Push to Start
The tangled path to date of Joe Norton, a nom de plume
Literary talent cannot be expected
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm
Winston Churchill
In my early days, I longed to be a gracious guest at the grand dinner table of life, to take my seat with grace, to taste deeply, to listen well. Yet somewhere along the way, that table stretched into a counter and I became a fleeting customer at life’s fast food chain, consuming moments in haste, mistaking motion for meaning.
And now, in the quiet reckoning of later years, I’ve begun to understand what once eluded me. There is a quiet wisdom in stillness, a dignity in pausing and that sometimes, inactivity offers more truth than all our restless functioning combined.
What follows is an outline of a life less than ordinary, perhaps, but no less lived. It has been gathered here for those already in the know and for those who, one day, may wish to know a little more.
What you will find is not a formal history but a mostly visual record. Fragments of journeys across Europe, Asia, the Pacific and the far reaches of remote Australia. The collection drifts between moments of quiet isolation and flashes of unexpected connection. Life in small communities at the edge of the map, long hours in airports where time forgets to move and a demonstrable talent for turning waiting into an art form.
There are miles upon miles of road behind these pages and in their wake, an attempt to make sense of what was seen, felt and perhaps misunderstood.
The passing years reveal themselves through photographs, notes, stray recollections and lists that resist neat conclusions. A chronology of sorts, though memory, like time, refuses to travel in straight lines.
For those who choose to linger here, there is much to uncover about the spaces between the pauses, the absences, the unfinished commitments.
So here it is
Snippets from life lived in those gaps.
The world remains an interesting place. Endlessly imperfect and still capable of surprise.