A World Waiting

I wanted to walk away. I wanted to close the door on this life and walk away. There was a street out there, waiting for me to walk down. Then, down at the junction where this street met the main road there was a world waiting.

I was tired of this narrow world where I lived and the narrower world where I worked. The same people, the same rooms, the same voices telling the same tales from their own small worlds.

I wanted something bigger.

It is not easy, though, to step off the familiar paths and set off in a new direction. There is the weight of routine, the weight of expectation, your own as well as everyone else’s.

There is safety in the familiar.

There is comfort in knowing that today will be the same as yesterday and that tomorrow will be just the same again.

There is fear in the unknown too. What if the world out there turns its back? After all, it can come as quite a shock to many of us, just how indifferent and unaware the world is of us. How easily this world can shrug us off. No-one noticing or caring that we have been left behind as time hurries everyone else on to wherever they must go next.

There were mornings when I stood at that crossroads, hesitating. The familiar road looking the same as every other day. While off I the opposite direction, lay a world of mystery and possibility. I needed to take one step, then another and the chains that held me to this routine, to that old life, would snap and break as they stretched way beyond anything I’d ever known before.

But, then, each day I would sigh and turn back and take the same step along the familiar road. Always, though, I’d promise myself that maybe tomorrow….