500 Words a Week - Seamus Heaney’s Desk

While home in Dublin last weekend, I found myself strolling through town, not to kill time, but simply because I was content. Content to walk, to watch life unfolding around me, and to feel present in the middle of it all.

On this quiet walk, I stumbled upon a free exhibition on Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet.

In school, we studied Heaney. But back then, like most teenagers, I read his work with a kind of distant detachment. I never really stopped to notice how it made me feel. With a few more years and some life behind me, I thought this exhibition might offer something different.

The first exert I read from Seamus was;

“The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.”

Immediately, I knew I’d made the right decision. That one line asks a simple, piercing question: How are you living your life?

Heaney reminds us that life isn’t defined in retrospect, it’s being defined right now, by the way we’re living in this moment. If we live shyly, nervously, avoiding risk and clinging to comfort, that will be our life.

If we’re bold, if we seize the opportunities in front of us, if we try to steer our own ship, then that too becomes our life.

But my biggest takeaway, and what has remained with me over the course this week, wasn’t Seamus’ words, it was his desk.

Nestled away in the attic of his Dublin home, under a skylight, sat a simple desk. A plank of wood, lying across two filing cabinets.

The world around us seems like a never ending list of morning routines, and how to craft your perfect set up to boost your productivity. We see the recent viral video of an individual getting up at 4:30am, dunking their face in ice cold water, and rubbing banana skins on their face. We see the copious X thread’s of advice on creating the perfect routine. And yet here is a world renowned poet, crafting extraordinary poetry, from the very ordinary.

We can get so blurred in the routines that surround our work, that we forget the importance of the actual work itself. We can allow our routines and environments to become an excuse to not be as focused as we usually are.

The work asks only that we begin, not from the perfect place, but from wherever we stand, with whatever we carry.

The final thing that stuck with me from this exhibition, was one of Seamus’ last texts to his wife before he passed away. 

He said; “Noil Timere”. 

Latin for: “Don’t be afraid”.

It’s a message we could all remind ourselves of as we venture through this life.

To not be afraid.

To be bold over timorous.