And so, we enter this New Year, where this series of short blogs will develop into something more for To Tell the Twins. For this last piece of 2025, I’ll yap about something that has only made itself apparent to me recently, in its most gentlest form, and kind of just in time.
I’ve always thought about what is yet to come and how I’ll achieve it, but more than that, how I’ll even get there in the first place given where I am now. And it saddens me how overwhelmed I become when I place all the expectation on myself to find the means to make it all happen.
I’ll find it in my living, not my longing.
My longing is a stone castle with archers at the battlements. From here, they strike my legs, my head, my chest as I trek across the moors, all just to get a glimpse over those walls. My every step forward proves an arrow to the thigh and an arrow to the lung, jutting me back a step so my progress is non-existent.
So, there I am in my approach towards the castle, weak and punctured; if I ever did make it a step closer, I’d still have to climb that wall as now the easiest target. And the archers are bloodthirsty.
In my determination to see the entirety of my longing, just beyond the walls, after I rip out the arrows, I realise which direction the arrows had always been pointing – back to the vastness of the moors.
My longing reigns over me with cruel kindness because that stab at my lung, and my thigh and everywhere else is a reminder of what I should not do – and that is spend my life wishing for something instead of letting it come to me in its own time. To put it bluntly, when you work away quietly, things seem to find you. It is especially when you are not looking that the most human things seem to surprise you.
The depth of your friendships, the warmth of your success, the click of a brilliant day, that forgotten feeling of love, the twinkle of eyes meeting yours and that unprecedented kindness – all of that wouldn’t have had you so surprised if you had gone out to seek it in the first place.
You have to fill your life with things that revolve around you having the best possible time, at every moment, that is your purpose. Though sometimes you have to sit down and plan exactly what you want and then sit with the fact it may all go wrong – and be prepared to live rather than wish you were.
Take out the arrows and see which way they’re pointing you. The archers may be bloodthirsty, but they are also kind – unprecedentedly so.