5 minutes of fear for a decade of journeys

I would like to take you back to a period nearly 10 years ago when I was working in a customer service contact centre selling ancillary credit card products. This was my day job and I did not enjoy it. I worked with some nice people but the amoral nature of the work gave everyone a shared apathy except for those who bought into the company spiel about providing the customer (existing customers who were either too disengaged or didn't care enough not to get shafted by us) with a service they needed. This was later proved to be a highly flawed premise based on the amount of payment protection insurance claims we are now seeing. My seed of creativity in this daily grind of vacuousness was that I was a budding stand up comedian and a fairly prolific performance poet. I went to poetry slams and thought I was quite the working class hero. I was at a poetry slam in Edinburgh and I was sat next to another poet from Glasgow (where I was living at the time) and we got talking. It turns out this other poet was originally from Zimbabwe and we were both lamenting the fact that our own city had a relatively limited range of poetry events. We spoke vaguely of starting our own poetry night in Glasgow which would get more of a scene going there. In any creative scene these conversations about collaboration happen a lot but rarely amount to anything. So we exchanged numbers and I thought very little of it. A couple of weeks later my new acquaintance phoned me but the place I was staying in had such bad reception that I was able to answer the phone but not speak. You know that feeling? I meant to email him back and say I was sorry I couldn't answer the phone. I think I may actually have but anyway, eventually we spoke briefly on the phone and he said that he had been into talk to the centre for contemporary arts and was seeing where this could go. He had also arranged an event at the Multi-cultural community centre and would I like to do a 5 minute poetry reading. I said yes as it was a couple of weeks away. Again I hung up the phone and though little of it. The day eventually came when I was due to go to the community centre and do the gig. I couldn't be bothered! My apathy was overtaking me. It was a wednesday night and I would much rather have gone to the pub or sat in and watched some shit on the television. I was at work all day and I was ready to text this guy and tell him I wasn’t able to make it for some bullshit reason. (You know the text excuse thing that sometimes happens). My mate gave me a lift home and I asked him to swing past the community centre as it was near where he lived so I thought what the hell it might be fun and it was on my journey home anyway. So I did…. When I entered the community centre my heart sank. The room was full of very serious looking people from a diverse range of backgrounds. At this point I must make the point that I am not at all racist or prejudiced. I was just scared to death as my poetry was very puerile and I thought was pretty much only going to make my dumb ass friends laugh. (subject matter such as pooh, hemaroids and gore). All I thought was “I am about to crash and burn like a diesel zeppelin” and “these people are going to hate me”. I was out of my comfort zone big time. I had come this far and just went with it. I got up and my did my poem all about having hemaroids, I did some other dumb poems which I thought were going to be thought of as superficial and insulting……then came my revelation……the audience were laughing. They were enjoying themselves and I couldn’t believe it. It seems that their reaction to my poetry was the same reaction as everyone else. They thought the poems were quite funny and energetic. They seemed to like them. Just because I wasn't performing to a dingy bar where the average person was in their early 20s and a fan of literature it didn't mean the people would react any differently. A few pretty simple truths came out of this experience for me. The first one is that people are essentially the same at their core no matter where they are from or what their ideas about life are. Something I create can be acceptable by the majority as something worth paying attention to. This is not even the most amazing part of taking the risk overcoming my apathy and going to that show. The man whom I had the pleasure of meeting at that poetry slam in Edinburgh has become one of my best friends whose family feels very much like my own and that feeling is reciprocated within my own family. I met a lot of the people who would have a very profound affect on the last ten years of my life that night in the multi-cultural community centre in Glasgow. That night has led to me developing one of the most enriching and creative friendships that I have ever had and it has given me tremendous inspiration both professionally, personally and spiritually. Many of the characteristics of that friendship have become part of what I have produced which are used in schools around my home. It has added a new dimension to my stand up comedy making me aware of the tremendous humour which can found in diverse places and the things which we all find funny. I have traveled to Zimbabwe to witness the most interesting and inter-cultural wedding I have ever had the pleasure of attending. I have made friends and new family with whom culture, religion, creed and background do not serve as boundaries or barriers but as references for commonality which is the seed of new creations. Take the risk. If I hadn't have overcome my apathy and done that 5 minute show I was so reticent about I would not have had the experiences that a decade of unique friendships bring. Take the risk!!!!