Public Service Announcement
by Lorin Clarke @lorinimus
Learning netball was fascinating. New rules. Figuring out the things that make someone good at it. Listening to the people watching calling things out. Watching a team dance and pivot their way up and down the court. New board games are like that too. Being taught a new game of cards. Learning Wordle was like that at first. Figuring it out by yourself. Doing the linguistic arithmetic required to get the answer. New shoes are grouse. The feel of them. The bounce of the runners. The shine of the dress shoes. When you go to the beach and the sea has done that thing where it sweeps the sand in front of it and there are kind of sea-froth bubbles in the sand and your bare feet are sinking into it and it’s new and fresh and nobody else has been on it so ha ha ha. Nothing like a blank page. A new project. An unwritten letter. A funny note for a housemate that hasn’t quite formed yet. A creative work that tingles somehow but hasn’t yet taken shape. New toothpaste does nothing for me, but new pencils? Different story. Look at how your handwriting just improved a thousand per cent. How the pencil marks the page. How it feels in your hand. New books are pretty great. Library books, second‑hand books, brand-new books or borrowed books with their own personalised recommendations. Whole worlds about to be discovered. Connections made. You
might laugh, you might cry, you might gaze out the window with a book in your hand – and if there is a better way to sit in a chair, I have yet to discover it. Okay now, time for a quick quiz: you must always what a new book? Fill in the blank. Come on, let’s not always see the same hands. You must always…? Smell a new book, that’s right. Well done. Top of the class. Stuck? Sick of it all? Got some stupid thing you have to finish and you’ve been putting it off? Move your desk somewhere different. Change some things around. New plants are pretty wonderful. A small person I know saved the top of the celery from the fridge and now has a small celery forest growing in an old fridge drawer she found somewhere that had no other use. Imagine that. Making whole lives happen. Little ones that you can watch and nurture and that repay the favour by beaming beautifully at you each day. From an old fridge drawer! Listen to some new music. Mostly, I drive around and around the same block I’ve always driven around, in music land. Recently though, a friend recommended a song and I took the time to listen to it and may I say to the manufacturers of a certain toothpaste: this is how you create a BRAND NEW EXPERIENCE. There were synapses in my brain doing all kinds of things they hadn’t done for a while. Another new thing I tried a while back was yoga. People who do yoga are always calm and together and have ponytails that look like they’ve been swept into place by blushing red robins and so forth. But I? I do not look like that when I do yoga. I giggle and fall over and shake and sweat but that’s because I haven’t done it before, and doing a new thing is making me – slowly, incrementally – slightly less shaky but no less giggly or sweaty. Public Service Announcement: sometimes life can get samey. The tiniest thing can change it up. But not toothpaste. If it’s a brand-new experience you’re after, sniff a book or buy a pencil.
Lorin Clarke is a Melbourne-based writer. The second season of her radio series and podcast, The Fitzroy Diaries, is on ABC Radio National and the ABC Listen app now.
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bought some toothpaste recently, the packaging of which promised a BRAND NEW BRUSHING EXPERIENCE. Don’t you hate it when brushing your teeth feels like it’s the exact same experience you’ve been having since you got teeth? Same. Surprisingly, the toothpaste didn’t do anything whatsoever to change this. The same week I bought the toothpaste, I went to my first netball game. A family member was playing. Netball is like a foreign language to me, and netball players at school seemed somehow to be a completely different species of human from those of us who (sensibly, in my view) played hockey. But I went along to watch this family member play their first game and here’s the thing… Public Service Announcement: trying something new can be exhilarating.
04 MAR 2022
Old Dogs
