Read on for Mark's latest article, "Dignity and Heroes".
Heroes are everywhere.
I often wondered when listening to the old Deacon Blue song “Dignity”, who was the inspiration for Bogie when Ricky Ross wrote the song.
”There’s a man I meet walks up our street
he’s a worker for the council
has been twenty years
and he takes no lip off nobody
and litter off the gutter
puts it in a bag
and never seems to mutter
and he packs his lunch in a “sunblest” bag
the children call him “bogie”
he never lets on
but I know ’cause he once told me
he let me know a secret about the money in his kitty
he’s gonna buy a dinghy
gonna call her dignity”
I’m fairly certain it was just some random guy he’d seen, perhaps every day, and his brain filled in the blanks.
Inspiration is everywhere for those who look for it. It’s in songs, films, books, music, daily events. It can be taken from strong role models, sporting heroes, or accounts on the evening news of bravery or success of strangers. But most of all, inspiration can be found in the people around us every day.
People who give up careers they hate and build their own business doing things they love. People who get up and go to that job that they hate every day, like Bogie, to feed their families or fund a long-term goal. People who give up their time happily to help others, expecting nothing in return. Parents who devote their time, resources and dreams for the future to their children no matter the personal cost. Young adults who work hard at Uni or in employment, for a better future that currently seems unattainable, or to make their families proud.
Heroes one and all.
But, for me, most of all those people who struggle through hardship and maintain an indomitable spirit, living their lives as best they can and refusing to be brought low by their trials and failures. Those people really inspire me to be better.
I know many such people. People with many problems who have fought hard to overcome them and move on. Alcoholism, drug-addiction, depression and other mental illnesses, poverty or abuse of one form or another. The human capacity for survival is amazing.
I “met” a young girl online a couple of months back. We got “chatting” through mutual friends and a shared love of the same music. Let’s call her “Hiro”, cos it’s entirely appropriate. She’s a cool kid. Pretty, intelligent, funny, caring and has plenty to say for herself. Basically, you’d love a kid like her as your daughter. Like mostly everyone, Hiro has a few “Demons” in her past. Hiro has been a self-harmer. I thoughtlessly asked her to email me some info on the phenomena to act as research for a character in my book, having no real idea of the motivation, methods, scope for recovery or mind-set of someone who self-harms. I asked because I want my character to be authentic and to maybe strike a chord with others who self-harm.
Selfish of me in the extreme.
Despite it being difficult to express, she drafted me a long email detailing some of her experiences and giving me some insight into that world. It was obviously not easy for her to do, but she laid her thoughts out for me to read anyway. The girl is superhuman in what she has dealt with in her short years, and how she has dealt with it.
Unlike many people I know of that age, she has systematically identified her problems, the triggers for them, and developed ways of dealing with a difficult issue
successfully. This kid is made out of steel. She thinks herself weak, judging by her words, but she is certainly one of the most resourceful, determined and wise wee people I’ve spoken to in a long while.
Inspiration, motivation and spirit to succeed can be found anywhere and everywhere if we care to look. In the early hours of this morning, via email, an extremely cool, incalculably brave, and completely inspirational waif of a girl in her late teens inspired me. Yes, Dignity is the word.
Have a look at the people around you. There are heroes everywhere, hell; you might even live with one. I do, two of them.
