Changes

As the bus trundled slowly towards St Pancras station, a million thoughts pulsed in and out of my mind like a beating heart. It’s funny how one memory leads to another, to another, to another. This snowball of recollection was brought about by being minutes away from a reunion with an old school friend who I hadn’t seen in a while -‘a while’ actually being a decade and a half but who’s counting?

My initial thought was that I wouldn’t recognise her face in the crowded coffee shop filled with people taking refuge from the hammering February rain. How had we both changed? Were we completely different people or still fundamentally the same? Would she even recognise me walking in now with my sodden jacket and dripping hair? I thought about how we vowed to always be friends no matter what...

We all have so many incarnations in a lifetime that sometimes we don’t see the changes happening right in front of our very eyes. Just as every single cell in our body regenerates, the same is true with our experiences, good and bad. Life has a habit of throwing things at us and we all deal with challenges differently. I am not ashamed to admit that sometimes the choices I make are flawed but never the less, make me the man I am today.

We can’t stay the same. It is the nature of being. Everything changes and everything grows whether we like it or not.

I guess the secret is in the acquiescence of that. Rather than fighting the metamorphosis we can accept that it will happen anyway and make a conscious decision to fashion ourselves into the person we want to become.

And yes, she did recognise me.