I'm never quite sure if people understand the length of ten years. For those that have spent it in prison, I can't imagine that they feel that it has gone particularly quickly. And then again, while everyone strives to be as happy as much of the time as they possibly can, I can never feel as happy for those that have loved the time so much that it is gone in an instant. Their happiness can't last nearly as long as the feeling that they are racing through there lives with such speed that they have only the rapture to look forward to. I guess that the best way is to try and find a happy medium between the different styles of winding our way towards an ever increasingly inconvenient death.In the past ten years, I've had the good fortune of visiting over two hundred cities in over thirty six countries, I've been chased by plain clothes police through London streets, I've made love to women from places I've never been and I've had the shit kicked out of me for no reason that I could have seen. I've torn my life to shreds, built it up again with tiny threads. I've cried over friends that have died and sighed over people that have lied. I've missed my dead mother for the things she never was able to teach me and I've grumbled over how little I learnt from those that could. I've soaked up all the knowledge that my books, twitter feeds, Facebook, love ,relationships and passion could offer and increasingly despair at how little more knowledge helps us understand the things that should matter most.
I have so much to give , but once I've been sucked senseless by an unforgiving relentless London, I'm fighting for my life, my sanity, my happiness....not every now and again, and not everyday, but every single moment.......except perhaps those split seconds when you are about to step out off the pavement in front of an oncoming bus and your brain shrieks that it's probably as good a time as any to die, but not by a blithering bloody bus (perhaps my grandfathers spirit stepping in who lost his life in exactly this way). I've been here ten years, I've got the passport....why is the original "big picture" so hard to see. Ten years here can cloud your brain to the point where your life that you had can seem surreal to the point where your brain is a cloud and you may as well be proud because the escape route you sought with the passport you have has been bought with ten years of your life! This is not a fucking joke! This is your life.......Laugh!
It's amazing to feel the spring sun on my face. The past winter here yielded ninety two hours of sunlight. You know that there is a problem with the sunlight when it is perfectly acceptable that someone counts the hours of sunlight that there have been in a given period. I wonder if anyone counts, or for that matter gives a flying continental buck how many hours of sunlight Kenya had last winter???? My point exactly!
We don't have to end up with people to share our lives with that are not exactly the correct fit for what we like. And in the event that your intuition stuffs it up and you end up with a lemon, there is no need for too much compromise to smooth over the rough edges. Too much satisfaction leads to complacency. Consider how you can retrieve what you think you deserve or thought that you had, apply the plan and in the event that you succeed, improve your life with the added bonus of appreciating similar to what thought you should have had a whole lot more! There is no-one that appreciates the perfect life less than the person that has it all the time!
The problem with these ten year periods is that no matter what you have done or how much you have enjoyed it.....it is still ten years and the chances are you have used two of those periods by the time you are twenty, you have used one of them in the past ten years, and you probably only have five others left if you are thirty years old now. Like me, some of you might be missing another couple of these pesky decades. Funny how they fly by, isn't it? There is no time to see how the next couple of decades may pan out. Now is the time to think that you have been living too boring a life and spread your wings a little, or like me, realise you've used your wings so much that soon you are going to end up voluntarily clipping them or head straight into the fire of poverty shared by the pecking turkeys while the eagles gobble caviar to their hearts content while soaring above.
What you are going to do with your next ten years is of paramount importance and that's what has led me to my thoughts on my next ten years and where I feel they should be spent.
Fuck it! I'm going home!
