大象传媒

A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Harry Baker

Good Morning.

The start of the year is often a time of new beginnings. Of taking stock of the year just passed and looking ahead to what is coming up. It is perhaps as good a time as any to quote The West Wing and ask yourself: What鈥檚 next? And yet I have a complicated relationship with that question. I am coming to the end of a tour of a show I wrote for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year, alongside a book of poems of the same name.

Because of Covid it is the first time I have been able to gig properly for three years, and the book has been 8 years in the making since my previous collection. Whichever way you measure it, I have been looking forward to this for a long time. And I love it so much. To be on stage in front of people sharing something I believe in is where I come most alive, and being unable to do so for so long during lockdown took its toll in ways I am only just coming to terms with. As this tour is drawing to a close, people have started to ask me the dreaded question: what鈥檚 next? To which the answer is: I don鈥檛 know. And I have purposefully kept it that way. As much as I get a nerdy thrill from the intricacies of putting a tour together, I know that what my soul needs is space to figure it out.

The question I have instead been pondering comes in the form of a lyric by one of my favourite writers Kae Tempest: 鈥淲hy do something if you can鈥檛 be proud of it?鈥� Whether it is another tour, something more local, or simply making a cracking meal for some friends, I plan to make sure whatever happens next it is something I can be proud of. And until then I hope to make the most of every second of what鈥檚 happening now. God grant us space to breathe, To work out what makes our hearts sing, and give enough oxygen to those things. May you help us to savour the present moment, and resist the urge to rush into whatever is happening in the not so distant future, so that by the time we get there, we will be able to savour it just as much.

Amen.