Swimming Against The Tide
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For the past three years, I’ve spent July and August in London. During this time, the majority of my friends have, at some point, been on holiday. I scroll past their Instagram photos of glittering Turkish beaches or tranquil Austrian mountains and a pang of longing to be elsewhere flashes through me. For much as I love London in summer, I’d still choose beach or mountains over city.
These homebound summers got me reflecting on other times in my life when I felt like I was swimming in a different direction to most of my friends. For much of my thirties, I was one of the few who was still single. And in my early forties, when I’d finally got together with someone, I was pretty much the only one without a child. My longings for a partner and, later, a child were deep-seated, and not fuelled by society’s expectations, or wanting to ‘keep up with the Joneses.’ But despite the lack of what I longed for, I could hardly say I had a poor quality of life.
Far from it. I had wonderful friends and family, lived in a flat I adored, enjoyed my freelance career as an architect and yoga teacher, and the work-life balance it gave me. I filled myself up with yoga, writing, reading, cooking, plus holidays to far-flung place such as India and Thailand.
When I look back on those years, I also see how much energy I invested on what I didn’t have and wanted, and in worrying about whether I’d ever have them. A sense of absence often settled in, like a film of dust over a beautiful mirror, which meant I didn’t always see my life in its full glory. With hindsight, I also realise that the emptiness I’d sometimes feel was less about my actual day-to-day reality and more about my fear of what my future might not have. Of course, there were occasions I felt the genuine ache of loneliness in my heart, such as when a girlfriend cancelled, last minute, a Saturday night dinner I’d been looking forward to all week, as her child was sick. But when I ditched the ruminating and was able to focus on what was right in front of me, I was mostly fine.
I wish I’d lived those years unaccompanied by the hum of all that fretting. I can never reclaim them from my ‘one wild and precious life’. There are (perhaps inevitably!) things I now miss about them, such as the luxury of a spacious Saturday spent ambling around, agendaless, or all those yoga workshops and classes I could just go to at the drop of a hat.
And it’s not as if worrying helped me create my future, either. What did help was taking proactive steps, such as signing up for online dating in my mid-thirties, by which time the steady stream of weekend parties full of single people, readily available a decade earlier, had dried up, and friends instead collapsed onto sofas on Saturday nights, exhausted by the demands of young children.
Not getting away over the summer is, of course, rather a small-scale concern. But it’s reminded me of the power of turning towards what we do have with joy, rather than focusing on what we don’t have. For the most part, I’ve placed my attention on the blissful quiet of an emptied-out London, and on times spent with friends and family, be it drinking Prosecco and eating bruschetta at a Marylebone pavement table, while getting to know a new friend, or watching the sun set over the city while picnicking on Primrose Hill with one of my dearest friends. In those moments, I wasn’t dreaming of swimming in a Mediterranean sea or an Alpine lake. I was simply there.
Our minds have the opportunity to take up residence in a million places. Where are you choosing to place yours?
