The Start of Something Beautiful

THE START OF SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL

Hello dear readers, I hope you're well. I wanted to write today because it feels like agggeessss since I last had the chance to write a nice, meaty, sizeable post. It's been a while since I've sat down in front of my computer screen and exercised my fingers, so I can channel and express all the feelings and thoughts fleeting around my heart, mind and soul. So here I am, and what a day it has been. Today I went to the airport with one of my best friends to see our other best friend off on her travels. Today she begins the incredible experience that is her year abroad. And so today marks the moment when things really do begin to change. Today is when the ball begins rolling. Today is when the snow globe of life begins to shake, and all the little sparkly pieces contained within it will fall and land in different amalgamations. Today marks a new beginning, as well as the beginning of the end. Today is when life switches to the fast lane, and the road ahead expands and extends itself until the future is just a distant speck on the horizon once again.

I know I always write about change, and I try to dissect it and analyse it and plot it like coordinates on a map. I don't know why, but it seems to fascinate me so truly and deeply. In the last five years my life and myself have changed massively. So much has happened in between then and now, and I guess it feels like one massive whirlwind that blew threw the plains and lands of my life and swept everything up in a handful. And gradually, as time has gone by and the winds have settled and the transformation emerges, I start to see how different everything is. Nothing is as it was. It's like my life was set to acceleration, and it's only now that it feels like this first huge series of changes has finally come to its resolution. A chapter has been finished. A fully finished document signed off upon completion. A contently fading moon has set into the sky and a new sun has soared high up into the blue, ready to commence the new day that awaits me.

Before this particular period of my life, things were pretty stagnant and predictable, and I was getting by alright but I wasn't as happy as I knew I could be. I was yearning for something more. Then this huge wave of change was set into to motion, and little by little all these aspects of my life began tweaking and turning and evolving into something new. And it was brilliant, wonderful, sometimes difficult, but also so unfathomably life changing, and it felt like it would never end. I would ride this one particular wave of change forever. Numerous times in the last few years I have tried to anticipate when this wave of change, and all those little changes embedded within it, will finish. I'm always trying to guess the endings and beginnings like it's a game set out to be played. It's hard sometimes to let things be. But it's strange because this time round, I'm starting to sense a natural and eventual ending occurring. I'm realising that the conclusions I pinpointed were merely pauses on the road of life, and it is now when the road finally reaches an intersection and the direction is changing. Destination: unknown.

I know that this time is different because it feels like these last few changes have exploded like massive, incredible, blooming fireworks in the sky. Out with a bang, a shot of light, a mirage of colour. They're still changes, but something about them just feels different. They're stronger, more forceful. There's something about them that seems more powerful, more significant, more pointed. If I'm looking for that all important dividing line to separate an old from a new, an end from a beginning, a before from an after, this feels like the exact time. A new wave of change is beginning. This moment of time and space is when the stars of my life have once again aligned. The orchestra of my life has reached that last all important crescendo. The athlete has reached the last leg of the race. It's a moment of transition as loose ends are tied up, and I gradually metamorphose from today into tomorrow. It's all so peculiar and surreal.

So many things have happened recently, and will be happening soon too: The other week my heart  finally, finally let go of someone that has been stubbornly occupying it for a number of years now. I had forced myself to believe that it was just never going to happen, until one day I just woke up and something had irreversibly changed. I volunteered on a kids camp last week, an incredible experience in itself, and I learnt an awful lot about who I am as a person, when everything else is stripped away. I also realised how far I've come, and the kind of person I still want to be. It left me feeling very proud of myself and everything I have achieved so far. It made me realise that I'm not doing too badly, as am I so very happy with the person I am right here, right now. It felt a bit like making peace with myself, and now I subsequently feel a lot happier in myself.

Camping in general has also helped to realign my perspective and reconnect with the things most important to me. I really do believe it has changed me for the better, and been an incredibly formative experience too. I've been volunteering at the Stroke Association, and will soon be volunteering a stammering event, as well as with the transgender community up in Manchester, things I never dreamed I'd feel ready to do. My confidence and skills have improved. My way of thinking and responding is noticeably changing for the better, and my attitude is improving too. I've been thinking about all the things I've learnt this last year at uni, and how I've finally put all the puzzle pieces together and ended up with a solid foundation from which I can grow from, during these last two years of my degree. 

My mind feels a lot calmer and healthier. I'm a lot better at figuring out what I need and finding ways to help me achieve that. I feel like my energies are being focused on the right things now, and I'm caring less about the trivial things and more about what matters most. I'm being a friend to myself. I'm creating a mental check list of things I intend to achieve in the near future. Meanwhile the distant future is now starting to feel like something tangible, something real, something I can touch and see and believe in. My fear and insecurities are starting to weaken, and instead I'm starting to feel like a warrior gearing up for a fight, a star getting reading to launch itself into the night. 

I'm gradually teaching myself to let go of the weights that hold me down. I'm starting to carve out my place in this world. I'll be living with new people. I'll be coming back to what I already know and trying to do things better than I did last time, and not because I have to but because I want to. One of my best friends is now following her dream and living in another country. A plane ride and Skype call away, instead of a 2 minute walk or a 10 minute bus journey. We don't know what the future has in store, and so for once we're just along for the ride. Another of my best friends's course is stepping up a gear, and she won't be back home as much, whilst another best friend has decided to set up home 5 hours away from me, and I don't think she'll ever come back for good. Come back to these cities and places filled with memories of our childhood and friendship that continues to evolve and persevere. These cities and places we call home in the truest sense.

My sister will soon be moving to London and following her dream too in the big city, and I don't think she'll ever really come home after that. We'll be the furthest away we've ever been. People are leaving my life whilst others are coming right back in. I'm reconnecting with people who meant a lot to me and still do. My opinions on matters are evolving and I like feeling as though I have a better understanding of things now. I have more respect, more time, more compassion. My understanding and grasp of what's possible has deepened and broadened in scope. I'm not feeling so limited anymore. When it comes to love, for the first time in my life I feel absolutely clueless as to what will happen next, and the strange thing is I rather like the unpredictability and the unknown. What will be will be. In the mean time I have a content and very happy relationship with myself to focus on. 

I'm growing my hair out and I have no idea what I'm going to do with it next. I can feel my personal style shifting towards a new aesthetic. It's like I'm becoming another reincarnation of myself yet again, and I so desperately want to meet her because I keep thinking back to who I was, who I used to be, and feeling so grateful that everything that happened to me happened. I'm in a really good place, and even if things still have the capacity to go a bit tits up, which I'm sure they will at some point, I feel like I have the strength to take it. I can do this. 

Of course change is the essence of life, and I will always maintain that it has been the making of me. And I'd be lying if I said that I don't resist it or fear it anymore, because I do. Of course I do. Of course I wish all the people I love most didn't have to leave. Of course I wish I could go back to my younger years and live it all over again. Of course I'd rather not get older and have to take on all the many responsibilities that come with it. Of course things happen that I don't like, things I wish I could undo. I still make mistakes. I still trip and fall. I still make a tit out of myself. I still secretly wish I'd done some things differently. Of course I wish that my life as it is right now could stay this way forever too.

But then I know that I've said that before, countless times. I wanted to stay right where I was, right where I was comfortable, but life had other plans and I let myself get carried along right with it. And the best of times morphed into new best of times, and things were still amazing and fulfilling and treasured, just in different ways. And the other week I was watching a Brian Cox documentary, and he was explaining about the difference between time and space. He said about how the Earth always does a 365/366 spin on its axis, yet every day it spins it moves forwards in space and every complete cycle occurs in a different part of space. Where we are on the 8th of August 2016 will be different to where we are on the 8th of August 2017, even if next year the weather is exactly the same and the places and people we visit still look the same as they've always done.

So in a way, we do lose the past every time we close our eyes and a new day begins, and it's true that things will never return to how they were, and we never quite return to where we were either. It's impossible. In life we're meant to continually keep moving forwards to this unknown and elusive destination. Things are always changing. Change is a constant. And it's so hard to let things go and leave them behind you. Have the best days of your life become simply memories. But the laws of time and space mean that to some extent, the moments of past that we treasure still exist somewhere out there in the universe. Somewhere in the debris and tell tale tracks of where we've been, these moments and times and versions of our lives still exist. So even though we have to physically leave them behind, I think it's rather nice to know that we never leave them fully. They're out there somewhere.

It's like leaving footsteps in the sand, whilst we carry on walking towards whatever comes next in the weird and wonderful workings of our lives, and it makes me realise that change is a good thing. Every day we wake up and we begin again, and the world keeps spinning and we keep moving forwards. And little by little we leave our mark, our own special signposts and markers and footprints saying we were here, this is who we were, this is how we lived our lives. And we carry ourselves forward into the great unknown, launching ourselves into the pool of wonder and magic that awaits us. We trust that our feet will find solid ground once again, and that we will discover the next adventures and times of our lives, lying embedded in the depths of time and space, just waiting to be found.