To Be Away

Disclaimer: this post was written whilst listening to a playlist of the same title.

“I don’t even remember the season. I just remember walking between them and feeling for the first time that I belonged somewhere.”

– stephen chbosky – The perks of being a wallflower.

As we enter a New Year and, what I’d consider, a new era of culture, music and style of living, we question ourselves again. What is it to truly escape and FEEL?

The feeling of being alive. Of throwing your arms up and shouting meaningless words to the breeze or jumping into freezing ocean water after a sunset.

Maybe its finishing a book or starting one. Or listening to music that matches your mood so perfectly that you start to dance down a street without a care if anyone sees you.

That’s the kind of feeling I’m gasping to find in the new year.

Throughout lockdown, quarantine and a general shut-down of world movement, I’ve found a stagnancy I never wanted to experience. The kind where you find yourself doing meaningless tasks, sat for hours on end in front of the TV or discovering that a lack of motivation is a frustrating as walking all the way to the Post Office with 5 large parcels and finding that it closed 15 minutes ago.

So I’ve vowed to keep searching for the feeling of “being away” more and more as January 1st approached. Realising more than ever that I want to dream as well as live in the moment when some extraordinary experience happens along.

It could be listening to some film score music while sat on a mountaintop with the wind all around, pondering the meaning of life or running full tilt down a mossy hill with the exhilaration that at any moment you could slip.

It could be walking through the streets of a small Bavarian town with colourful shuttered houses surrounding you with the sounds and smells of the bakeries opening for the morning or hugging someone after being apart for a long time.

Whatever gives you the sense of “being away”; it’s a feeling that’s worth chasing.

It’s knowing you are in a unique moment that won’t ever come again but you know that you’ll hold onto the feeling of being inside it long after it’s over until you can find it again somewhere else.

In short: To be away: (wanting to go back to those moments).

Away from reality, from melancholy, from pain and from responsibility.

This doesn’t mean that these things don’t exist. However, it helps to emphasise how incredible the feeling of being away truly is, in balance to the negatives of life.

Being awake before everyone else, to wake up to the sunrise.

Being the first off of a plane.

Being stood in the middle of a bustling crowd and simply standing still and observing.

It’s taking a moment to “be away” from everything going on in life to appreciate the feeling and emotion that is possible to feel in one moment.

I hope you find moments like that as we enter 2021.

Wherever you are, no matter how overwhelming everything feels.

Escapism is a beautiful thing.