19 August 2020 — GOING BACK

Sometimes, after a long time of doing the same thing like going to the same cafe and feeling that the staff and the customers are like family, the cafe closes for refurbishment. This has been my experience and now after a longish period of 5 to 6 months the said cafe has reopened.

And my expectations are running wild! Will it feel the same as before? Will the regular customers return? Will it be the same staff? And even if the same customers and the same staff do return will they have changed?

‘GOING BACK’ seems safe and comforting to my rational mind but in my heart I am aware that ’things’ will not be exactly the same and if they are this might not necessarily be a good thing as hopefully I have changed and grown in the interim and am unlikely to respond in exactly the same way to the old.

I have two choices to accept things as they are and to build a new beginning, OR, to feel discontented and wish that things had stayed the same, if indeed, I discover things have changed.

My life experience has taught me that ‘going back’ is a fallacy in the sense that we go back only to the same conditions and circumstances. There is a sense in which we can never go back emotionally as hopefully we will have changed and grown emotionally and embraced our new circumstances whilst that old part of our life has been ‘put to bed’ as it were.

We can only GO BACK physically and only enjoy ‘GOING BACK’ if we do not expect everything to be exactly the same as before. If, we do not expect the situation to fulfil us emotionally in the same way.