Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Søren Kierkegaard
Life never seems to stop. I know, I’m stating the obvious again.
There is always something waiting. Projects to finish, messages to answer, people asking for our time because they trust us to show up. We complain about being busy, yet if all of that disappeared tomorrow, I suspect many of us would feel a little lost. Perhaps it isn’t the busyness we object to. Perhaps it is how we carry it.
I’m writing this from a hotel room at Heathrow. My window overlooks the two runways, and since checking in, I haven’t gone more than a few minutes without watching another aircraft climb into the sky or descend back to earth. Thousands of people arriving, thousands leaving, families beginning holidays, others returning home. Business trips, funerals, weddings, first dates, last embraces, every aircraft carries a collection of stories that will never meet.
Heathrow does pause for a few hours each night because of the agreement on noise. Then, before most of us have finished our first cup of tea, it begins again. Seven days a week, every week of the year.
Watching it from afar, I found myself thinking about momentum.
Life has a habit of moving whether we are ready or not. We finish one chapter only to discover another one has quietly begun before we’ve even noticed the page turning. I find myself at one of those moments now. Not at the end of something, but standing in the doorway between what has been and what comes next.
I spend a great deal of time wondering what life feels like for other people. Not what they do for work or where they live, but how certainty feels to them. When they believe they are on the right path, does it arrive with confidence or quietly without announcement? And when that certainty disappears, do they carry the same mixture of disappointment and relief that I sometimes recognise in myself?
I’ve stopped looking for definite answers to those questions.
What matters more is noticing that the questions are there at all.
There are days when my mind races ahead of me, producing thoughts faster than I can make sense of them. Years ago, I would have fought them, convinced they needed solving. Now I am beginning to understand that not every thought deserves an answer; some simply deserve a little space.
There is something strangely comforting about allowing uncertainty to sit beside you without demanding that it leaves. I cultivate it through action and harvest it through calm.
Perhaps that is what I was really watching outside my hotel window. Not aeroplanes, not runways, not Heathrow.
Simply movement.
Life carrying on whether I understand it or not. And somehow, that feels enough.
