It had been so long since Lucille had been paid and she could not work out how she had gotten herself into such a 21st century predicament. If she was to believe the pundits, she now needed to categorize herself among the precariat: one of many contemporary people who did not know where the next job might come from and so spent a whole lifetime in an angst-ridden condition of always searching for work.
Yes, perhaps this could be how you see Lucille’s current circumstances, but this is not how she wanted to go down in her-story. She had decided to push through the morass of nonexistence, up and out into the making of her own kind of luck.
You see like MLK, Lucille had a dream; one in which her life meant much more than a paycheck. And beyond that, she had this vision of lovingly carving out her own vocation; one in which she was able to do “work that makes life (oh so) sweet", in those sage words of her icon bell hooks.
Lucille had toed the line for many years of study, within a banking system of education and, in doing so, she had acquired a whole lot of useless knowledge – along with a modicum of insecurity. The latter was linked to the idea that one was never good enough to do more than be in a structure of success according to no-one-knows-who but everyone abides by said rules.
Now it’s true that Lucille was highly educated, with over 25 years of schooling under her middle-aged belt. But still, she found that these opportunities only served to keep her radical intentions in check, since she had excelled in the scheme of learned things and consequently fooled others and herself into believing that a bog-standard job, in a bog-standard field, undertaken from bog-standard day into bog-standard years, was what she had been manifested into this world to do.
Of course, this was so far from the truth, which unfortunately was also a very well-kept secret from both Lucille and—most of—her 7 billion brothers and sisters of shared genetic origin.
Absent from Lucille’s conscious mind was a keen awareness of the necessary language, skills and mechanisms required to release her—potentiality—out into, through and with the universe; to avail of her tumi (so to speak); to flex the Matrix, as did Neo when he accepted that he indeed is the one and only creator of the selfless beauty and Love that frees us all in space-time.
It is this that Lucille longed for because although she did not know how, her unconscious (I) remembered: it had traces of ancestral memory passed down through the ages from the many who found that their might was worth much more than their wait to exhale.
This small but considerable cohort of might formed a significant palimpsest—a multitude echo effect of tried and failed, amidst so many others who never sought another way of being alive.
But it is this modest band of renegades that is so very important to Lucille, especially those few who fought against all odds for another existence and so became the very change that they had wanted to see in their desperately discordant doldrums.
It is these trails of tears and traces of an audacity called hope that filled Lucille’s head when she was most silent. They whispered into her ear like the fluttering ululation of the mad. They told her snippets, about dangerous wo-m!n who dreamt by day—with their eyes wide open.
And in this way, they fomented in Lucille a hunger for something different; a change in sheer existence, through the conjuring of invisible atomic particles into the tangible (material matter)—purely as a consequence of learning to dig into deeper dreams and clamber onto greater visions; what some mistakenly think of as merely being about when one puts thought into words and then rolls it into a series of actions.
This is how Lucille wanted her life to BE: purposeful, measured, intentional, directed and charged with a cacophony of creative engagement – all only in a bid to make life much better for the millions of others who had not been paid for far too long. But even too for those who are being well- and, also, over-paid, only due to their mastery at surviving in a rather ratty race that somehow always seems to strip you of your very soul.