Eureka moments, sudden realisations that change you forever, revelations of great truths. They are all epiphanies.
I had a self epiphany at my first school cricket match. When I walked in to bat, the opposing team as a man moved 10 metres closer to me, sensing an easy catch. It was a self-revelation that told me I would never bestride the cricket world like a Colossus. And I never have.
Over the years I’ve come to a slow, strange, tangled epiphany about my abilities in handling large pieces of fabric. They baffle and befuddle me. I can’t even work out how to hang a bed sheet on the washing line without dragging it along the ground or pegging it up diagonally in desperation. I can’t straighten out the bedding on our bed without pulling it all apart and starting from scratch. Sheets, blankets, tents, even scarves, they all confuse me. The other day I put on a team scarf to go and watch my favourite football team and at the end of the night I realised I had accidentally got it tangled up with a necktie from my wardrobe – which wasn’t even in my team colours. I now recognise I will never be able to work in haberdashery or as a fisherman pulling in nets. This has been a valuable epiphany to guide me through life.
But other proud, positive, personal epiphanies have come to light over the years as well.
When playing darts one day with a friend I realised I was not too shabby at it. Occasionally I hit the dartboard and once I nearly scored a triple 20. We won’t talk about the time the dart accidentally bounced off the board and hit my friend in the neck. Perhaps I could have a business card printed with the simple description “Dartist” underneath my name. Howard Hughes the zillionaire had a card with “Aviator” printed on it. Most of Hughes’ aviation adventures seemed to end in some sort of disaster but he still clung to his epiphany of himself as a skilled pilot. By parallel delusion I could call myself “Dartist “.
I also had a slow epiphany as a teenager that I could figure out how to plug one bit of electronics into another. It was just logic after all. Plug the output of one thing into the input of another. It’s a metaphor for life if you think about it. Perhaps I could add “Plugger” to my business card.
When I first started work, our department would host lunches for potential clients. After one such lunch a fellow worker drone said to me “You’re a great conversationalist”. It took me a while to figure out if he was being sarcastic, but apparently he wasn’t. Here was another epiphany. I had worked out by trial and error that most people love talking endlessly about themselves. With the right question they will prattle on for hours about their cute as a cuttlefish families, their tedious hobbies and their absorbing mortgage offset accounts. Ask them questions and they’ll yabber on about their pets and their pet theories about the imminent demise of the universe due to the spread of SUVs, the conspiracy theory that explains the popularity of TV reality shows and the health benefits of curried turnips. True to my epiphany I should add the abbreviation “Conversationist” to “Dartist” and “Plugger”.
Of course I’m not the only person to have experienced epiphanies. At the moment I’m staring at a wood heater in a beachside cafe on such a winter’s day, trying not to start humming “California Dreamin” and trying not to cough because of the smoke leakage. The wood heater is branded EPIPHANY. Clearly the makers experienced a realisation, a eureka moment about wood heaters. Perhaps the manufacturers had an epiphany when it was revealed to them that burning wood in a cast iron box with a chimney produced large amounts of heat inside and smoke pollution outside. “Eureka!” they shouted as they ran around the factory like Archimedes leaping out of his bathtub and running around Syracuse naked. Somehow I doubt the owners of the Epiphany Wood Heater Co. were the first ones to think of taming the heat produced by combustion of wood. But perhaps they felt they were the first and that’s the same thing isn’t it?
I recently saw evidence of another heating epiphany when we visited Pulau Ubin Island just off the north coast of Singapore. Rejecting the local bicycles as suitable only for the weak and wise, we tramped all the way from the ferry wharf to the beautiful Chek Jawa Wetlands. I particularly wanted to go and see the Singapore chilli crabs which live there until they become mature and then voluntarily sacrifice themselves to be eaten by tourists in numerous Singapore restaurants. As we struggled out of the steamy jungle dripping with perspiration we were confronted with …… a pretty 1930s mock Tudor English Cottage. My head begin to swim. Were we really in sultry Singapore or the tropical part of Surrey? Turns out the cottage had been built by the Colonial Surveyor in 1930 as a holiday house (though today it is a colonial era curiosity and information centre for the wetland). After a tropical brainfever epiphany and wanting to recreate his childhood surroundings Mr Surveyor built a large brick fireplace in the living room. ”When it gets below 30 degrees C we’ll light a fire to keep from freezing” he may have told his perspiring children. Perhaps he had previously been stationed in the Amazon rainforest and found Singapore a bit on the chilly side. Or perhaps he was waiting for Mr Carrier to invent the air conditioner so he could cool the place down to English winter temperatures and then light a fire to keep warm and cosy. I will never know, but surely it was all because of an epiphany.
-Geoff Milton
