When you're 21 or 18 nothing matters and there's no such thing as a consequence. I'm close enough to that age to remember it without the rose tints and although I'm sure that there were day to day issues and the odd worry, for the most part it is a brilliant time when you can do what you want and forget about the future and simply concentrate on having fun without realising how good you've got it.
When I was that age the concerns were just how quickly the weekend would come around, how much to drink and smoke, pulling girls and driving fast cars. It sounds like a cliche but that's how it was. Didn't earn much but didn't pay rent either so all of our income was disposable and we had no problem disposing of it. There was a tight group of 7 or 8 of us and we just had fun. No worries, no bigger picture. I guess that's what being young is for, although it would be nice to appreciate the freedom of it all at the time, if that was even possible it wouldn't be as enjoyable.
Naturally a few years pass and one or two of the group fall in love and get married and then more and you grieve the loss of the situation and then you get over it as you fall in love and move on. I'm sure it happens to every group of 21 year olds up and down the country. I think it's called 'growing up'.
So that was me 10 years ago and things have obviously moved on since then. That was a brilliant time; brilliant then as we had so much fun and brilliant now because it's encapsulated in a 2 year bubble which you could never recreate if you tried. Perfect left as that. Of course we're all still friends and see each other relatively often given the logisitics but it's not quite the same but that's cool because as 31+ year olds we'd look pretty sad doing the things we did.
Since that carefree time I'm a lot different and without sounding too dramatic, I sometimes struggle with life as I worry a lot. Worry might not be the right word but I constantly have things on my mind which seem unecessary and stop me from enjoying the moment. I find it very difficult to be content and to a lesser extent so does Clare. This is not good and I think it stems from events in the past which haven't gone quite to plan. We found ourselves always saying '....it'll be o.k when the business is sold.' or '....it'll be fine once we've moved.' and always waiting impatiently for the holiday to arrive. We forget to enjoy the present and just enjoy life without planning the next move. From the outside as I've said before our life looks peachy. Good jobs, tick. Cars, house, nice things, tick. Great friends and family, tick. Etc, tick. We view other peoples' lives based on comparisons to our own and whilst it's important not to take the good stuff for granted it all takes a reasonable amount of effort. The one thing you can't change is the family you were born into and for that I am enormously grateful. If you break it down beyond the family you realise that all of the good stuff doesn't just happen. For example in order to get good friends in the first place you have to work at being a decent person and in order to keep your friends you have to work to stay in touch send birthday and Christmas cards, throw parties and make sure you don't turn into an arsehole. In order to keep your job you need to work hard and then you need to continue to do so in order to get a nice house, a car and a big tv etc. So when people look from the outside in and tell you how grateful you should be you can tell them that it's not luck or coincidence that the good stuff is good, it's actually hard work. The lucky bit was not being born to substance abusing violent parents in a Tower Hamlet's squat.
As you can tell I think too much about unconstructive things but nonetheless think about them I do and it bothers me. It takes up way too much time, effort and worry. I live my life from mood to mood, good or bad and I'm hoping upon all hope that the baby's arrival changes that and that I can stop fretting about the nonsense that has plagued me for the last ten years and focus my attention on something so much more important than me and my insignificant woes. I'm looking forward to our baby being a great leveller so instead of worrying about if our business is going to survive the credit crunch, or about dying young or about if people think I'm a joke or about drinking too much or not doing enough exercise or any of the other crap which fills my head every day, I can concentrate on the bigger picture, something to take my mind off of me.
Sorry if this is a depressing post, but as I've said before, this is my blog and if you're crazy enough to read it that's your problem!
NCT starts Thursday. Yikes!
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