Change is in the air.

I have been thinking a lot, lately, about lasts, and firsts, and leavings and beginnings. Our director and my manager have gone on maternity leave one after the other, there are new bosses to get to know, new responsibilities and tasks to get used to at work, a new room in a new house – though I have settled in so well here that it feels I’ve been here far longer than a week. My housemates are great, things are really, really relaxed, and I couldn’t be happier.

But then, as always, there is the future. And it is the future mainly I have been thinking of; it is becoming increasingly likely that this may be my last year in England, depending on how things go visa-wise. Where do I go from here? Do I buy a return back to Singapore in December so I can come wrap things up here before leaving for good next year? Or should I just buy a one-way… and not look back? Should I settle in Sydney with my family? Go straight back to Singapore? Or… try my darndest to wrangle immigration laws into my submission and find some way of staying here? I feel there is still much I can learn from being in this country, and if I do leave next year it wouldn’t be by my choice, but sometimes there is a lot more going on that’s larger than you.

There is a whole world out there, and… I guess I needn’t restrict myself to the warm and familiar when considering my next move. There are many places I could go and many things to see. And I know, for certain, that this is the time to keep working overseas if I want to; I’ll never find a window of opportunity like this again once I settle down in Sydney or Singapore, or at the very least – it’ll be that much harder to just up and go. But then – do I want to? That’s the million-pound question, isn’t it. Are my wandering days over? Is it time to stop being a nomad and set down roots, at last? I don’t know, I just don’t know.

The last time I wrote, it seemed unreal to me that only one week of January had gone by, it seemed to have been 2010 forever and the world seemed to have marched right on as if the year had never changed. Today, the opposite is true – I am surprised that two entire weeks of January have flown past already, I wonder where half the month has gone, and I am striving to hang on to the bright promise of the year ahead that I felt so strongly on January the first. It’s hard at times not to be mired in the trivial and inconsequential, and not to get bogged down in seemingly endless slogs, but I haven’t lost it all. I still feel it – that livewire spark – that glimmering, teasing hint of great things to come.

Work commitments are piling up, not just in the office but out of it – events, training workshops, things at which I am to be a delegate of the company, which is still new enough to me to be fairly exciting; I am looking into moving to North London and possibly sharing a house again (much as I truly enjoy living alone it is far easier to move into a house where internet and bills are already sorted), I am still trying – this ongoing, neverending journey – to get to know the city better because however many of its nooks and crannies I explore, it never seems enough. And I am thinking, albeit somewhat vaguely and inconclusively, on the future and what I plan to do now that I have a permanent job. I am asked that a lot; I don’t have any answers right now. I wish I did.

I thought to myself on the Tube this morning that if I do wind up moving, perhaps the time will have come to really, properly audit my possessions, to cut everything down to whatever I can carry in whatever luggage I have (1 big suitcase, 1 medium suitcase, and a backpack), and either throw out, donate, or ship home everything else. The amount of stuff I have after over 5 years in this country is, naturally, astonishingly voluminous. And given that I am likely to be a nomad for the foreseeable future – perhaps it is time to pare it all back, once and for all, and do the nomad thing properly, in the appropriate spirit of liberation from material goods.