A lot of my beliefs and opinions have been rather malleable throughout my life. I don't know what it is more of - openness of the mind - or weakness in personality. Growing up, I always believed it was the latter. I felt that people needed to have black and white opinions to be bold and confident, and I almost hated that I didn't have that in me. However, as a young adult now, I have come to whole-heartedly accept my personality as it is. How I am has made it easy for me to be friends with a lot of people who have different ways of looking at the world, and that has allowed me to have a very vivid, albeit sometimes a confusing or complicated, worldview.
Amid all my malleable beliefs and opinions though, there are a few things that I have come to accept as what I can only think of describing as higher truths; things that make me feel grounded and at ease, things that basically feel right. One of these higher truths for me is how things take their own time to happen, possibly because the universe wants for you to experience them in the most enriched way there can be; if you are working towards getting something, and it is taking time, it may be because your life hasn't yet taken certain turns. Be it meeting the right people or being in the best state of mind, these events need to happen for you to finally be in the most receptive state to accept what you want. Slowly assimilating this way of thinking has been causing a gradual transfiguration in my attitude towards stimuli that both, arise from my inside, and are from things on the outside.
The things that you want, don't always have to be the most dramatic in nature. Sometimes, they are as simple as wanting to look at a sky full of stars and be able to recognise constellations. Every night, I saw almost all of Orion from where I grew up, thinking that it was probably a scorpion since that is what its brightest stars made it look like from behind a smokescreen of clouds and pollution. Whilst I would have loved to see more, it wasn't a thing that I strived for in life; I didn't push myself around to be able to do it. In fact, the notion of pushing oneself around for something as simple, albeit rather inaccessible today, might sound ridiculous, but in the grand scheme of things, so does it for anything at all. More on that some time else.
So a few days ago, 7500 miles away from home, as I walked down the streets of Portree with the love of my life, still struggling to absorb where I was, how happy I was, and how cold I was, I didn't know that we were about to experience the most beautiful version of something that we had both always desired to do. In a dark patch away from streetlights, when we looked towards the sky, we witnessed, as if from behind black hazy curtains slowly being drawn, the emergence of the translucent smoke of the Milky Way. For the first time in my life, I felt an admiration for the cosmos that was unadulterated by the fear of the unknown. As minutes turned to hours, we looked for planets, and connected stars to identify constellations, and as any modern story would have it, we did it with the help of a mobile app (Stellarium, if you're interested). Hand-in-hand, radiating one's happiness while absorbing the other's, we exclaimed when we saw stars aligned to form a Lion or the Gemini, and joked about how constellations finally made sense and how people in the ancient times were simultaneously smart and jobless enough to make them in the first place.
Thinking about that night, I understand why something seemingly simple, like being able to look at shapes in the stars, took me almost 25 years of my life to do, and why it could be a good thing that it did - and so when things don't seem to fall in place, I try to remind myself to be just a little more patient everyday, for I know in my heart that the wait will probably be worth it. And as I almost turn 25, I can only feel uncertainty and my fear thereof, metamorphosing very slowly and subtly, into waves of possibilities.
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