I was in London for the weekend. It was a bit of a whirlwind, but it culminated in a shopping spree in Canary Wharf. It feels like a lifetime ago that I worked there, and wandered that mall everyday, took the tube to work everyday. Muscle memory took my feet to the eastbound Jubilee line to Canning Town, before I remembered I was heading in the opposite direction. It's actually only been three months since I left, and it feels like a year, and a split second, all at the same time.
I remember myself three months ago, and I'm not sure what I was doing. I was making ends meet, seeing my friends, hoping for the best, making elaborate plans. But always standing still.
Now I'm living through my unexpected deviation. And I'm making ends meet, and seeng my friends, hoping for the best and making elaborate plans. But I'm still standing still. Always with the standing still.
I'm not sure when, if ever, I was properly living. Sometime I feel like every day since I left university was a day of elaborate plans and standing still. That can't be living can it?
I'm not being unhappy here, or even morose. I'm just wondering if that cheesy Hallmark saying is true: "Life happens while you're making other plans." I don't want it to happen without me noticing. I don't want to be reading a guide book while the sites go by.
It's just that in Cape Town I was living half a life, working to come over to the UK. In London I was living half a life, trying to make things work in a badly paid job in the most expensive city in the world. Now I'm living another half life, in a boarding house populated with a bad tempered English guy, his bland girlfriend, a bemused Frenchman and a dispossessed Vietnamese chick.
Unexpected good has come out of my unexpected diversion. Things have worked out better than they could have. And yet. And yet. And yet.
I would like to get on with my real life now, please.
3 comments:
Life is what we make of it Taking each day at a time Enjoying the ups and planning to get out of the downs You need to go and rest and have a break next weekend
I got shivers reading this. I've recently realised that I'm doing pretty much the same thing - getting by, doing the work I've fallen into, and making elaborate plans for the future. I feel like I'm holding off, waiting for a life to align that I can really throw myself into wholeheartedly: my REAL life, my REAL work. I've always imagined that at some point, I'll stop living with one eye on the future and actually have a life I can commit to here and now.
Maybe it is a question of finding the particular plans, the particular changes that will turn a half life into a whole life, and making them work. (For me, I've sort of fixed on working in the developing world - if I can make that happen, then my life can actually start!) Or maybe it's a whole series of little changes that push one's current life, bit by bit, into centre stage.
Or maybe this is how life works - but I don't like that idea. I don't like to think that I have to choose between chasing the life I've envisioned, and living.
I'm aware that I'm probably being unhelpful - but I'm glad I'm not alone in feeling this way.
i love this post. the hardest part of my twenties has been how it's nothing like i thought it would be.
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