What have I learned this year?

Action doesn’t come from hope; hope comes from action.

This is just like learning, or eating. You start learning or eating, and your appetite for it grows. I feel like I’ve been quite stagnant in my involvement in important social causes. On a personal level, I also feel like I’ve abandoned a lot of my creative passions.

Through the first lockdown, I definitely learned the importance and the power of rest and the outdoors. I walked a lot, worked out loads, and spent as much time as I could outside in the sunshine.

Now, however, the days are shorter, darker and colder. I feel fatigued and although I still go outside, rest doesn’t feel as wholesome if it’s indoors.

So, when I wrote that short story two weeks ago, or when I printed and stuck photos into my travel journal from my summer trip, I felt inspired. I performed the action, and this gave rise to the subsequent hopeful feeling in my heart. Similarly, attending the Black Lives Matter protest in Bristol subsequently gave rise to my thirst for educating myself around the issues; for acknowledging and learning how I am even a part of those issues. With these actions I took came hope that I can be better, and so can the rest of the world.

We need to rebuild differently.

I definitely do not want things to go back to ‘normal’ because ‘normal’ was anything but that. It was filled with things that remove you from the human experiences; traffic, pollution, noise, stress, constantly chasing time. I did not enjoy that normal.

However, we have been stripped of our ability to experience the social aspects of the world in the way in which we are meant to – for our wellbeing and our survival. I guess I am one of the lucky ones. I do not have a partner or my own family but I am not in a high-risk group. I live with housemates I like and have friends I can see. Of course, I am deprived of the energy that an amazing, noisy gig gives me, or the chance to drink with my friends in the pub and have a good time. Above all, the sting is most felt through the absence of three things: laughter, hugs and sex. I am a very tactile and affectionate person, and I also have a tendency to lean towards low mood and frantic anxiety. Laughter, hugs and sex serve such an important survival purpose for us all and for me, they are irreplaceable by any activity I can muster on my own.

A lot more of the world should be focused on community, love, laughter, shared experiences, understanding and intimacy. Not this individualistic, corporate-oriented, capitalist culture we have going on.

It’s astounding to me how bussiness-like our existence is. There are politics in pretty much everything – even in my own job, working with victims of horrific crimes. The focus should be on us thriving us a society, not on enlarging the gaps between us. 

Best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. Next best time is now.

It’s a scary thing, getting older. It’s also really wonderful as with age comes (hopefully) serenity and an increased level of self-acceptance. That being said, we all have our struggles at different ages and we do tend to spend a lot of time focusing on opportunities we’ve missed, rather than creating them for ourselves in the present. We say things like ‘If only I had done this when I was younger’ and for the life of me, I cannot think of a more futile train of thought.

That time that we idealise and romanticise has long since passed. We should be taking the lessons we learned back then and processing them, so that we can enrich our lives now.

I am 31 years old now. My body feels different, my metabolism has slowed, I value peace and calm in my life more so than I did several years ago. I get tired more easily, I have a little less patience.

On the flipside, I know who I am a bit more, I understand my worth in relationships – both platonic and romantic – and I take less shit. I am able to enjoy the presence of my younger housemates, and the mentality of my little sister, in a caring and reminiscent way. I see them on their journeys, more or less a decade later from when I was at that same, and there is a real beauty to watching them undertake it. There is wisdom in my thoughts and my words that I have now earned – as opposed to felt entitled to in my youth.

I have less friends but the ones I do have are absolutely golden.

I have more time and appreciation for my family.

So in conclusion, although I am definitely older today than I have ever been, I am also younger today than I will ever be. We all are.

My list of dreams and ambitions may be smaller – because reality has become much more clear to me now – but I’ll be damned if I don’t attempt these things now. It would be very sad for me if, at 41, I look back over the last ten years and fall back into that unhelpful thought of why I didn’t try or do certain things when I was younger.

I still have a lot of love, creativity, time and energy to devote to my personal ambitions, and to my more philanthropic aspirations. So now is, truly, the time.

(Listening to a great podcast I was recommended by a friend – Jon Richardson and the Futurenauts – gave me the above three headings. It’s good stuff)