I threw my oversized hood up over my head at ten to eleven this morning and shuffled out the door. Peeping out from under the hood I dodged the endless rain and jumped over the torrents running down the hills of central Brighton. Decaf latte with soya milk in hand (I am now officially a Brightonite), I threw my rain soaked jacket to the meeting room floor and embarked on a two-hour discussion with nine other coaches about life… and death.
I came away with two realisations; the first is that one day, I am going to die.
Woah.
I’ve spent much of my life so far ignoring the fact and whilst I don’t want to dwell on it I think there is something beautiful in the realisation that it is in-fact going to happen. I am not immortal and I don’t have all the time in the world. Whilst that doesn’t mean I want to ‘do everything now’ it does mean there is no point in waiting – what am I actually waiting for? There is no right time, there is only now, I want to embrace that, live now, not next year, not next month but now. I want to make choices that impact me now, because essentially that’s all I know. I don’t know what’s around the corner. I don’t want to look back on my life and think wow, I spent a lot of time living in the future and missing out on what was right in front of me.
The second realisation is that after death comes a new beginning. Not necessarily always the death of a person or a living being, but perhaps the death of an idea or a relationship or a belief about myself. I guess what I’m trying to say is that when we let go of one thing, something else has the space to show itself more fully in our lives. There is beauty in things passing and there is beauty in new things appearing.
Big stuff I know. But as I braced myself to leave this mind and heart opening conversation and head back out into the treachery outside, I was reminded of what I’d just learnt as the rain had subsided and I had to shelter my eyes from the brightness. Space had been made for this particularly beautiful new beginning, and I appreciated what was right in front of me in that moment.
