Riding Elevators...

Every once in a while iTunes reintroduces me to a song I’d all but forgotten about. A song that puts words to emotions, expresses fears and feelings that I’m too scared to voice or even admit to feeling on my own. In a way it is like iTunes get’s inside my head and made sense of me, then explains me to myself.  

I have some big decisions to make in the next few weeks. Decisions that personally I’d rather not make Janet Fitch once said “I know it feels like you have all these options and when you make a decision, you lose a world of possibilities. But the reality is, until you make a decision, you have nothing at all.”

Today’s iTunes was Riding Elevators by the Danish artist Mads Langer.

“Waiting to put my feet on the ground,

I'm tired of going up and down

But sometimes it feels safer, waiting...

Never here or there,

On the ground or in the air

People come and go 

But I'm still riding elevators”

Happily ever after?

I set up this blog space months ago with the intention of writing regularly once I completed the move from Denmark to Australia. You know a new blog to chronicle a new chapter etc. Well I’ve been here over two weeks. It's been two weeks of staring at blank pages and unpacking boxes.

There are a lot of unanswered questions and old insecurities to keeping me company and the honest truth is, I have no idea what comes next. The one thing I wish more than anything is that I knew, I wish I knew what came next. But I don’t. When I was little I thought I’d have my life figured out by the time I was 20... at 22 I can hear my a 5 year old self scolding me for being so behind schedule. But when you’re little, being grown up seems so far away, so simple and yet so tangible.

When you are little happily ever after is the life you live once you have grown up. Somehow you wake up from a deep sleep (your teenage years) and go on to live your life with Prince Charming, forever unencumbered by evil spells, wicked witches and heartless stepmothers.

But as we grow up we detect that it’s always other people that have happy endings. People we haven't seen in a few years, who on seeing them again or via Facebook profiles, seem to have organically evolved into perfect specimens, with perfect lives, with no trouble, with little or no effort at all. The same goes for people whose lives we look back upon in history books; their successes seemed inevitable, rather than a lot of really hard work.

I wish there was some way to get past this awkward phase, this phase of not knowing what comes next in life to that place where I can at least know something. But the thing I’m coming to realise is that we (no one) will never live, life happily ever after (not on this earth anyway).  Because we actually have to live it. We are here every day. Making decisions every day. Taking baby steps, forwards and backwards. Dreaming. Loving. Hating. Moving. Succumbing to weakness. Rising to the challenge. Applying for jobs. Making money. Spending money. It's never ever after. It's just another day after day after day which, collectively, accumulate to make what seems like happily ever after, to people watching us from afar.

So while right now I know nothing. I’m living hoping, praying and wishing on every bit of dandelion dust and every shooting star that someday I’ll look back with no regrets.

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer." Rainer Maria Rilke