I have a mini zen garden in a box, with three tiny rocks and a little rake.

Every time I move, and I tip the sand in my zen garden back into its packet, I never get all of it in. Inevitably, some of the grains spill out of the sides. And every time I unpack the zen garden, it’s got just a little less sand in it than before.

Many, many long hours of thought, an email back-and-forth, and a phone conversation with my parents later, I think I have finally come to a decision on what to do next year. Much of the finer detail still needs to be worked out, much of it is a plunge into the unknown, there are things I need to research, people I need to inform – but at least I know which fork in the road to head down. I think. I think. I hope.

I would love for a day to come when I no longer have to worry about losing all the sand in my zen garden. I’d love to tip it out once and for all and sit it on a windowsill for the rest of its life and mine, as zen gardens should be – still, tranquil, immovable havens. That day is not to be… yet. But I’m slowing down; if my wandering days aren’t quite yet over, there is, at least, an end in sight.

I promise to be a little less vague about all this when I actually get round to acting on this decision (rather than turning it over and over in my head fretfully). In the meantime – life, and more steadily trickling grains of sand, await.

if there is one thing my trip home and the past two days have taught me, it is that at the end of the day, the people matter most of all. i could have the best job in the world anywhere (and i do really love my job) and it wouldn’t keep me there if i didn’t have my family or my best friends around too. and what a family, what a group of friends i have. i couldn’t ask for more.

and if there is a second thing i have learned, it is that there is no such thing as the perfect place to be. here, i miss so many things about singapore and sydney, there, i miss things about england. wherever i go, i think, there will always be something or other i miss; fuzzy said to me after tea at coffee club that this feeling of passing through places and always being in transit was probably always going to be a permanent one, and i can’t help but think she was right. ironic, isn’t it, for someone who has been doing nothing but trying to find home for the past four years. maybe the answer i’ve finally found is that there is no home. there are only feelings, feelings of being home, feelings of belonging somewhere, and the people and things and memories that trigger them.

and there is no combination of words i could say

there are so many things i want to express, for which words will never be enough. reading terry pratchett’s nation in tasmania, and then watching it last night at the national theatre, brought that home to me all over again. i feared i would cry at the last scene, instead there were helpless, silent tears in my throat and a choked up dryness in my eyes. how do you put a name to this? how do you say hello, and goodbye, and hope to see you again soon, and i love you, in your own way – without using these words that so many people have used before you, to mean things that they feel, not that you feel? there is only so much i can pour into my christmas cards, into my smiles and gestures, and i don’t know if it is good enough.

I know I ask perfection of a quite imperfect world
And fool enough to think that’s what I’ll find

i had some very pensive and slightly blue musings here, involving the painful aptness of the carpenters on this cold, quiet, rainy friday night, but then i decided that no one is served by my melancholy, least of all myself.

deep breaths, deep breaths, if i concentrate on the hereandnow split nanomilliseconds of each moment and just, for that short period of time, be happy, it will all add up, and it will all fall into place.

the days are so short, now. i miss the spring, i miss the summer even more, and most of all i wonder where 2009 went.