I have been thinking about time lately.
Not time in the big, dramatic sense.
Not years, decades, birthdays or anniversaries.
Just moments.
Those tiny pieces of time that pass so quickly we barely notice them.
Because I think there is something rather extraordinary about a moment.
We enter every single one as a slightly different person from the one who existed in the moment before.
Even while I am sitting here writing this, I am changing.
And by the time you have finished reading it, so will you.
Perhaps only by the tiniest amount.
But still...
Different.

We tend to think of ourselves as one continuous person.
I have always been me.
The little girl in the photographs is me.
The teenager who thought she knew absolutely everything was me.
The young woman trying to work out adulthood was me.
The woman who became a wife and a mother was me.
The woman who has laughed until her stomach hurt, made mistakes, loved people, lost people, broken down, got back up and constantly wondered what the bloody hell she was doing...
That was all me.
But I am not exactly any of those people anymore.
I carry them with me, of course.
Their memories, mistakes, loves and lessons are all woven into who I am now.
Because something happened between them and me.
Life.

Sometimes life changes us in an instant.
There are moments that divide everything very clearly into before and after.
A death.
A birth.
A diagnosis.
A wedding.
A betrayal.
A phone call.
A text message.
One moment you are living a life you recognise.
Then something happens.
The clock might only have moved forward by a few seconds, but suddenly the world looks different because you are looking at it with knowledge you didn't have moments earlier.
Sometimes you recognise that change immediately.
Sometimes it takes years.
But most change is far quieter.
It happens in ordinary conversations and ordinary days.
We read something that makes us think differently.
Someone says a sentence we remember years later.
We forgive something we thought we never could.
We stop caring about something that once consumed us.
We begin missing something we once took completely for granted.
We become softer in some places.
Harder in others.
Braver.
More cautious.
More understanding.
Hopefully a little wiser.
Although, in my case, the jury may still be out on that one. 🤣

Maybe that is why photographs can sometimes feel so strange.
You look at yourself smiling back from twenty years ago and recognise the face.
But you know things she doesn't.
You know what is coming.
You know who stays.
Who leaves.
What works out.
What doesn't.
You know which things she is worrying about that won't matter at all.
And you know which completely ordinary moments she should have held onto for just a little longer.
Sometimes I want to reach into old photographs and whisper,
"Pay attention.
You don't know it yet, but you're going to miss this."
But perhaps we aren't supposed to know.
Perhaps knowing something won't last would change the very thing we were supposed to experience.

I think there is another side to all of this too.
We don't only remember old versions of ourselves.
We remember old versions of other people.
Sometimes we hold somebody inside a mistake they made years ago.
An argument.
A decision.
Something they said when they were angry, frightened or hurting.
Yet none of us would want our entire character decided by our worst five minutes.
God knows I wouldn't.
If I believe that I can learn from the things I have got wrong, then I have to accept that other people can too.
That doesn't mean pretending hurt didn't happen.
It doesn't mean repeatedly forgiving behaviour that continues to cause pain.
And it certainly doesn't mean everyone deserves a permanent place in our lives.
Sometimes the person who has changed is us, and that change is precisely why we finally walk away.

I think healing is one of the clearest examples of this.
We wait for the day when we will suddenly feel better.
As though grief, heartbreak or trauma will eventually pack its bags, announce that its work here is done and politely leave through the front door.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work like that.
Healing hides in much smaller things.
An hour when you didn't think about it.
An afternoon when you laughed properly.
A song that used to destroy you, but one day you managed to hear all the way through.
The first time you told the story without crying.
The first morning you woke up and something else entered your mind before the sadness did.
None of those moments feels particularly significant when it happens.
But eventually you turn around and realise...
You're not standing where you used to be.
And perhaps you couldn't even point to the exact moment you moved.

Maybe that is why we should be a little kinder when looking backwards.
We have a terrible habit of judging yesterday's decisions using today's knowledge.
"Why did I do that?"
"Why didn't I see it?"
"Why did I stay?"
"Why didn't I speak?"
"Why didn't I appreciate it?"
But we know more now because we have lived everything that came afterwards.

We cannot demand yesterday's version of ourselves possess tomorrow's wisdom.
That doesn't excuse the things we got wrong.

Sometimes we made terrible decisions.
Sometimes we hurt people.
Sometimes we allowed ourselves to be hurt for far too long.
Sometimes, with hindsight, the answer seems so obvious that we cannot understand how we failed to see it.
But hindsight has one enormous advantage.
It already knows how the story turned out.
We didn't.
We were making decisions somewhere in the middle of it.
And all we can really ask of ourselves now is that what happened teaches us something about what we choose next.

There is something both frightening and comforting about knowing we are never completely finished.
Frightening because nothing stays exactly the same.
Comforting because nothing has to.
The grief you carry today may become lighter.
The thing you cannot imagine surviving may one day become something you survived.
The person you miss may always matter, but the shape of that missing can change.
A mistake does not have to become your entire identity.
And the chapter you are living now does not get to decide the ending.
Perhaps that is what a lifetime really is.
Not simply travelling from birth to death as one unchanging person, but gathering pieces of every age we have ever been.
The child.
The teenager.
The daughter.
The wife.
The mother.
The woman who loved.
The woman who lost.
The woman who got things spectacularly wrong.
The woman who somehow found her feet again.
None of them completely disappear.
They become entwined within us.
Their laughter.
Their scars.
Their loves.
Their losses.
Their lessons.
All woven together into whoever we happen to be...
in this moment.
And I think there is something rather beautiful in knowing that even this version of us isn't finished.
There are conversations we haven't had yet.
People we haven't met.
Places we haven't seen.
Things we haven't learned.
Ordinary days that will quietly become precious memories without us realising it.
There are parts of ourselves we haven't even met yet.
Because the next moment is already arriving.
And when it does,
We will be different from the moment before.
Until next time,
Toodle pip, 
Lainey.

🌼🌼🌼