Waiting

There’s a saying that having less of something only makes you want it more. Here is the life you imagine, the life you want. And here is the life you get.

Here you lie wondering about waking up in a different time, a different place. Here you are, waking up in your own bed instead. It’s like you’re dreaming in third person. You’re the audience to your own movie, and you dream of paradise or togetherness, of purpose and excitement, and of coming home.

Oscar Wilde once said, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” You are looking. The stars are coming from one of those galaxy light projectors, so that you have the whole universe at your fingertips, and on your ceiling. And the gutter is where you live, or at least you see it as such, because it’s not where you want to be.

When you examine paintings a little too closely, you notice the paint chips and pencil marks. And those cracks in your painting make you wonder. You are the caged bird that sings, because you remember the sky and how you felt when it carried you. It makes you think of sailors who heard the sirens’ calls, who followed their voices blindly into the depths of the sea: we are all longing for something.

But dreams don’t materialise overnight. They merge slowly with reality, until you’re living at least part of the life that you have always desired.

See, after swimming for many years, turtles eventually find their way back to the beach where they were born. They sense the Earth’s magnetic field, and feel the pull of home. They go to it, like a tide returning to sea at last.