Nothing is permanent in all the world.
All things are fluent; every image forms,
Wandering through change.
– ‘Renewal’, by Ovid
The city opens the door to a change in seasons. I swim and the scent of back-burning smoke hangs heavy across warm saltwater. A peachy pink light swoons out across the sky. Summer is passing, letting go.
The sun tilts over and begins to set into autumn. There are long, amber stretches of it sprawling across Hyde Park as I head home. It’s beautiful, this light, at this time of day. Day tipping into night. A fluffy dog walks by, lifted onto its owner’s shoulders and the orange turn of light makes its brown fur shine.
A friend and I maintain the ritual of a midweek morning swim in the sea. There’s one week where I skip it, believing my schedule to be too hectic to squeeze it in. In some ways, it is a relief to give myself a little extra breathing room. And yet I quickly notice the lack of it. I can feel my body’s craving for it.
I’ve become better at waking up for it, even now when it means leaving the house in the dark. Better at getting into the water, though my friend might disagree. Better at swimming, even when waves surge. Better at looking at what exists beneath the waves and no longer flinching.
It started when a friend told me to borrow his goggles to see the octopus crawling across the bottom of an ocean pool. I was hesitant. I persisted. It was strange and wondrous, this whole hidden world that I’d spent so much time avoiding looking at, thinking about, not wanting to know about despite swimming at the edges of it.
It’s changed my relationship with the water. I watch the churn and sway of seaweed. Admire the fish darting by. This has been a summer of seeing rays gliding by and a starfish clinging steadfastly to a wall. I’ve felt the tingle of a jellyfish across my skin. I’ve felt afraid, at times. But I’ve swum with friends by my side and have been made to feel far braver than if I were swimming alone.
Autumn drops into the city with force on the morning of the equinox. I dig through my wardrobe for an outer layer. My fingertips feel an unfamiliar chill on the way to work.
The weather changes and I change. A weight lifts off my shoulders.
There’s another Friday spent driving to enjoy fish and chips by a beach for dinner. I like this, the increasing habit of this. It makes it feel like I’m on holiday. This gentle reminder — still, now, as the years build and grow and begin to collect in a pile — of why I returned to Sydney. Of why I’m still here. It’s been years and years now. Shocking when I have to count and the answer of ‘two and a half years’ takes me by surprise.
We drive over the Harbour Bridge not long after sunrise. Swim in a harbour pool, enjoying the silky water flowing over and around us. We eat hot cross buns as the sun continues its ascent. It’s good, this. We need more of this. Less rush, more ease. Less late nights, more early mornings. We pledge to keep swimming as the temperature drops, as the water begins to cool, as the darkness creeps in and motivation becomes harder to find amongst it all.
I’ve barely read all year. I forced myself into the cinema last weekend, sitting myself down as the lights began to dim. So much of what I normally enjoy has fallen to the wayside in the rush of the year.
It’s so easy to prioritise the things we think matter. To think that doing more of them will take away the stress, not add to it. That doing more will make it easier in the long run. I’m still looking for a more permanent home, a search that feels as if it’s taken hostage of my day to day. Every waking moment, it hovers there, at the back of my mind.
At times, positive change feels tantalisingly close. At others, impossibly far away.
I’ve begun to once again carve out space and time for calls with friends back in London. We catch up on each other’s lives. Laugh at the strange similarities in our situations despite the space. I feel such a sense of relief at being able to keep these dear friendships going.
Someone I talk to reminds me over and over of the huge role luck plays in life. It’s easy to think we can work harder, work longer, and do more to create change. Easy to forget it’s so often entirely out of our hands.
My mother begins to clean out the great gathering of items that have built up over time in my grandparent’s house. It’s soon to be sold. Another family home – the third in three years.
It’s strange, this. The fleetingness of it. The great ephemerality at the end of the day. These buildings that felt so sturdy as children, great lumps of brick holding the stuff of life between their walls, and then the years accumulate and soon it’s all gone. The connections we think we have to places and spaces and memories made are increasingly lost the more time passes.
I collect a bag of my mother’s belongings that didn’t fit in her suitcase and take them home. A friend joins me and I give a tour. It’s strange, a great emptiness. I find it hard to convey what it once was like. It’s hard to picture my younger self, feet dangling from the lumpy green piano stool, trying my best to practise scales and turn them into songs. Hard to picture New Year’s Day dinners, eating at the table as the setting sun beamed through the blinds of the front lounge room. Hard to picture joining the pull-down, makeshift breakfast table and watching in awe as the mask on the mug turned from brown to white while the tea brewed. How small I once was. How big everything felt.
There are glimpses of my grandparents’ lives still present despite the great clearing. The barometer by the front door speaks of my grandfather’s profession. The slender bookcases he lovingly made to fit between and on top of other bookcases. The whole sunroom addition and garage at the end of the garden that he helped to build.
Soon, these too will be gone.
The leaves begin to change colour and turn, despite the lingering of the summer heat, the continuation of summer dresses and sandals worn to work.
Autumn is creeping in, encroaching, shortening our days.
It’s time to let go. Hold true to the natural notions of rebirth and renewal. Trust that nature knows best.
That it will all work out. That it will always, somehow, work out.
Very enjoyable especially the house clearing experience resonates with clearing out my own grandfathers "time machine" seemed Like life stopped 40 years previously when my grandmother had passed.