I realised today that I don’t often tell you where I am.
Not physically. Just in life. Somewhere along the way this page became full of thoughts, conversations and questions. I kept writing, but I quietly stopped talking about where those words were coming from.
The truth is, I don’t really know where I am anymore. Not because I’m lost, but because life doesn’t look anything like I imagined it would.
Most mornings begin the same way. I make a coffee, sit down with my diary and look at the week ahead. The coffee usually goes cold before I remember it’s there.
I still buy a paper diary every year. I don’t really know why. Maybe because I like the feeling of turning to a blank page. Maybe because some small part of me still hopes that this will be the year it fills with ordinary things.
Instead, before the ink has even had chance to dry, the pages begin to fill. Meetings move. Contact changes. Appointments appear. Reviews are booked. Reports arrive. Phone calls need returning. New dates replace old ones, and somewhere between all of that, another week quietly disappears.
Sometimes it feels as though the diary belongs to everyone else more than it belongs to us.
Every now and then I find myself wondering what it must feel like to wake up and have absolutely nothing planned. To decide, over breakfast, to drive to the beach because the sun is shining. To spend an afternoon wandering without watching the clock. To make plans simply because you want to, not because you’re trying to fit life around everything that has already been decided.
I don’t know if people realise how much freedom there is in something as ordinary as that.
When all of this first began, I genuinely believed there would be an ending. I thought there would come a day when someone would smile and say, “You’re through it now.” I imagined life slowly settling back into something familiar.
It doesn’t seem to work like that.
Instead, life carries on around you.
Birthdays still come and go. The seasons change. Children grow older. Years quietly pass. Before you even notice, the life that once felt temporary has somehow become your normal.
Some days I honestly believe we’re moving forwards.
Other days it feels as though we’re standing exactly where we were, only the date in the top corner of the paperwork has changed.
I think that’s the part I struggle to explain.
It’s not just the waiting.
It’s not even the uncertainty.
It’s how easily extraordinary circumstances become ordinary life.
How the coffee going cold no longer surprises you.
How another meeting finds its place in the diary without you even thinking about it.
How you stop noticing that your weeks are being planned around things you never expected to become part of your life.
You adapt because you have to.
You carry on because there isn’t another choice.
And somehow, in the middle of all of it, you try to protect the ordinary moments that are left. A laugh over dinner. A walk. A quiet cup of tea. A conversation that has nothing to do with reports or meetings or what comes next.
Those moments matter more than they ever used to.
Maybe that’s what this season has taught me more than anything.
Not to stop hoping for change.
But not to wait for life to begin again before noticing the good that’s already here.
I don’t have a neat ending for this.
Real life rarely gives us one.
I just know that one day I’d like to open a brand-new diary and, instead of wondering what the week is going to ask of us, wonder where we’d like to go.
I think that would feel wonderfully ordinary.
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