“And if I speak of Paradise,
Then I’m speaking of my grandmother
Who told me to carry it always
On my person…” – Roger Robinson
Hi there and welcome to another holiday season creative prompt.
This one is partly inspired by recent New Year’s Eve celebrations (balloons and confetti and streamers), partly by a poem, and partly by a Tweet I saw ages ago. In this Tweet, a mother recorded a conversation she had with her young daughter when they were getting ready to go out. I’m paraphrasing because I no longer have the Tweet in front of me but the conversation went something like this:
“Kid: So I’m right to go, Mum. Got my emergency confetti.
Mum: Your what?
Kid: My emergency confetti. Just in case I need it.”
When I read this, I thought ‘I like your thinking, kid.’
If you are a chronic overthinker like I am then it’s easy to give into anxiety about the future. But what if all of those ‘what-ifs’ weren’t wholly awful. Alongside wearing our clean undies and having some emergency supplies just in case things go wrong, we should also have our emergency confetti handy because you never know when you might need that, too.
The quote at the top of this Substack comes from a poem called A Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson which talks about carrying your idea of paradise on you “concealed, so no one else would know but me.” Depending on how you interpret this poem, perhaps this pocket-paradise could be traces of real things that remind you of an idyll – pebbles, sea shells, an old coin, a piece of jewellery – or perhaps they could be an imagined place that you commit to holding at the front of your thinking where it is easily triggered by words or actions.
So that’s today’s challenge:
Instead of emergency confetti, what could you carry around? What is your pocket-paradise?