While polishing off my write-up I discovered that I’d touched on a few supremely essential things with regards to my relation to this work. This work is framed as an exploration of myself, my own rhythms, but while reading through Rhythmanalysis to find some good quotes to illustrate my intentions it occurred to me that this work also has an element of melancholic ‘coming of age’ to it. I’m realising that exploring these natural life-rhythms (say, days) that bracket our own contrived rhythms is just another way of exploring how people change over time, and I’m desperately grasping at straws as life rushes past me and I’m becoming more and more independent and I have only one more year of university and then I’m out in the real world. I feel like I’m bursting at the seams with life and I’m furiously aware that this may not last as long as I want it. I see people on the streets wearing suits going to their 9-5 job and underneath all of the furious desire to live that I am dripping with is a deep-rooted fear of getting to a point in my life where I feel that I am not living. This work seems to be a device to come to terms with the fact that certain things in life stay the same – the sun will always rise, winter will always come after autumn and be followed by spring – but expecting life to stay the same forever is a fools errand; the slow change of life is part of the beauty of everything.

One must simply administer a firm slap to ones own cheek, grit the teeth and carry on, for though I may grow old with many passes around the sun under my belt, the world around me will always be comfortingly alive with rhythms that have existed long before I turned up, and will exist long after I’m gone.

[A segment of this blog post was included (almost word for word) in my submitted write-up. This is because I tried to re-write it but the frantic tone of grasping at the present whilst peeking apprehensively at the future with my heart in my mouth didn’t quite come across in the re-write. Is it lazy to quote myself word for word in two different parts of the same submission? Perhaps, but that doesn’t bother me. Pasted below is the attempted rewrite that didn’t quite make the cut.]

I worry about how fleeting life can be, I feel happy and content at the moment but am slowly coming to terms with the fact that life changes, and someday I may become the very person that I despise; going through the motions of life not because life is beautiful and ever surprising but because life must go on, I must provide for myself and jump through the hoops of some ever-flaccid bureaucratic joke. I feel as though I am dripping with life at the moment, I recognise that these are the good days and yet I can’t shake the feeling that time may be running out for me to get on with things and achieve the goals that I hold dear to my being. This work feels as though it’s a reminder that even though my own rhythms will certainly change, I am an essential part of larger rhythms over which I have no control – and that is okay, and gorgeous. I should not dwell on the changing of my own small rhythms but revel in the knowledge that I am but a miniscule demi-semi-hemi-demi-semi-quaver in the grander rhythms of life around me, which is a lovely freeing thought.