November 19, 2015 in Dag

I’ve got a Melbourne kind of mind

You can learn a lot about people from the place where they live.

There are lots of ways you can characterise people by the country that they live in, and whether they live in rural or urban areas.

And you can definitely tell a lot about people from the city that they live in. For you Americans out there, your average New Yorker is likely to have very different characteristics from your average Los Angelenos, and so on.

It’s a lot like that here in Australia as well, particularly when we talk about the differences between the residents of our two biggest cities. You can definitely say there are Sydney sorts of people and Melbourne sorts of people. As for me, I’m undoubtedly a Melbourne sort of person.

I’m not going to go too far into the kind of standard cliched descriptions about the difference between Sydneysiders and Melbournians. Yes we’ve all heard how our northern neighbours are louder and more outgoing than we are. How they’re the brash “look at me” types while we’re the more quiet and intellectual types. How they dress in bright colours while we tend to favour black, black and black.

Maybe it’s true and maybe it isn’t. The point I want to make is that my affiliation comes from a slightly different angle. I see myself as very much having a Melbourne kind of mind.

What do I mean by that? It’s very simple. The characteristic that most people identify with Melbourne is its changing weather. Over the period of a single day, it can hot or cold, sunny or rainy, clear or cloudy, often combining all of them in totally unpredictable ways. In short, Melbourne just can’t make up it’s mind.

I’m a lot like that. I also never seem to be able to make up my mind on anything. Show me an issue, and I won’t have a clue. I’ll read someone’s perspective on it and think, “That must be right.” Then I’ll read an alternate perspective and I’ll think, “No, the first one was wrong, this one must be right.” Take me back to the first perspective and I’ll be back on board with that one.

In short, I haven’t got a clue what I think. My mind might change 20 times a day, depending on all sorts of different factors: what I’m doing, or what I’m thinking about or how I’m feeling at that particular moment or how convincing the person is talking to me. It’s as if the weather in my head is sunny and rainy and cloudy and clear, all at the same time.

While it can often be frustrating managing this lack of decisiveness, at other times I kind of like it. It makes me feel like I really have found my home. I’m a Melbourne kind of person with a Melbourne kind of mind, and I suppose that’s all right with me.

 

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