If you’re not a runner, get out of bed the moment you open your eyes. Throw on your ripped jeans and Birks, your painting shirt—nothing too sporty. Maybe even your pyjamas and thongs will do. Run down the stairs as fast as you can. Take your dog if you have one. Burst out the door, through the gate, and just keep running.
Run like an athlete, as if you’ve done it all your life. Imagine you look light and graceful, like Cathy Freeman in full stride. Your dog is surprised but understands. She knows why you’re running. Run faster, until you can’t anymore. Then walk.
You were running because you can. Because you forgot you could. Running freely, without purpose. Just because. How good it feels to remember.
But don’t make this a habit. It will turn into a chore, like all the other good things they’ve killed by writing books about them, by turning them into manuals.
On the other hand, if you are a runner, wake up and get dressed in your nicest office clothes. Then go back to bed, all dressed. Pick up a book you haven’t touched in weeks. Stay in bed for hours. Sleep.
Rejoice all day in the unexpected sense of freedom you’ve just found—hidden in plain sight, right there, at the tips of your toes. A freedom so vast it wants to burst out of your body but is trapped somewhere in your stomach, or just above it—an airy, weightless lump pressing outwards, making you slightly dizzy. You don’t know what to do with it, this feeling. Where to put it.
Perhaps this is what they call happiness, that moment when you know you are alive. When nothing significant has happened, yet something immense has.
So, carefully, fold it into a bird. Go on with your day as if nothing happened. Because nothing did. Keep it tucked away in your secret pocket; never share it.
And as you move through the world, past the heavy-footed, the hunched, the ones weighed down by their anxieties and worries, nobody suspects a thing. Nobody knows why you are free. Nobody cares to.
But you are free. Walking ever so slightly hovering above the ground, with a strange, perhaps mad, twinkle in your eye.
Free.
All day, you move through the motions of being normal, lowering your eyes so no one catches the wild, unbridled glint in them. You keep up the performance. You make a grocery list, fold the washing, send a work email, nod politely at your child’s teacher during school pickup. You play the role of a responsible adult, just as you promised you would.
But nothing is normal.
Finally, you reach your studio on a day you’ve lied about—claiming you’d be doing something sensible. Sensible can wait until tomorrow. Don’t make your studio a habit either. Despite what they say, it’s not a workspace where you listen to audiobooks as you chisel away at shapes or test different colours.
It is something else entirely.
Like a magician pulling endless silk scarves from his sleeve, something begins to unravel inside you. One by one, they come, like eggs slipping from your mouth, perfect, golden, round. They keep appearing, cracking open on the floor.
Art. Words. Strange ideas. Forms.
You feel them on the tip of your tongue, unexplainable shapes, like the fever-dream patterns you see behind your eyelids in the dark. Hard to describe, impossible to grasp—but you must catch them, transfer them here, onto paper.
You stare at your hands as if they belong to someone else. You hadn’t planned this. You didn’t know this was inside you.
Are you sick? Possessed?
Do others feel this? Do they walk around with something unhatched inside them, pressing against their ribs, waiting for the right moment to spill out? Or are you the only one regurgitating secret worlds, a quiet eruption that no one else seems to notice?
You keep going, letting it pour out. Because what else can you do?
The eggs keep coming. Some roll to the corners of the room, unbroken, waiting. Others shatter on impact, spilling yolks of colour, words, half-formed thoughts that stain the floor in unfamiliar patterns. You try to capture them before they vanish, pressing your fingers into the mess, smearing it onto paper, wood, canvas, anything within reach.
It’s frantic, but it’s not panic. It’s urgency. It’s necessity.
For a moment, you wonder: if you don’t let it out now, will it rot inside you? Will it fester, harden, turn to stone? The thought is unbearable. So, you keep going.
Time bends in the studio. Hours dissolve, unnoticed. You don’t eat, don’t check your phone. You don’t think about the responsible version of yourself, the one in pressed clothes with a composed smile, discussing school lunch policies and weekend plans. That person does not exist here. You are no longer yourself, but the strange lump. You’ve forgotten what you once looked like, lost in the shape you’ve become.
Here, you are nothing but hands and breath and wild, silent incantations.
And when finally, exhausted, you stop, when the eggs stop coming, when your hands are streaked with paint, ink, dust, whatever substance carried this madness, you step back and look.
What have you done?
The room is alive with the remnants of your eruption. The walls are covered. The floor is ruined. Something stirs in your chest, something like terror, something like relief.
You should clean up. Wipe it all away before it dries, before it becomes permanent.
Instead, you leave it.
You close the door behind you, step out into the cool evening air. You smooth your clothes, straighten your glasses. Your heartbeat steadies.
Tomorrow, you will be responsible again.
Tonight, no one has to know.
Meanwhile, outside, a war rages—
not just the kind that crumbles cities,
but the quiet kind, the insidious kind,
the war on thought, on speech, on art, on freedom itself.
It moves in whispers, in glances, in rules unspoken,
in the unsteady hands of those who fear creation,
who murmur of justice while tightening the noose,
who erase with a smile, exile with a nod,
strike below the belt and call it virtue.
Since that day—October 7—
when the world watched slaughter in real time,
and then, as if on cue, turned against the murdered,
turned against us, the Jewish people.
In lecture halls, in galleries, in streets once ours,
they chant not for peace but for obliteration,
not for freedom but for silence.
They take over cities, rewrite truths,
weaponize history until it is unrecognisable.
They call it solidarity as they cast us out,
call it justice as they revel in our grief.
At home, the phone flickers.
Messages flood in—contempt, mostly venom.
Stares laced with poison, admiration twisted into exile.
A few feign concern; most savour your undoing.
The art world closes in like a well-mannered mob,
wielding words as daggers,
claiming the right to name what is righteous,
to decide who may speak, who may exist,
who may create.
But inside, where the work is born, they have no power.
The eggs still slip from your mouth—
golden, fragile, unstoppable—
cracking open into something vast, something real,
something they cannot contain.
They cannot bind your hands.
They cannot silence your voice.
They cannot reach the place where the art comes from.
And that is why they fear you.
That is why they hate you.
Because no matter how they try,
they cannot take away what they never owned.
You are free.
And nothing unsettles them more!
* Feature image: Nina Sanadze, ‘Terminus’, Experimental film still, 2021
Nina Sanadze at the fire-bombed Adass Synagogue in Melbourne. Photo by Emmanuel Santos, 2025.