Reflections on a beginning...

There’s nothing like gazing out over the ocean at sunset for putting the mind in a reflective and contemplative mood. And after a week of sunsets in the West, I feel like putting a few reflective words onto paper before my mind reverts once again to the immediacy of new events and people. Just a few words, mind, as there is much to say about the present. But as my life here becomes increasingly ‘normal’, it now seems important to give a little nod in recognition of the period when I first arrived, and the extraordinary experience of coming to terms with this abrupt new reality.

Even the smallest changes can be a struggle (I tried to change newspapers once and got the shock of my life). But uprooting from everything and everybody I had a connection with, travelling almost as far as it is possible to travel, then settling down for a two-year stint in a place where I knew nobody, represents one of the more monumental upheavals in my life. Yet difficult as those first few days and weeks of entering a new reality often are, there is also something uniquely special about them. There are the obvious things of course, like the fascinating novelty of everything and everybody. But there is something more subtle too.

In that transition period, before your new life slowly begins to take shape, there is a brief period when you’ve left one world behind but are yet to fully enter another. For what amounts to a very brief moment in the timescale of life, it is as if someone has pressed pause in your mind - a rare sensation, in particular for those hailing from the hectic lands of the West. While the world buzzes around you, you occupy your own space, observing from afar. This is the moment, if you are arriving alone at a party, that you seek out a familiar face, or better still the bar. But here in the Solomons, with two years rolling out in front of me, I felt no such time pressure or inclination to break out of this unique bubble. Soon enough, of course, the world around you, or more specifically the people, break through for you. You meet a couple of people, then a few more… and suddenly you are part of the new reality you inhabit.

I make it sound like an intrusion, but far from it. After a few weeks of acclimatising, when my mind had just about caught up with my body, it was a welcome respite to emerge from the cocoon of new beginnings into the tiny but active social world of Honiara. And once you step out there is no going back. A couple of barbeques or nights on the lash are all it takes. Perhaps this is what makes such beginnings so unique: the mindset you find yourself in is fragile as a Scottish summer, and once gone there is no way to rediscover that same state of mind and perspective. The blank slate is soon filled with familiar names and faces, knowledge, associations and memories. Normality, if that is what we call life, resumes.