Temporary

As the saying “this too shall pass”, temporary situations are always easier to endure because I know they won’t last.

At first, I told myself that school was just a step, limited in time. Temporary. Then, I told myself the same about university, attic rooms, internships, first jobs. Then job in general. For my relationships too.

It is no big deal if we don’t really match, we’re only seventeen anyway, he’s probably not the one. It’s temporary.

Every time I started dating someone, I was already anticipating the end. I knew that all of this was temporary, and I’ve lived every relationship like a movie, a role, a game. Since, anyway, it could only be temporary.

But time goes by, situations succeed each other, pile up, and one day here I am, almost thirty with the impression of running in circles, comforted by permanency of things, scared to see I haven’t accomplished anything.

The problem, truly, is that we are all confronted with each other’s situations, and even if the goal is not to compare ourselves, we do it anyway. It is like a reflex. We cannot help checking if the grass is greener elsewhere.

My friends get married, buy houses with their partners, evolve, grow up. And here I am, newly arrived in a shared house of thirteen people as if I was twenty again, without a single project in hands, alone with myself and my unfinished ideas, some not even begun. Because I was too busy in temporary situations, I’ve put aside my dreams which could have been permanent, and I’ve let pretty flowers die because I didn’t water my own garden.

But maybe being lost too, is temporary.

Perhaps, one day I am going to fall on my head and wake up yelling Eureka. Perhaps that at some point, I am going to stop having the feeling of pushing away the deadline by going from temp situation to temp situation, always walking a bit straying away from my path. Perhaps hesitations, wandering and bad choices are also temporary.

If we push the idea even deeper, life itself is temporary. Everything is temporary. Temporary, temporary. I repeat that word on a loop as I feel it holds the salvation I am looking for, without truly yet understanding the blessing of the impermanency of things. 

Despite being sometimes unpleasant, temporary situations are somehow comforting. I accommodate better to uncomfortable situations when I know they are not going to last. Suddenly, sleeping over at someone’s place become more comfortable than sleeping at mine. Having my own place, even, becomes frightening. As if being in motion was the only way for me not to panic. Being in motion is being constantly in non-lasting situations. In that sense, putting myself in motion might be the smartest choice for me.

Taking off, sneaking out, pinching my entire life in a bag, and starting to walk. Going to bed in a different place every night, seeing a different landscape every day. Stop believing my life passed me by, because I don’t have a boyfriend, or a flat, or a baby or just a plan. Accepting that, despite my mates, my path has not a rock alike, not two identical trees, because it is sometimes hot, sometimes cold, the weather changing along my constantly moving progression, different, unpredictable.

We can’t build anything on shifting soil. But I have to stop believing it is a bad thing. There was a time human were nomads. I like to think I am one too, and once my heart will stop being afraid of this, I will know how to walk, to run, to fly without looking back, without a single regret, and take the path life wants me to go on to.  

Perhaps this is my life model. Perhaps I don’t have to shape myself in a sedentary and standardized schema and have an adventure as valuable as others’. Perhaps it is no big deal not to have my own house, or property investments, or career. These scenarios bring with them stability and safety of a long-term project, the certainty of being rooted somewhere when I don’t root anywhere except to myself. Perhaps my life will be a long succession of temporary situations, short stories I loved to live, nourishing a book full of chapters, that will never be too long to be boring.