STUART FORSYTH .com

It’s funny the things which stay with you. I still remember finding a tatty postcard as a kid upon which were written “The real world, a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there”. Even then the gravity of those words couldn’t quite be hidden by the intended humour and bright colours of the card.

The real world means different things to all of us, my real world and its constant struggle to find meaning can seem very selfish and shallow set against the vast measure of our species brought low by war and poverty and famine. I certainly didn’t plan to live in the real world, the hard world my father warned me about where daily cruelty and a concerted struggle to earn your coin long rubbed the smile from your face and ploughed lines of worry deep into your forehead. It was therefor with some surprise that I turned around twice and found that the real world had caught up with me irrespective of my well meaning and childish dreams … now I was a father myself, ‘needed’ a well paying job to ensure we could send our beautiful little boy to the right schools, to ensure the right policies and insurance, to drive that nice car; and so the cycle was set on auto-pilot - I bought into the required materialism of the real world, got shackled by the golden handcuffs, wondered incredulous how I sold up lock stock and barrel for the lowest common denominator of the human experience.

I look at all the gloomy faces every morning as the giant metal worms [trains] as I like to think of them ferry us all citywards to jobs that, on the whole we loath; I talk to friends and colleagues about the stomach knot that sets in on a Sunday evening and the ecstasy of reaching the end of a Friday and the promise of the weekend. I want to take those waxen and sullen commuters by their lapels and shake them yelling: Is this the real world? Is this actually what we’ve chosen to accept in life? Maybe I would, maybe if I wouldn’t feel like such a fraud in doing so.

I can’t help but feel that after millions of years of evolutionary struggle, of pulling ourselves out of the vicious beautiful quagmire of animalism that we have dropped the ball somehow. If I were a religious man I could not reconcile meeting my creator one day and saying that 40 years of earning a buck in a cramped cubicle was how I repaid the gift of life.

The cares and worries of the ‘real’ word sometimes wake me in the small hours of the morning when imagination is at its strongest and most cruel. It is with immense joy when I can grab my camera and head outdoors to really experience the real ‘real’ wold in those all too infrequent, sanity saving moments when I get to touch the memory of my face before I was born.

Perhaps you have some good suggestions on how to find that real meaning, to move beyond the empty strivings which seem to pervade modern society. Until I can figure it out, I’m going to keep loving those special real people in my life and cling to those pauses, those clear moments of sanity when I can take my camera and get lost somewhere beautiful, out in the fresh air under big sky. Where I can stand alone, still and quiet and feel a tug, like the gentle breeze, of something bigger and greater than what I’ve bought into.