Castles in the Sky

My old boss once told me that one of my greatest strengths is my ability to think of the most outlandish and craziest ideas and then have that idea become a reality. She says that I work like I have my head in the clouds most of the time, and I come down to earth and get on with the business of making things happen.

I suppose I’ve always been a very optimistic person. I’ve been fortunate enough to have an easy and happy childhood. Even when things seemed difficult, life always had a way of sorting things out with or without my help.

Being somewhat of a type A personality of course I wasn’t contented to watch from the sidelines. I’d like to think a took an active role and made some pretty savvy life choices to get to where I am. I’ve made some mistakes along the way but I’ve managed to bounce back from them with my psyche relatively intact.

So yes,  I am a person who’s full of hope. Hope springs eternal; I shit dreams and unicorn and all that. It will be the last thing that leaves my body when I’m dying, and even then I’d probably be clinging to the hope that I can find a way to defeat death somehow.

Hope is a double-edged sword though. On the one hand, it is what propels me to keep going and to keep pursuing the things that I aspire to. But on the other hand, I often wonder how much hope affects my ability to perceive and interpret the reality of what’s actually happening around me.

I sometimes find myself in situations where I do really stupid things in the hopes that things will go my way, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I once built an epic romance out of what was essentially a platonic relationship, based on nothing but hopes and dreams alone.

I’ve travelled tens and thousands of kilometres on the hopes of finding something amazing, based on something as flimsy as a month’s worth of semi-intense connections (and you know, that connection might have just been due to Christmas being in the air and the lights around Central London making things more romantic than they normally were).

I’ve had my heart if not broken, certainly bruised, because I refuse to give up hope without definitive proof, and that definitive proof usually comes in the form of almost soul-crushing disappointment.

After my recent brush with hope and its consequences, it would be tempting to resolve to be a hard-eyed realist from now moving forward. It would certainly save me a lot of tears (and a good chunk of my life savings) if I did.

But the thing is, I wouldn’t know who I am if I wasn’t the kind of person who would go to the other side of the world for the chance of exploring the potential for something more with someone who made my heart beat for the first time in a long time.

And yeah, maybe that blew up in my face a little bit, but I came back to London ready to try again, to give it another go.

And when I get to a point where I’m ready to throw in the towel because I feel like I may never find the kind of love I’ve always dreamed of having, I somehow find an inner reserve of hope that something amazing could still happen.

I suppose what I’ve realised, after having given it some thought since I came back from my holidays, is that I would rather hope and love a little too much, than to ever become a cynic who can’t see the possibilities of the extraordinary in the ordinariness of life.

I’ll keep building my castles in the sky. Who knows? Someday my prince could even come along and join me there. Or better yet, a prince will come along who will share a mortgage with me and join forces in the battle against exorbitant London house prices. Lol

Happy Sunday, one and all.