I want to begin to appreciate more the little pockets of freedom in my life. I forget how lucky I am all the time, and my grim thoughts are sometimes too cloudy for me to enjoy life. But as I said, little pockets of freedom are there to be found and recovered and they can really help you put things in perspective.
I volunteer for four hours every Friday at a local second hand warehouse that will soon become a charity – Shabitat, the home of Magpie Recycling Coop. I want to find out more about how they process and recycle the stuff they pick up from households in and around Brighton. Trash is really important in our lives and we should become much more familiar with it. We should start as early as possible, and by that I don’t mean memorising which bin colours are for what type of waste. It makes kids think that once the trash is taken out, it is no longer our responsibility. But it is! We created it and we have to make sure it doesn’t poison the planet or people. You don’t want to live in a toxic environment, do you? Then don’t help to make other people’s environments toxic.
This went off on a tangent, but what I meant to say is that I’ve been feeling under pressure as to what I should do after my Masters and questioning whether doing the course I’m currently doing here in Brighton was the best idea. Surely, you can never compare ‘good’ with ‘the best’, and there’s no right or wrong so you can’t compare anything with ‘right’ because ‘right’ doesn’t exist. Or does it? Maybe it’s just that everything’s right and nothing’s wrong. I can’t see it being the other way round any helpful for the state of humanity it is in now, as it seems the spirits are rather low across generations and geographical locations.
Tangent, again. What I meant to say is literally in the title. I forgot that I am free, and I have my undergraduate degree now, and it’s a First Class one from one of the top universities in the world, and top universities for my subject (which is geography), and I shouldn’t be worried about anything. I spent five years doing my undergraduate and I did it thoroughly, I dare say. I did do an entire year remotely, including the whole of my dissertation, but that was actually way better than I expected. I felt happy and whole because I had access to all the people and hobbies and places I really needed. I got involved with something I really care about and reconnected with my old place, which is my hometown.
Now I’m outside of my hometown again, and outside of my home country, and it’s a new place rather than the Edinburgh to which I had been connected for the last five years, and it feels strange, obviously. I’ve not been doing as much work as I thought I’d be doing at this point, but a few things stood in my way. I’ll have to get down to my assignments pretty soon though, as they’re due in just a bit over a month.
But I am free! after all. I can do whatever the hell I want next year, and it’s me who decides where I go. Duh. It’s easy to forget that, at least for me, but I suppose practice makes better.
kotersey 