This year my birthday falls on 'Black-Eye Friday', aka the day/night where most work colleagues will go out and celebrate Christmas together and try to shake off the year in preparation for Christmas. I'm unlikely to see most of this type of behaviour this year, with increasing Covid restrictions. But, I thought it was an interesting premise for a post.
So, yes, I turn 41 tomorrow. This time last year I was in the middle of changing jobs and I had just unpacked from a weekend in Newcastle knowing full well lockdown was about to hit again. This time 2 years ago I was packing my bags to leave Ecuador and return to Scotland when we didn't even know Covid-19 existed. Today, I have repeated some of the pattern. I have just spent over a week having a 'staycation' with my boyfriend, after we re-booked our week-long holiday in Fuerteventura due to the rising Covid cases. I have returned to my flat in Leith and unpacked. A life still in movement but also in stasis.
I want to come away with something crass like 'I don't feel 41' but then again, what does 41 feel like? All I really know is that I am here and I'm about to go through another milestone. This is where you feel the liminality, even if it is artificially constructed. You look back to look forward, standing at a vantage point that allows you to see both in particular ways. I feel both content and a sense of foreboding. The contentness comes from the cumulation of life choices I have made sequentially throughout the years, not knowing for sure if I was moving in the right direction but buffered by a core belief that it was. I do think I was. Each year I remark at how much I have grown and how much I have learned, about myself, others and life. This has been a real growth year in terms of my career, self-knowledge and interpersonally. I'm a more rounded version of who I was even a year ago.
Still, there is trepidation. With Covid I have had to 'ground'. I have had to accept additional responsibilities and live in, and appreciate, the moment, rather than shoot arrows off in multiple directions. It has been a revelation in many ways but also disconcerting. In sitting down with the 'howl' and in partial 'shackles', I have learned a lot about who I really am through slowing it all down. I have often been advised to live in the moment and to appreciate what is around me. I think I'm finally learning this lesson. It's been a struggle and it has taken it's own time, but I'm finally learning.
Plans give us motivation and goals, but sticking to them and achieving them is not the benchmark I once thought it was. The pandemic, amongst other things, have taught me that. It is important to love what you have now and that includes who you are. Because, that's all most of us have had in the last two years, and it looks like this will be the foreseeable future also. I do love what I have now. I love where I live and I love the relationships I am embedded in. I also love almost-41 year old me and I'm proud of her. That is a good place to start.
Here's to another year of growth in whichever way it goes :)
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