Everything has a story

 I am enjoying a good book at the moment, The White Road, A Journey into Obsession by Edmund de Waal. It's a curious book about someone's quest to find porcelain. It may sound odd to you, but it is very much like the quest to find "the beginning". The beginning of what got him to where he is, and where he is going. This material that has become the essence of who he is.

We all have quests.

The book is full of little gems.

there is a moment when the idea that something is a vocation becomes so internalised that you end up a priest, a potter, a poet, and you are just too embarrassed to walk away. And you get caught.

I will forego the Harvard referencing, it's on page 95 or 27% of the book according to Kindle. Like everything else, it isn't so important where something is, it's the road to finding it. The cliché of the journey being important, not the destination is by definition debunked. It's all about the destination. The journey is what happens on the way to finding it, if we ever do. Otherwise we would be like Alice in Wonderland. Remember the Cheshire Cat?

if you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there.

You'll have to take my word that that's a real quotation, Google it if you don't.

So.

Another little gem is that everything that is made should have a story or history behind it. It's a fascinating concept. It makes me wonder whether we have lost our stories because we no longer make things. We no longer make mud cakes as children or build tree houses at the bottom of the garden. We buy plastic tea sets and wendy houses. We forget who Wendy was, and why she built one in the first place. We definitely have long forgotten the history of tea, let alone that of the tea set and the alchemical discovery of porcelain in Europe. Or what either/both have meant to the history of China and Europe or the rest of the world for that matter.

On the journey I am on at the moment I am discovering the history of the world. My, that's a statement.

I am not a very spiritual person, I don't understand the concept of us all being interconnected on a spiritual level. Especially as one part of humanity seems intent at destroying another part of humanity at any one time, since the beginning of time. I do, though, understand the concept of every action having an opposite reaction, and the consequence of an irresistible force impacting an unmovable object - for so far that is possible in hindsight and from a completely different part of the world. That's why I love history. Not what I learned in school, but what I didn't.

My quest is always to the beginning. Without it you can't know where you are now or where the next step will take you. I don't exactly know where I am going, except that it is That Way. Over there, where the next door opens and stands ajar. The door that is now open is inviting me in. I have crossed the threshold.