Dichotomy

(Writ­ten last night when I was in a slightly alco­holic haze, though not drunk.)

Lately, I’ve had a feel­ing, a pre­mon­i­tion, a glimpse into the future. It’s no great rev­el­a­tion, unfor­tu­nately. All I know is that I have this vague sen­sa­tion that things are going to change for me in the near future. I don’t know how, I don’t know in which areas of my life these changes will mani­fest them­selves (well, OK, I have some ideas), and I don’t know when — but there will be changes.

How­ever, there’s an extra ele­ment to this foresight — I also feel that these changes aren’t going to be seis­mic. They are not going to be Major Life Events, just minor hap­pen­ings or slow shifts that will res­ult in cos­metic dif­fer­ences to my day-to-day exist­ence. My prob­lem is that I want changes to be huge, or not at all.

I’m not explain­ing myself very well, am I?

In recent years, I’ve become aware that there are two sides to my char­ac­ter when it comes to life dir­ec­tion. Half of me desires a com­plete and utter change, and a con­stant state of flux. This is the per­son who could pack a few belong­ings tomor­row, get on a plane and go — who knows where? — and start a new life, cut­ting vir­tu­ally all ties with what went before.

How­ever, the other half of me wants things to stay as they are for just a little longer — that’s not to say I don’t want interest, excite­ment and adven­ture, but I want it within the sphere of people and places I know, to retain the things I hold dear and that are import­ant to me. Yes, it’s a need for secur­ity. But, more than that, it’s a need to build up a little his­tory for myself because, for the past 12 years, I’ve lacked a sense of this in my life. (If you don’t know what I mean by “his­tory”, think of it as hav­ing a lin­ear past that you can trace back for more than three years).

The feel­ings I’ve had about impend­ing change don’t sat­isfy either of those halves of my char­ac­ter. What I see before me on the hori­zon is the most com­plete illus­tra­tion of the pro­verb “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” And I’ll con­fess to not being entirely sure whether to run with the things that are about to hap­pen, even if they’re not quite what I want; hang around and wait for the seis­mic changes that may one day erupt through the ground beneath me; or to try and fight to keep hold of what I’ve got for a little longer.

You can’t beat a bit of week­end navel-gazing.