We learn how to live our lives, following, whether we want it or not, the echoes of what we learned in our childhoods. Hoods. Like coverings which deny our looking out. This is normal. However, as we age in wisdom and, hopefully, with a measure or a deal of independent thought, we might lift those hoods and slip into an (heretofore unknown) crevice, an in-between. It’s a weird thing, that slip, that fall, and it can happen anywhere and at anytime, particularly when we think we know who the heck we are. Especially then. It’s as if my clothes don’t fit. As if the chair upon which my butt is perched is, all of a sudden, the wrong shape. As if I suddenly want to run from this place and into the new understanding of me, but don’t, because I am half way through a starter and the running might make me look weird and deranged. After all, only I know what just happened, how what someone said connected with me like a dart to my heart, literally. All this occurs in complete silence, even though an entire planetary explosion has just shot me from whom I thought I was, right out into space without oxygen, no space suit, no map.

In such an in-between, I am inadequately dressed. My shoes are not for climbing out of this deep and rocky divide in the land I thought I knew so well. It’s cold and I have no answers. But, but, I can still see the sky. I can still hear the swash-slap of ocean whack against the rocks I do know. And I know that this sudden realisation is going to be my pal on the road. I just know it. Oh, I could, and many would, flap the whole thing away and find a way back to what……reality tv, the projectile misery of the daily news, the poison and the lies of social media; a comfortable landing; what happened was just a thing; a No Thing; the thing that clicked with me there, really halted me in the everything of my life, meant nothing, it’s nothing, I’m fine.

Thankfully, I am not one to not notice such a spontaneous and unexplainable crevice fall. In fact, I invite and welcome one, because life is not a straight line, nor is it a following of old echoes, of parental control, of school experience, of hurts and damage and disappointments. Life is lived from Day One no matter what age nor stage. I ask myself this. Who do I want to be? What do I want to achieve? When will I finally like myself? Why not now?

The in-betweens will come. They always do. I’ll leave that with you.