In praise of mediocrity – and having a crack regardless

There were many mentions of crystals for some reason. It was dramatic, often melancholic and also boring. A great reminder that it’s better to train your eyes outwards and observe the world than devote yourself primarily to analysing your own – in hindsight, quite dull – emotions. I even started feeling sorry for the boyfriends I must have tormented then.

Here are a couple of fragments, to give you a taste. One poem, called Spiritual Rattle, began:

Crystallised melancholy gleam/Dreams of beams/Isolate screaming feelings/Then all is silent …/Empty … grey

Cheerful eh? It is actually painful, typing this out.

Another gem, written when I was obsessed with William Lane’s failed attempt to set up a “New Australia” utopia in Paraguay, was called Written on the Phone:

Crystallised visions/A utopian future/Always beyond the reach of man’s grimy fingers/A mirage perhaps/Or maybe we don’t reach far enough/Our arms are too short.

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It’s diabolical stuff. And don’t I sound like an absolute hoot? A joy bomb. When I sat down to write in my teen years I was earnest, way too serious and my work was overwritten.

Still, despite the dodgy output I had always wanted to be a writer and I pressed on. I was not writing for me – or a judgmental future self that would shame me as I am doing now – I was writing for myself coz I was trying to figure stuff out.

And I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote, not because it was good but because I had to and I wanted to – diaries and letters and essays and theses, and eventually, I got better. I wrote articles then books and got them published. This happened because I started somewhere, enjoyed it and just kept going.

A second example: I swim all the time, in the ocean. I go with different groups, on my own, with my mermaid friends, and this has become a practice which has sustained me during the roughest times. It has trained me to slow my breath, to pay close attention to the sea floor, to watch the tides and swells and moods of the waves, and taught me that daily rituals like these can make you calm and strong. I see it as part of a personal pursuit of awe, of the feeling of smallness in a vast and wondrous universe.

I have written columns and books about it, made documentaries, bored people senseless with it. Everywhere I go around Australia, on the NSW South Coast and Margaret River, in Hobart, Portsea and Adelaide, people invite me to go swimming in wild and beautiful places and I never regret it when I do.

But I’m not a good swimmer. As with many things, my enthusiasm far outweighs my ability. I’ve never won a swimming race, nor do I think I have even been placed in a final. I’m pretty slow, my kick doesn’t seem to add much to my speed, and while I’ve worked on it, I’ll never swim at the front of a pack. But I love it! It brings me infinite joy and pleasure, and I do it any chance I get.

In short: who cares?

Some have lamented that a pursuit of excellence has degraded the world of pleasure. People tend to avoid taking up hobbies, in other words, because they worry that they will be bad at them.

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So let me sound the trumpet for mediocrity this year. The worse you are at something, the better you might make others around you feel! You could even become better yourself? And if all else fails, and indeed you fail, at least you’ve had a thumpingly good time.

Julia Baird is a journalist, author and regular columnist. Her latest book is Bright Shining: how grace changes everything.

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