Hope is the Thing with Feathers

I set the anthology down on the side table and thought about the words that still lingered in my mind. It was a beautiful piece of poetry and it made me think about hope in a new way. It was always there, whether I chose to acknowledge it or not. I always lost it a bit after Christmas, when the decorations were stripped away and I succumbed to the January blues. I knew I wasn’t the only person to do that. Whenever I walked through a day the colour of granite, I could sense others feelings of depression too. There was a heaviness in the air and it hung about the moving creatures that were cast in that day as characters with their own lives. Everybody looked glum. I wanted to brighten the world up, and there was a driving force within me that pushed me to think of a solution.

I shook off the webs of sadness that clung to me, like cobwebbed Christmas baubles left too late on a fir tree, whenever we are clinging to the dusty remnants of the past. They stop looking joyful and merry and they begin to just look jaded. I didn’t want to become that way myself. Why had a season of celebration left me feeling so drained and hollowed out?

When I picked up a new book to read, I’d been in the mood to dip in, but not to fully commit. Poetry was perfect for that. It gave me an intro without dictating that I remain for the entire duration. I had work that needed to be done. Reading in front of the crackling fire might have sounded luxurious, but I had to return to my own world too. I’d had so many goals in mind whenever I had composed my New Year’s resolutions. They weren’t unattainable, as far as I could see. They just gave me direction and a sense of purpose, but still, they felt like a never-ending to do list: one that was never complete and that never gave me the final sense of satisfaction I always strove to find.

Like everyone else, I had bills to pay, household tasks to complete and errands to run. On top of that, I wanted this to be the year when I “made it;” whenever I finally attained the goals I’d been chasing for years on end. I wanted to make something “big” of my life, but getting there was a huge undertaking and I didn’t quite know how to go about it. I always ended up resigning myself to the fact that I would probably never make it in the world of acting. It was a tough business, and I wasn’t best placed for it in my small part of the globe. I could have moved to somewhere better suited to it. That was what I planned to do each year, but the practicalities of doing it overwhelmed me and I always managed to put it off.

There were so many things about my hometown that I found dissatisfying. It had never felt like the best place for me to flourish, even though I’d tried my utmost. I’d felt like my determination was fading, leaving me like a drained bottle with nothing but useless sediment at the bottom. I was the sum of my experiences, but it felt like that was all I could be. It felt like I was getting to old and ungainly for the magic that comes with novelty and risk-taking.

It's strange how something so simple can spark an idea inside you; it can completely reawaken your enthusiasm for living. Emily Dickinson wasn’t a poet with whom I'd long been familiar, despite the fact she was so revered and widely read. She hadn’t been appreciated in her time. I remembered my mother saying that to me, during the phases whenever I felt like I was failing. I might, in all my lifetime, fail to find my place in the world, but death wasn’t the end of that opportunity. I felt like inspiration was running through me, like river currents in a still body of water. It was time for a change to occur.

I got out of my comfortable armchair. It had become a prison of my own making. I had stayed there, secluded all Winter, thinking I was doing myself a service. Maybe rest had been needed to prepare me for what was coming next. You never know what is waiting for you just up ahead; you might suddenly turn a sharp corner and find yourself facing your destiny head-on, like two strangers meeting by sheer chance.

It was time to face the bracing coldness that I knew would greet me whenever I opened my front door and stepped out into the world. It was often uninviting, but it was also open-ended. I felt like all the possibility I wanted to bring into concrete form was waiting beyond my own door. I thought about all the finest moments of acting I had participated in, the local actors I had worked alongside, the small-scale theatres that had housed our plays. It was worth so much to me, whether it was ever publicly acknowledged or not.

The wind whipped my long coat and made it dance with a theatricality that was ordinarily hard to reproduce offstage. I allowed it to billow in the strong breeze. It felt like the strength of the elements were filling me up, like helium added to an unfilled balloon. I stepped forward and walked to the shoreline located mere minutes from my house. I looked across the water in the direction of the promised land. I couldn’t see it, but still, I knew it was there. It awaited me like a lover calling me from a clifftop, its voice being carried away by the wind. It didn’t mean it wasn’t there; you just had to go in search of it. “And sweetest – in the gale – is heard,” came to my mind like a song of hope. In the background I could see houses being emptied of Christmas decorations – seaside cottages with strands of twinkle lights removed, proud trees being chopped down into disposable wood. The past whether glorious or not, was gone, but the future of acting and living awaited me like a bird ready for its migration. And so, I took flight.