Hope

Sat with my notes scattered slightly carelessly across the table top; my laptop open, teasing me with the blank screen. I know that I'm supposed to be good at this, and I am, in theory. But that clinical-white blank page brings a cripling fear of making a mistake, and I freeze.

My mind wanders to a far-away place, a mountainside and all the freedom it brings. The colourful landscapes and the harmonies of nature. The sky is blue and clear, poles apart from my current state of mind. And then I remember. I remember that the world is so much bigger than this assignment. The world is so much bigger than me. Than university. Than education. The world is a beautiful page in someone's sketchbook, a narrative etched carefully onto a canvas of air.

I can see this beauty, but I can't feel it; it's like my veersion of real and everyone else's version of real are identical copies of the same page. Except they're carved in to a different secion of air and they never can quite align. I'm here, but I'm not actually here. I know I will be, it's just going to take time.

Still frozen. Eyes glued to the screen. Scared to write the first words. Scared of making the first mistake. Because once there's one mistake, what if it leaks mistake and wrongness into the rest of the words? What if they become contaminated by mistakes, plagued by fear?

An irrational fear of failure that, ironically, is more likely to lead to failure. But once recognised as such becomes even more infuriatingly difficult to control. I wish I could call it something more poetic, but it's not procrastination or perfectionism. I don't want everything to be perfect, I just fear the opposite too much to let the quirky imperfections shine through. An element of a proocess taking shape, a process that sometimes can't happen at all.

Still frozen. But someone hands me a lighted match, and lights an internal candle. A spark of hope; the power to thaw that panic. Someone hands a lighted match, and I realise that someone came from within me.


Keep smiling,
Kathryn

Appreciating the small things

I woke up to the sun-light blazing through my bright orange curtains. They were ready to be peeled right open to display the wonder of the world outside. I don’t know how twelve hours and a change of the clock seem to make the world of difference. Maybe it’s all in my head, some sort of placebo effect, but I swear waking up this morning was like waking up somewhere new. The grass seemed just that little bit greener, the birds in my back garden just a little bit happier. And with all of that, so was I. 

My day was more productive, to-do lists completed in record time and even time for a break in the middle. And knowing that I could go out for a bike ride at 6 o’clock on all of my favourite public footpaths, through fields after fields of greenery and wildlife, without worry about whether it would be light enough led to more productivity. The bike ride gave me the opportunity to appreciate my surroundings more and more, in a cycle of positivity that I’m determined to seize.

So even if it is a placebo effect, I’m always appreciative of our crazy little thing we do with the clocks to signify the start of summer. In a world consumed by technology, where the common lifestyle involves rushing from one place straight to the next, it’s so easy to let the little things in life pass us by. It’s not often we take time to appreciate the way the sun bounces off a lake that casts a warm glow everywhere, or the stranger in the street that smiles at us as we pass, but it’s something I’m trying to do more and more.


Keep smiling,
Kathryn x