Today I have been pondering about places and one of the NaBloPoMo daily prompts ( for if you get writers block whilst having to write everyday!) was to write about your writing space….but instead this prompted me to talk about another space.
I have been stuck at home for the week, in bed with laryngitis. Basically bound to my house for 3 days straight, I was going a bit stir crazy. The only human interaction was my family and they are of course crazy busy and so were rushing in and out, and so I spent about 3 days in what felt like solitary confinement. And though at first I relished the alone time, and the space from hecticness of everyday life it got boring…..fast…and very lonely. I felt really isolated and lethargic, more so than just the illness, because I am someone who gains there energy from being around people. It got to the point where I was desperate to leave the house if only for an hour!
And so today I went out on a dog walk, just me, my dog, my i-pod and I brought along my camera because lately I’ve regretted not having it when autumn is this beautiful. I walked to the fields near my house where I always take my dog. And I went to this alcove of trees.
Its somewhere that whatever is going on in my life I go, just somewhere I seem to gravitate to, if only for its close proximity to my house. There is a rope swing tied to a huge tree with an overhanging branch over a small dip, and when I was younger everyday me and my friends would walk a different and longer way home from school just so we could go on it, and would routinely spend hours just chatting and swinging. I remember spending an afternoon with my brothers and friends desperately trying to untangle the swing from the top branch, using every trick in the book to get it down to use it. I remember sitting by the tree using my umbrella as almost a bubble over the top of me protecting me from the rain as I sat on the phone to my friend pouring out my troubles, I remember the summer BBQ’s I’ve had where me and all my friends will go down to that spot and laugh and joke around, I remember all the conversations me and good friends have had sat in that exact spot. Sure there have been hard times, days where we’ve had bad days at school, or days when I recall us fighting and leaving in tears but yet I always left that place with this unsaid promise that better times would come. I would always inherently know that we would have good times there again, better memories of this place were sure to come.
the rope swing! A bit tangled at the moment
The rope swing action over the summer!
And we do this with physical places. A lot of memories good and bad can happen in one specific physical place, but never do I find myself giving up, resigning that place to where bad things happen, that alcove of trees I always know good times will be had there despite if the last memory may be bad (my last one though is of a summer bbq!). Yet I’ve realised we don’t always look at our lives this way.
Sometimes we look at life very bleakly, and we don’t accept that good times will come again sometimes we just focus on the bad time we are having right here and right now in that ‘place’ in our life. Yet we need to look at it more like how we think of these actual places of comfort in our lives, that though bad times sometimes swoop in and take over and fill that space, its only for a time and you can rest assured on the promise that good times will be had there once again.
A place like this filled to the brim with memories, both good and sad is somewhere you can always return to. Even though I know in a year or so I will be off at University and then living somewhere else that spot is somewhere that reminds me to remember things will always be ok. With life sometimes we can think the bad times will last forever, yet with places like here I know that there will always be new memories to be made there, always new experiences to be had. And I realise I need to have this philosophy with my life, always expectant of the bad times to roll right back into good ones, in anticipation of great memories soon to be made.
But what do you think?
Where’s your ‘comfort’ place?
Do you think of life as a place of promise of things to come?
ANDYS BEAT! 