L is for Elsa or What Disney Princess Are You?

It's my 50th birthday today. Fifty of course is L in Roman numerals (I for one love Roman numerals) but I think perhaps it's not the right symbol to have tattooed anywhere prominent. A friend told me today that I should be looking forward to my 50s as a period in which "everything is just more in control and focus". Perhaps he's right. I feel like I've spent a long time trying to let go of controlling things, but if there is anything the universe has told me this last few months it's that if I want anything to be done, then despite whatever contracts or agreements are in place, no matter if it's the assistance of a best friend or just help from a paid consultant, if I really want it to happen, then the only way it will with any reliability is if I do it myself. I suppose that's the opposite of letting it go.

It got me thinking about whether I've been picking the wrong archetypes this last half century. And so, like a sick Facebook quiz that just wants to rape your email and spam your contacts, I began to wonder what Disney princess I was. 

Now I've been amongst the common people on more than one occasion, and more than once I've once had to ask myself if it was acceptable to be that turned-on by a young middle eastern man, barefoot, brown skinned, semi-topless and pantalooned... but I'm no Princess Jasmine. Certainly I've dated a few beasts in my time, and despite the love I felt for them they never seemed to take human form... but I'm no Belle. Cross-dressing and joining the military have never been on my bucket list, which crossed off Mulan. And while I've often felt like a fish out of water, I'm no Ariel.

Lately it's occurred to me that I'm Elsa, Princess of Arendelle, queen of Frozen. Not just because she's the newest, and by most accounts the most popular princess, but because at the end of the movie she's still single, and she's cold. Loosely based on the "The Snow Queen", a fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen, Frozen's Elsa character is actually a composite of two characters from the original story:  Kai, Anna's brother who is cursed with negativity after his heart is pierced with a shard of glass from an enchanted mirror, and the Snow Queen, fair and beautiful, but made of ice. 

More than that, though, as an overarching theme Frozen preaches the importance of embracing your true nature. But it's not without cost. At the end of the film Elsa doesn't get the guy... it's her sister Anna that does, and after a significant wrong turn. And he's no Prince, he's a cowpoke, well, reindeer-poke. It's a nice twist really, rustic and real. In fact, the whole story is a modern, subtle and subversive commentary on true love and relationships: Olaf is no Prince Charming. Prince Charming is no Prince Charming. True love isn't romantic love. The hero doesn't get the girl, or in this case the guy. And the world is full of trolls. Kids, it's a dark and brutal message about the price you might have to pay for being yourself and what you can expect along the way. 

Oh well. Let the storm rage on, the cold never bothered me anyway. What Disney princess are you?

Wabi-sabi

Who's your favourite sportsman? Mine is Eldrick Tont "Tiger" Woods. Now I've never played a full 18 holes of golf. I played nine once, and it was a mysterious and highly unpredictable game (even just in terms of knowing which direction the ball might head after being struck). I tend to agree with Harry Leon Wilson who wrote in his 1905 novel The Boss of Little Arcady "this new game of golf that the summer folks play seems to have too much walking for a good game and just enough game to spoil a good walk".

Following an outstanding amateur golf career, Tiger turned professional at age 20 in late summer 1996. By April 1997 he had already won his first major, and reached the number one position in the world rankings only two short months later. Through the 2000s, Tiger was the dominant force in golf, spending over 500 almost unassailable weeks from August 1999 to October 2010 as World Number One. Good natured, clean living and simply apple-pie. Perfection in plaid pants. I don't like him that much for his golf, impressive as it was. I like him for something far more impressive: his humanness.

Tiger's monumental fall from grace after the airing of his almost innumerable alleged infidelities was for me the defining moment of his career.  The sponsors dropped away like wounded birds and suddenly he was no longer outstanding in the field but just out standing in the field. No mere sportsman now, no freak with a big stick and an uncanny ability to hole his dimpled balls, this was a human through and through: flawed, and apparently subject to all the same vagaries and temptations as are we all. Suddenly he was real. It was his brokenness, his flaws that made him so appealing, accessible, real. Before, he had seemed, well, too shiny, too good, fake.

You could probably say the same about President Clinton, after he "did not have sexual relations with that woman". Slick Willie, was always my preferred moniker for him, so to speak, although the Comeback Kid has a certain je n'est sais quoi in the circumstances. Like Tiger, who rose to number one again in 2013, Clinton's polls actually firmed up after his fall from grace. Why is that? How? Weren't they both broken?

Wabi-sabi represents a Japanese aesthetic view centred on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. According to author Richard Powell, the Japanese term wabi-sabi "nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect." Buddhist author Taro Gold describes wabi-sabi as "the wisdom and beauty of imperfection." Westerners may be most familiar with its application in kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with powdered gold or silver. Also known as kintsukuroi, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, understanding it is something to be celebrated rather than disguised. Not only is there no attempt to hide the damage, the repair itself is literally illuminated. It is deeply beautiful (though Greek newlyweds may have a different view, if only for practical reasons).

Perhaps wabi-sabi is a concept for our times, as we roll our role models and elect leaden leaders. The first item ever sold on eBay, now a multi-billion-dollar e-commerce business, was a broken laser pointer. Even though the seller informed the buyer the item didn't work, it nevertheless sold for $14.83. I wonder if the buyer had it repaired in gold laquer.

Can kintsugi be practised in the realm of human relationships? I dare say Tiger and the Comeback Kid applied liberal amounts of gold and precious metals to theirs as the ground fell away from them (though I imagine these were lacking in laquer). Can you repair a broken heart with laquer and gold dust?

In Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind, Rhett Butler delivers the following speech to Scarlett O'Hara: "I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken - and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived." Lately though I've certainly found myself embracing a certain serene melancholy and gentle acceptance of brokenness. My own, that of lovers past and of those closest to me. I sometimes picture those fault lines as the richest seams in our interactions. Sometimes the right state of things is broken. At their best. Authentic. Real. Human.