I was a shop-girl once…no, I correct myself, I was never a shop girl, I was just a girl who – at one time – happen to work in a shop.
Now there are times when I’m not quite sure what I am. There are times when nothing really feel solid, but that isn’t a bad thing. One thing I’ve learned in the past year is the life is better if you allow it to fluctuate a little bit. As human beings, we tend to break time up into manageable pieces: hours, days, centuries even millennia. But that’s a human construction; time is – in reality – all one piece. “a river” as David Eddings put it once, “flowing endlessly towards some incomprehensible goal”
Anyway, at one point, I worked in a shop.
Now, I sit at a desk on deck 10 of a floating palace, welcoming 2,000 complete strangers into what essentially is my living room.
Ain’t life just the funniest thing sometimes?
I never thought I’d see the day where I’d be sitting looking out the window going “oh look, its Juneau…again” and then deciding I didn’t feel like getting off the ship and heading downstairs to watch a movie instead. I remember when Alaska was the most exotic place I’d ever been, if you discount my temporary time as a resident of London. When it was something to write home about. I suppose it still is, but it’s lost some of its luster now that I can list so many other places that I’ve been privileged enough to see.
That said, Alaska – with its whales and dolphins and seals that stare at you with big watery eyes from the tops of icebergs – Alaska will always hold a special part of my heart. No matter how tired of it I may get after 4 months worth of 7 day cruises. Because Alaska was my first foray into the world beyond my comfort zone. My first time truly stepping off of a chasm and hoping beyond hope that my feet would land on some kind of an invisible bridge.
Alaska brought my focus back to where it should be, opened my eyes and my mind to the life I could be leading if I had a little faith in myself, introduced me to connections that would change both the way I looked at my performance career and myself as a person. It got into all the cobwebby corners of my mind and blew them clean in such a way that for a while there, things almost looked like they were going to get worse…
In short, being back in Alaska reminds me, on some level I can’t really explain:
I will never be a shop-girl again.