Countdowns

Next month, I’ll be twenty-four. I wish that meant something significant. Of course I am grateful; for my health, my reliable old heart and the wonderful people in my life who make it all worthwhile. But for as long as I can remember, my age, or rather, the ‘number’, never quite felt right. I think I’ve always had what people call an ‘old soul’. I don’t know where it came from, but I’m pretty sure it’s there.

Twenty-four isn’t a particularly large number (albeit the rest of me seems to be filling up on the dimensions fairly quickly) – especially when I consider that I have a friend who is in her 70s. And yet, despite the fact that our relationship would warrant a granddaughter-grandmother label, we are friends. She confides in me, shouts and curses when she’s angry, seeks comfort when her morale is low, and loves me as if I were her only confidant. Admittedly, I do the same.

I have come to learn that relationships aren’t defined by any particular characteristic; neither are matters of the heart governed by points on an agenda. You love because you choose to love. I’ve faced the reality that nothing lasts forever, although I seem to be struggling to ‘practically’ accept that. I’ve learnt that actually, my ‘number’ means nothing. You can learn in twenty years what some can’t in forty. And every day is an opportunity for a new experience.

As a writer, the most valuable lesson I’ve learnt over the past few years is that ‘writer’s block’ is a nonsense excuse. In fact, it’s such a painstakingly embarrassing sentiment that even the word ‘excuse’ seems too sophisticated for it. When all else fails me, words never do. To those who know me well, that will not come as a surprise. The motor on my mouth laughs manically in the face of energy sources, for it almost never requires its battery to be recharged.
On the odd occasion, however, even words fail me…

I am a wordsmith. Words are what I do. I will refrain from saying words are what ‘I am’, because (almost) twenty-four years of life have also taught me that ‘I am’ more than just a singular matter. In reality, the fact that so many definitions string together to explain the one me there is, should illustrate that I serve a purpose. Sometimes, however, you find yourself existing without one – a purpose, that is.  So, you attach what you ‘do’, with what you ‘are’. But the problem is, sometimes what you ‘do’ decides to show you up. In this case, words.

Words, which to me are like a lifeline, have become stifled as of late.  I realise that my experiences over the past few years have been so unlike any other, that I am at a loss for words to describe them, to communicate them – even, simply, to understand them.  Life is guilty of that often. One may even argue that those experiences are life: moments which dazzle you, beguile you, leave you stunned and confused, moments which make you long for more, moments which puncture your core with wounds. All of them are life. Thus all of them must serve a purpose, or so we like to believe.

Some things are just supposed to happen – without rhyme or reason. They were, as the phrase is so casually uttered today, ‘meant to be’. But how do you explain that to your ever-logical mind, the Chief Immigration Officer of the ‘You’ sphere – poking and prodding at everything in sight? How do you explain to a small child why he’s lost both his parents in the space of a year? How do you provide justifications to your best friend about why the man she loved left her stranded? How do you forgive someone who you feel has taken everything from you, and given nothing in return?

I think the hardest thing I’ve learnt (and admittedly, am still learning), is that at some point you have to relinquish control. Sometimes, there just isn’t a justification. Sometimes, there isn’t a comprehensive explanation to alleviate your unsettled heart. Sometimes, it is what it is. And there lies the irony – despite its simplicity, that is perhaps the most difficult lesson to grasp.

As my countdown continues, I realise with every year that I am more willing to acknowledge and accept my flaws. I never realised how difficult that was before. Was I ever foolish and self-absorbed enough to think that I was perfect? Or is it just that experience taps relentlessly at that hard exterior shell, until you are forced to confront those uncomfortable realities you’ve been trying so hard to conceal all this time?

However it happened, they are very much alive and present – my impatience, my greed, my destructive need for control. They perhaps don’t manifest in the ‘conventional’ way that one would interpret them, but they are very much real and bear their ugliness when I least expect it (much to the dismay of Monsieur Control, of course). So what do you do? It all comes back to that incredible feat of learning to relinquish control. To allow situations, experiences, life itself to soften you, to sweeten you. To accept that just as you acknowledge the existence of a new flaw inside you at each hurdle, so too is the world and its people. Love, in whichever capacity it is given, is not to be regretted. Ever. However many bridges you’ve built and broken, however many hurts and slights, however many losses – this moment right now is what it is.

Countdowns seem only to live in the present – willing this moment, this now, to be, so that it may run its course until the next.