(Photo: Montée de la Grande Côte, Lyon France)
' The First Day of the Rest of your Life'...
Because evidently there is a day when you feel that everything changes, and that what you do from that moment on will alter and infer with the course your life takes. I do not think there is an age for this day, it's simply a moment in which you finally feel the responsibility of living fall on your shoulders with all its weight. To keep on the metaphor...I would say that it takes a while for you to get used to the new weight; you shift, you try to accommodate yourself to it and the hardest part is always when you wonder if you are going to be strong enough to keep it up.
And then, comes the waking up every morning, the days in which you look at yourself in the mirror and you think 'I can do this,' you assure yourself and you go along through the day...and then, there's the morning when you are awaken but unable to move due to the weight. It seems heavier this morning and thus you ask yourself once more..'I am going to make it?' There is an awkward shifting, rolling around, probably some sighing as you get some air in and out of your lungs...the doubt seem to press physically onto you and it pins you to the bed. The very action of setting your feet on the floor indicates that you will have to move, to act, to do.
Doing was the worst part. It is when you do not know what it is you want to do, when you do not know what it is you should do. I remember I would go to sleep wishing the morning would not come, or would take a long time to arrive...so that I would have time to consider my options, the possibilities and as always the consequences.
All these thoughts seem out of context and probably do not make sense...the story behind them is too long to tell, but I reckon that eventually I will. For now, I will just focus on the moment in which I found myself struggling between decisions and possibilities, the days when waking up seemed to be the worse thing...and I felt time passing me by, waving at me and reminding me that it was not stopping for me, that the days were still going to come one after the other.
Finally, a decision was made, I jumped on a plane and found myself on the other side of the world yet again, away from my family and friends. Away from what had meant to be the new future for me, suddenly I felt that I had completely changed the course of things and that my life had turned to a page that I never thought would have never been part of the story. Suddenly I found myself face to face with a different world and in a completely different situation and at this point I realised that the future, the following years depend on what I am capable of doing right now.
Evidently, that has now brought me to consider my own self-worth, my abilities and now every morning I wake up, stare at the ceiling, look at the person beside me and wonder if I am good enough for this. I know for a fact that I am not the only person who asks herself this genre of questions, we all do it, more often that we would like...but uncertainty plays a big role on our lives, whether we like it or not.
Thus the first day of the rest of my life started with me in a different country, with different people and with different challenges. It started with me looking at myself on the mirror and ensuring myself that I had made the right choice and now all that was left to do was to take a step forward and move on through the way I had chosen. It has been a little more that two months after this day...I still wonder about how things would have been if, I still question myself...
The thing is that when you open your eyes and you wake up to this day, you become aware of the fact that the world is right in front of you, the choices you have made have brought you to this decisive moment in which you either move forward or you let life pass you by day by day.
It puts things into perspective...I considered my options, the consequences...accepted them and took a step forward.
Here I am, walking my way through life, one day at a time.
