Change

I didn’t realise how infrequently I’d been writing, or how bad my memory gaps had become, until I realised this post was about to follow close on the heels to a post also about change. Or at least a change in personality. I shouldn’t be too surprised really. There’s a lot of big changes going on in my life and I’m both excited and absolutely terrified at the same time. Though right now there’s a lot of the terrified going on at the moment, which is what I want to talk about this week. 

Though for a little while today, or really most of today, it was almost a completely different blog post that was going to be written this week, one that I was going to write last week, but that I never got around to. However I always wanted to write this one for this week, so the other one can wait. This one is slightly more time conscious than the other one.

That’s because the biggest source of my fear, and excitement, is what’s happening at the end of this week. And some things that have already happened. I took some risks, decided that I was only young once, and that if I didn’t do something soon most of my best years were going to pass me by without me doing anything that I was truly satisfied with. I’m already going back to uni in October, so I decided that instead of spending all my time until I left working at a job I disliked, I was going to do something different.

Which is how I ended up signing up to go work on a farm in Norway for almost a month. A farm with limited electricity and internet, no flushing toilets, and miles from anywhere else. Somewhere that sounds both incredible and terrifying at the same time. I can’t lie, I am really looking forward to the idea of being away from social media, modern technology, and doing manual labour. I blame the whole Earth’s Children series of books, or even the Wolf Brother ones before that. I think they were what started my obsession with nomadic, living off the land lifestyles. This is just my modern equivalent. With hopefully less disease.

However, at the same time I’m a lot terrified. Not necessarily because of what I’m doing out there, but because of what it signals for me. The moment I get on that coach on Friday morning everything about my comfortable little life that I’ve been living for the past year or so stops and I’ll be firmly in the unknown. It may be slightly dramatic but that’s how it feels and it is possibly the scariest thing I’ve ever known. I feel like I’m hurtling towards a cliff’s edge powerless to stop it and until I get there I’m not going to know until I plunge off that edge if I’m going to fall or fly.

It’s scary and exciting at the same time. I’m reminded of a quote I read a long time ago, but one that feels entirely too apt for this situation: 

“There is freedom waiting for you, on the breezes of the sky, and you ask ‘what if I fall?’ Oh but my darling, what if you fly?”

 

• Erin Hanson

 

I’m really hoping I fly.

Sophie x

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