My first blog

The pressure of a post…  Thinking about all of the things that have happened to me today that I could blog about, the pressure begins to mount. Especially when it also happens to be my first personal blog post ever. I feel like the reading of this blog should have some kind of accompanying trumpet fanfare heralding the arrival of yet another new blogger’s search for attention in cyberspace.

I could talk about the feeling of relief that looking into the eyes of a summer’s break from higher education is bringing me or the joy at my final mark of the year being a respectable 68. Or the sense of accomplishment that recording a song that I have written, sung and played the ukulele on for a summer festival in my home town has given me. (disclaimer – not all days are as eventful as this one)

But mostly the thing that I want to talk about in this first blog is ‘goodbyes’. I have experienced two goodbye’s, farewells and bon voyage’s this week. Firstly my friend Mary had returned to the shores of the UK for a flying visit having emigrated to Australia two years ago. Saying goodbye to Mary two years ago turned out to be impossible, so much so that I pretty much avoided Mary for the last few months of her residence here and never actually said goodbye to her, and regretted it once it was far too late to do anything about it. I went to college the next day and cried to a great group of people about how the finality of it had suddenly hit me and how I wished it would have been different.

Goodbyes are strange things, almost like the death of something or someone. It is an end, a definite end to something that will never be the same again, so it is no wonder that most of us have the desire to avoid endings at all costs.

Today that aforementioned great group of people finished a journey of epic proportions, for one it was the end of a 4 year journey, for others it was an intermission before heading back into the fray in September. Yet in saying goodbye to one of our band of wonderful women, I was reminded again of the value of saying goodbye. Not only did I get to close the door on a chapter in my life in a way that was bitter sweet, I got to wish someone else well on their continuing journey.

Though two years late, I got to say goodbye to Mary this week, and it was worth the wait, to be able to hug her, welcome her home, and then say goodbye again in the space of three hours was very cathartic, and both these experiences of this weeks endings has made me value them even more. Though part of me will probably always want to avoid the pain of saying goodbye, there is a bigger part of me that now knows and can treasure the pain they bring.