A Transitional Phase

The Sunday I needed arrived today, which I hadn't fully realised I was waiting for until it was here.

Everything slowed in a way that felt welcomed rather than imposed — my mind, my movements, the pace at which one thing followed another. I became, by any reasonable measure, a world champion nap-taking machine, which surprised me a little because I don't think of myself as particularly good at stillness. My actions today would suggest otherwise.

The day drifted by without friction. Very little to do and even less that needed achieving, and I let myself settle into that rather than filling it with something more productive. A comfortable numbness that I chose not to resist.

After dinner, I went out with the camera, not looking for anything particular, which is always the right way to go out with a camera, in my experience. I didn't take a single photograph, as it turned out. What I found instead was a conversation with a fellow student that moved naturally from one thing to another, neither of us pushing it anywhere, pausing only where it needed to pause.

She asked at some point whether I was in a transitional stage.

I smiled at that and said: I think we're all in a transitional phase, all the time.

I meant it. After eighteen months of training, I feel as though I've stopped needing to search for a simple life in the deliberate. Not because I've arrived at it but because the searching itself has quieted. The concept has stopped feeling like a destination and started feeling more like a fact I've gradually accepted.

Right now, I know what I know and believe what I believe, and I'm also aware that tomorrow will bring its own version of both. Not better, not worse. Just different.

The accolades, the success, the security — they all seem vital until they don't. Until what you have becomes enough. Until each moment is simply a moment in a long journey, experienced for what it is rather than what it might eventually add up to.

I wonder sometimes whether I could go back to what was. I'm genuinely not sure — not because I couldn't, but because the past is what carried me to this quiet point, and from here, the now is something I can inhabit with an openness I couldn't manage before.

Right now, I am happy accepting now.