, p. 131

To try is to open the door to possibility.

The old adage is true, you can’t steer a stationary ship.

Part of finding out what you are good at is finding out what you aren’t so good at and then deciding if you need to work to be better at that thing or can let it go.

Then work at being as good at the thing you are good at as you can.

It is the hard-working students who ultimately do best. Their natural smarts may get them part way there, but it is their grit that gets them over the line first. Every time.

Doors open to people who try.

So try.