it's raining softly, London Calling

The rain has stopped. For now anyway. I looked out my office window at much the same view yesterday. The tips of orange on the green leaves aren’t doing much to brighten the wet, gray landscape. And yet… sigh… such a view makes me happy. And sad. And long for a similar sensation of damp colorless urban air.

There has been much reflection this week, and no doubt yet to come, of the world ten years ago. So maybe it isn’t strange this bittersweet appreciation of a rainy landscape makes me sigh. I was in England that day. And that day was ten years ago.

Somehow adding a second digit to an anniversary makes it more… significant. Profound. Necessary to reflect. And maybe that’s why I pause at the gloomy air. And no, I’m not really reflecting on that ominous day so much… but more on how it altered the path for the days that came after.

I went to London with every intention of staying there indefinitely. I had my heart set on a career and a life that I would begin that fall of 2001. Only… the focus shifted as the world recalibrated. I still had a fantastic autumn and early winter there… perhaps one of the few times of my life I managed to live every moment as close to vivid as I possibly could – a mantra I have often wished I could find again but never have.

And yet, life is so crammed full of things right now .  Just not crammed full of satisfaction with them. Some are great and wonderful and make me happy. Some have just developed into huge time sucks to which I find myself inextricably committed. None of them are something I imagined would be the activities of my life when I stepped on a plane to hop the pond ten years ago.

Except… I published a book. I made myself a writer. I was creating storylines every time I took one of my random city walks through the ivy covered paths of Hampstead Heath or stumbling on the grave of a couple killed during the Blitz. I found stories there and stored them in my memory for future manuscripts… but not for anyone to read.  Because even then… even when I was there to study a course in English and work in film, I was terrified to have any one soul look at my writing. I wrote all the day long in my journal. I wrote emails to friends on a daily basis. But… I never thought that I was good enough to be entertaining to a reader of my fiction.

It’s something to contemplate, with all the other things that happened or failed to happen in the last decade. I don’t really attribute any of those choices to the other significant anniversary… except that it did prompt me to take a different path.

I look again out the office window and the rain is falling softly. The best kind of rain. The rain that is a given on any day in England. That is just so ordinary that it is acceptable to have it touch one’s hair and skin without complaint. 

I hear London calling. It’s time for our ten year reunion.