Weeping for What Will Come and What Will Stay Behind

The tick-tock of time passing is getting very loud. Today is my Going Away Party. As I write I await the first of my guests. I feel anxious, nervous, excited and sad.

When I planned for a prologue ride in Australia, which begins next Sunday, I was thinking of it as a test of my bicycle, my gear and my physical readiness. I’ve realised this week it will also, and maybe most importantly, be a test of my emotional readiness.

I’ve been a bit sad all week. I love Sydney; I love my mates here, my life here and as much as I’m looking forward to my adventure I am also looking forward to coming home at the end of it. I know I will be changed – if I’m not I haven’t done it right. So, perhaps some of the sadness is in saying farewell to the me I am today, the me that my friends here know and the bit of trepidation around what I will find out there, and what I will find in myself as a result.

This past week I spent several days on Queenlsand’s Gold Coast for the baseball Junior League Nationals. For 15 years I have handled media and public relations for Major League Baseball International’s office in Sydney. I thought a few days of watching Under 14s playing baseball would be a good point of departure. It was lovely in many ways. What I hadn’t anticipated was the ways it also eased me toward life on the road and travelling alone. I was away from home and when the day’s playing was done I was on my own to make what I would with my evenings: dining alone, befriending the man at the gelato shop and going for walks.

On my Wednesday night flight home the moon, red and three-quarters full, hove into view drawing my attention to the window. The lights of Sydney slowly filled the space beneath us. The confused roadways of the northern suburbs sparkled like luminescent tracers with streetlights and headlamps. I was seated alone in my row but on the aisle so the view was perfectly framed by that familiar oval – and into that frame came the Sydney Harbour Bridge and then the Opera House – for it seemed nearly a minute there they were. The iconic symbols of my city, of my home.

I wept.

I was listening to Jim Moginie’s Alas Folkloric:

And we live in stolen moments … solitary moments of truth sometimes shine through

 

The first time I flew into Sydney my flight came in over the city and my first view of the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House was also from the sky – but in daylight.

 

The next time I fly into Sydney will be in May 2016 at the end of this particular road I am about to set off to follow. Whoever I have become, whatever I have experienced, the Harbour Bridge and Opera House will welcome me home and so too will my friends – just as today they will gather to see me off. I will weep – probably with a mix of joy at being home and nostalgia for the journey just finished. And I’ll be that little bit more Australian for having been away and for having made the long journey home again.