I woke up from a whimsical journey into the heart of the human spirit in the shiny, souless offices of a recruitment agency.
It hurt.
The flavours of the dream still clutched to me. My ears were still ringing with the beating of the drums, and I could still taste the grilled fish and palm wine. I could still smell the ancient forests and the restless, salty oceans, and feel the glacial chill of the mountain lakes. But the halogen ceiling lights were blinding me, and there was an excessive demand for documents. A stiff, silent numbness began to settle around that joyous ache in my heart that clamours for adventure.
I’ve had the same view out of my window for six weeks now. Chimneys and chestnut trees, and a row of multicoloured houses perched on a hill. Every once in a while a train rumbles past on stone railway arches, and I silently bark at it. There are bills to be paid and the pressures of society to confront. It can be a delicate balance, reality – that jarring space where heart and soul meet the highway code. It threatens to be a slow, painful death by beaurocracy, and secretly, I’m terrified.
I’ve discovered something, over this past year; something which has always nagged at me, and I’ve always managed to suffocate in a whirlwind of jobs and pubs and parties: a Sacredness, in nothing more than the beauty of the human spirit, in all its echoes and expressions. In my head-on collision with the beautiful strangeness of existence, I’ve realised that the most meaningful adventure I can take myself on is a celebration of nothing more than the wonderous potential that lies in all of us; a potential eager to explode as soon as we gather the courage to follow our heart.
Society grates, not so much in the demand for rent as the demand for spaces of your soul. I am not sure how we’ve arrived here, but we have. We’ve taken spaces that could be filled with warm-hearted expression and filled them with the X Factor. We’ve created an economy that feeds off thoughtless, empty greed. I am terrified of sacrificing my creativity, my curiosity, my thirst for understanding, to bland, relentless emptiness. I’m terrified of loosing more and more of my time to being what I need to be to pay the bills, watching hopelessly as the time I spend being what I feel to be gets increasingly pushed into treasured little isolated corners. I am terrified of loosing the meaning that comes with creating your own world on the edges.
Luckily, I’ve moved to Bristol, a city whose foundations throb with a dazzling myriad of human expression, and whose edges are wide and filled with colour. Everywhere I am meeting people who have made the same discovery as me, and whose lives inspire me, to carefully chose who I am when I’m clocking hours, and accept the gifts and the sacrifices that come with not clocking too many of them. It doesn’t rain as much as it does in Manchester. Outside a train rumbles past on stone railway arches, and I bark out loud.
