I guess we’ll talk again when you catch up
These days feel like one long lesson in realising how complicated things always are. Maybe I’m just getting older, but I sometimes miss the polarity of my teenage years and how absolute and final it all felt. It was black and white even when it felt unbearable. It’s not a time I’d return to, but the battle lines were clear.
Now in me I feel the continual argument of the romantic and what is either my cynicism or my better judgement. And these two sides of me bicker incessantly about the lens through which we should see the world, each throwing up their own reason and rationale for how I should interpret things.
I used to believe that there was no such thing as timing. That if it was worth it and we were worthy, we’d make ourselves ready. I see now what an impossibly arrogant viewpoint that was to take, as if I — a humble being standing 5 ft 4 inches — could somehow warp and twist the universe in my favour. How egotistical to assume that just showing up would somehow change things or speed them along.
Some of us may be familiar with what Edgar Allan Poe called the Imp of the Perverse, or that little voice that shouts “JUMP” when you’re overlooking a drop, or tells you to throw your phone out the window of a moving car. You wouldn’t ever do the thing, but the voice is there, albeit only briefly.
