Pause. Stop what you are doing right now. Stop the music, find a quiet spot and just pause. Wherever you are take a moment. Close your eyes, feel the ground beneath your feet. Take a deep breath and feel the air in your lungs, the sun on your back, the wind across your body. In that small moment that you take for yourself think about everything that has brought you to where you are today. Take the time to appreciate where you are and how you got here. Ignore what you need to be doing for that moment and just take your time to feel that small amount of time. There is a value and a power in moments like these that allows us a moment to reflect. It’s the still small moments in life where everything comes crashing down around you. In a lot of ways I think that our mental state mirrors the cartoon physics of Bugs Bunny and his ilk. Until we take the time to notice, we can keep on running despite having run out of space.
I’m caught between a desire to acknowledge and revel in the moment and the fear of acknowledging that everything has come to an end. So for right now I’m choosing to pause, eyes closed as I hover above an abyss that I refuse to acknowledge. For right now I am enjoying the moment being surrounded by friends in a place that I have come to love, I am a long way from home still, and for the moment I’m just going to see the sky above me, the ancient, crouching buildings down the street, and I’m willfully ignoring the suitcase that sits, creeping behind my door. When I did my last external study program, I left claiming that I had never been more sad or more happy to leave somewhere. In that moment I know that that wasn’t true, I was happy to be leaving and glad to leave behind the life I had created there. But here it is different. Here I’m happy and am surrounded by people that I get to see every day.
I know that being happy to go home and being heartbroken to leave are not mutually exclusive. Despite this even now I feel my mind’s eye opening and looking toward the abyss of realization that I’m going home. So I’ll be done now and I’ll just sit in the moment. I will let myself not dwell on the future, but rather appreciate life for what it is right now. You don’t have to say goodbye until you acknowledge that you are leaving, so as I sit here in a mental hover, midair amidst the winds of change, I’m going to smile as I refuse to see my own predicament.
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Isaac Morley
Shakespeare in Oxford! 