What Could Have Been, What Could Be.

The seasons in the UK are much more defined than back in Australia. There isn't a gradual shift, no crossfades like in a movie, just a morning where you look outside and realise something has changed. One day you're wearing a coat and scarf while you walk the dogs, the next you're wondering whether to even bother with a jacket. It's a clear shift in light, colour palette and mood. Even the sounds seem different. Birdsong shifts gear, the air seems more alert. And each time it happens I find myself pausing, taking stock, wondering whether these quiet sudden seasonal pivots happened back in Australia and I just missed them, or whether the seasons over there truly blurred and the weather never quite committed one way or the other.

Maybe as I get older, I pay more attention, am more aware. Maybe the landscape and the climate make it obvious. Or maybe living this far north means you can’t help but notice when the days start to stretch, when the mornings are brighter a little earlier, and the afternoons are reluctant to let go of their light. The change slowly settles in, but at some point it simply feels as if the new season has crept in while you were looking the other way. That point was during last week.

Perhaps it's the changing seasons, but I've had reason to reflect the past few weeks, thinking back to things that have happened and what might have been. Times when I made decisions - sliding door moments - which led me to where I am now. Opportunities ignored, missed or lost. And for the most part I have few regrets. I was disappointed on a couple of occasions when plans fell apart or simply didn't come to fruition. A few I stretched for but was either not skilled enough or couldn't reach high enough to grasp.

I hear people say that it ‘would have happened if it was meant to be.’ I've always felt this is a mantra we repeat when we need to make sense of a disappointment, a way of trying to rationalise the things that never quite materialised. But when I look back at those disappointments, and realise that for the most part it was for the best, I start to wonder about whether those near misses I took to heart were actually narrow escapes in disguise. The past month has held a sliding door moment. A decision made which I have since realised would probably have led me down a path I wasn’t meant to walk, a path I wouldn’t have wanted to walk, and I imagine the passing of time will confirm that. But I woke this morning feeling strange, imbued with something I haven’t felt for some time. I had to poke it and prod it, explore it before I could recognise it. I found a strange calm in my mind, a sense of hope, as if something had finally settled inside me, a quiet reassurance I couldn’t quite explain but didn’t want to question too deeply. A weight I didn’t realise I was carrying had gently lifted, leaving more than a hint of optimism in its place. Was it the recent near miss? The lighter mornings creeping in? Or was it that the Brits around me, many of them recently weighed down by the winter blues, had begun to thaw? They’re chirping again, like the birds I hear each morning, and it’s hard not to notice. And perhaps, in the end, it is none of those but a combination. A blend of things. A quiet relief at a near miss, the promise of a new season, and the faintest changes stirring both within me and without me. A change in the light, a change in the air, a change in the people around me, and a change in me. The seasons turn whether I am paying attention or not, yet this one arrived with a clarity I could not ignore. As the world around me begins to brighten, with mornings growing lighter and people shaking off their winter heaviness, I feel something in myself brightening too. Not loudly or dramatically, but enough. Enough to notice. Enough to carry. Enough to trust that whatever comes next, I am stepping into it with a softer tread than I had before, with a growing sense that things will work out, and that I will end up where I am supposed to be.