Swings and Roundabouts

In the clear summers night of mid July, when the stars were shining through and brightening up the London sky, and the moon in all its half glory echoed amongst them, I got to wondering (as normal) about life. How the choices we make may decide the very fate we are heading to. Are we suppressing ourselves by not creating opportunities? And are others suppressing us? If so, How do we confront these suppressions and excel? Can we break free? And if we do what knowledge do we have that we’ll be caught on the other side? If life is really just a set of swings and roundabouts, what changed? When did the swings and roundabouts we used to love as kids, in which we saw no danger, become dangerous? We have to wonder when did it all get so serious?

Remember the days in the playground, when you would be told to be careful or slow down, and all you wanted to do is go higher or faster. Is this where all the fun went? Did we start getting boring because we started listening? Undeniably, there were times when we should have listened and didn’t, but no doubt there were times when we listened, and wished we hadn’t. But when was it that other people’s judgments started being important. Sometimes we need to refocus our efforts. Sometimes we need to come to our own conclusions and find out for ourselves why it is we shouldn’t do ‘it’.

Decisions come more and more every year. And yet inside ourselves we are always facing one on our own. A difficult one. Something that maybe we can never fully answer. Maybe we can never fully decide. Some decisions mean losing too much, and it is these decision that pain us. Because even if our heart tells us the answer, our minds can’t face the music and swing. But why is it that when you decide to take one answer that the heart doesn’t believe in, it won’t give up until you pick the other. Why when your at a roundabout, and you’ve picked your destination, does the road become shut? Yes the other two routes may lead us there in the end, but on a longer journey, one of fears and tears. A journey where the baggage is light, not because you dropped it, but because it dropped you. Is it fair that such a small decision should change our lives so dramatically?

So what is getting us down? As a nation, a city? Is it really the money, the job, the friends, the relationship? Which of these is our real pain? It could be any one. Or maybe a mixture of them all. But all of these things make up who we are. Its what we do, what we buy, who we see, how we laugh. So basically its us. Are we just getting ourselves down. By not doing anything but think, are we thinking ourselves so deep that we will soon drown? Should we instead get out of the thought process and get into the action? Should we jump out of the net and into the ocean, we should.

Putting it off will just continue to hurt us. If our lives are boring, it is our own fault. We brought ourselves here, so we should take ourselves back again. When we were young, we cut our leg, grazed our arm, we fell down. And the tears may have come as an automatic reaction but what was the lead-time on our recovery? Minutes? Seconds even? We may have fell down in life but we got back up, we didn’t think about it, we didn’t make it something it wasn’t, we had no reason to. And why should we now? When we fall down, we should take as much time as we did when we were 6 recovering, wipe the tears, stick on a plaster and carry on. Because life is a load of swings and roundabouts, and they keep getting higher, and they keep getting faster. And that’s as serious as it should get.