Timing

Almost one year ago, I made the move back to Norway, and it feels quite absurd how fast time has gone by. I arrived here on April 1st, and somehow, I’m only a few months away from reaching that one-year mark. A year ago, I couldn’t really imagine what my life here would look like. I didn’t even know what the next few months would bring, let alone thinking five years ahead.

Well, today’s journal is just about that: timing.

It’s quite odd to say this, but I feel like my life only really started in my 30s. Everything before this almost felt like a tutorial of some sort. Figuring out who I am, what I am, what I’m capable of, what I’m not capable of. Testing things, making mistakes, choosing the wrong things, sometimes choosing the right things without even knowing why.

And perhaps that’s what the tutorial was for. Because now, I feel like I finally get to play the character that I was given. Before, it felt like I was playing some blurred version of myself, pressing random buttons trying to figure out what each ability did. Oh, so I can do this. Apparently I’m quite bad at that. Hmm, this seems to come naturally. Eventually, you start to understand the character a little bit better.

But the funny thing is, knowing your character doesn’t mean the game is over. It actually means the game just began.

What Do I Do With What I Am?

Now that I understand myself a little bit better, there comes another question: what do I actually do with all of this?

Suppose I was a druid of some sort, someone who is deeply connected to nature and was given the ability to heal. Well, do I just walk around healing everything that is injured? Who am I supposed to heal? And how would I even know? How do I make the judgment between something that needs my help, and something that perhaps needs to be left alone?

Maybe a wound needs healing. Or perhaps the wound itself is part of the healing. I don’t really know.

These are some of the questions that run through my mind lately, and I suppose I don’t need to know all of the answers just yet. Perhaps that’s what the journey through my 30s is for.

In other words, I’m starting to know my strengths and weaknesses. I’m starting to understand what I was given. But then the question simply falls back onto me: What do I want to do with it?

And strangely enough, that might be a much harder question than figuring out who I am. Because knowing yourself is one thing. Knowing where to place yourself is another.

But I think knowing how I want to impact the world, even in some small way, gives me something to navigate towards. A north star of some sort. Not necessarily a destination, but perhaps just something in the distance that tells me, keep going this way.

The Birds

From time to time, I watch birds flying through the skies. There are these moments where they seem to glide in almost complete stillness. Their wings barely move, and somehow they remain there, floating in the air as if gravity had forgotten about them for a moment.

Of course, gravity didn’t disappear. The bird simply found a pocket of rising air. The air rises from below, gravity pulls from above, and somewhere between these two forces the bird finds this little pocket of harmony where it doesn’t really need to do much at all. It just opens its wings.

And I’ve thought perhaps there’s something quite beautiful about that.

The bird doesn’t have to learn how to become a bird. It doesn’t look down at the rabbit wondering whether it should be running instead. Nor does it look at the fish and question why it cannot swim beneath the water. It simply uses what it was given: its wings, its eyes, its instincts, the wind. Everything that makes the bird a bird.

And perhaps embracing ourselves is something similar.

Everywhere I look in nature, things seem to become exactly what they are. Trees become trees. Birds become birds. Rivers become rivers. There seems to be no embarrassment about it, nor any desire to become something else.

Yet somehow, human beings were given this strange ability to do otherwise. We can spend an entire lifetime trying to become something we were never really made to be.

Perhaps that’s why these past few years have felt like a beginning for me. I’m not necessarily becoming someone new. Maybe I’m just finally learning how to use what was already there.

And perhaps, like the bird, there will be moments where I don’t need to flap my wings so hard. Maybe I just need to understand what kind of wings I was given, pay attention to the wind, and find the right place to open them.

Until next time friends, be kind to your self.