How did we get here

Why I think canon moments live in our conversations

I’ve been thinking a lot about canon moments lately.

What are they really?

Are they the big events that steer us down the road signposted ‘this way to your life’ like

What you study
The student halls you land in
Which city or street you move to
Who you do or don’t marry
A positive pregnancy test
A death of a close family member

Or are they the everyday conversations that inevitably lead us down the rabbit hole of a canon we didn’t even see blow up in our faces.

I have multiple conversations etched in my memory that I can pick like fruit off a summered ripe tree. Stored in flashing colours and familiar voices. Haunted within the recollection my life which lead me into my canon.

It’s November 1998 and I’m in the kitchen with my mum. We recently moved into suburbia. A tight knit cul de sac where I can ride my purple bike round and round and round. Pink tassels draping from the handle bars ride alongside in the wind’s current. Clink clink go the colourful beads threaded to the spokes of my bike wheels. Knock knock goes my knuckles on the kids’ doors to invite them to play out. The date is the 1st and mum is turning the page of the calendar to our joint birthday month. It’s an ‘around the world’ calendar and that’s where I see it for the first time. A cresent mooned bridge above glistening waters and in front of a particularly spectacular, dare I say perfect house with a roof made of angels wings. The backdrop in blues and bright sunrays land in sparkles across the bay. I ask my mum, ‘why is it sunny in that picture?’ November as I knew it, was a miserable month and I only liked the dates ending in 5’s. After the high of bonfire night on November 5th, you were in for a rapid descent into winter. So cold and so damp, I can still feel the moist air like winter dew on my uniform. Our coats needed inseams of wool and our shoes thick and bulky to keep the cold out. We would look forward to spoiling mum on the 15th, and then I would impatiently tally down the next 10 days until the 25th. By then the days were extremely short. Nightfall blanketing the sky by 4:30pm. My birthday candles could be illuminated against a blackout room before dinner. The wind and rain sang in celebration, clapping their hands against the back sliding doors, dancing unapologetically through the trees of the back garden as I sat on the lounge carpet with my cousins; usually in some kind of after school sparkly attire. Reflecting back, those special birthday evenings spent with extended family were precious. Cosy, like curtains drawn over another year. But I yearned for a summer birthday. I wanted garden party games, sundresses and BBQs. I wanted to not have to go to school because it was the long holidays in between school years. I almost resented my parents for giving birth to me in November and looked enviously at my cousins who had theirs in July. So when I asked my mum that fateful question, she answered so casually back, a sentence that stayed with me forever, ‘oh honey, that’s Australia. In Australia its summer on your birthday because it’s on the other side of the world’.

7-year-old mind blown.

I had no idea before that conversation that seasons were experienced at different times of year in faraway places around the world. With that, began the obsession. I wanted koalas instead of squirrels in my back garden trees. I wanted to be besties with Frankie from ‘The Sleepover Club’ and to wear bikinis on surfboards at the weekends. Funnily enough, that’s not exactly what happened when I followed my dream here. But I did make it to the Sydney harbour bridge and Opera House 19 years later.

December 2016 <3

It’s the first time I remember a conversation wildly changing my perspective of the world. And it didn’t mean to be the last..

It’s August 2010 and I’m floating in the Mediterranean ocean with a close girlfriend. Our arms are spread in the open embrace of a hug to the sea. Allowing us to bob like corks separated from their champagne. Our feet gently kick the blue, finding each other’s as we move to and from each other. The rest of the girls are sun baking and I’m sharing my story of quitting university that summer. I’m debriefing my options as I think about taking a gap year and then applying to start a journalism degree the following September. My friend has just finished her first undergrad year in mental health nursing, and she suggests to me, ‘I think you could be a children’s nurse, if you wanted to be. I see you as that’. A memory unlocked of the young blonde nurse who looked after me a lot when I broke my elbow at 4 years old. She stuck up what appeared then as a huge Disney poster at the foot of my bed for me to look at, as I could barely move with my arm in traction. She helped me, a leftie, use my right hand to make collages out of sparkly mesh and chocolate coin wrappers. I still remember her warmth and how she made me feel cared for and safe when my parents had to go home and look after my baby brother who, of course, had broken out in chickenpox the same day I broke my elbow. A glow radiated through my body as I tread salt water under the Majorca sun. A children’s nurse. I could be that.

I changed university application when I returned home from that girls’ holiday.

It’s September 2012 and I’m on a train in Barcelona. My flatmate / uni bestie Emma had invited me to spend a few days sightseeing and visiting her bro who played basketball for Spain (cool right?!). Walking the streets of Barcelona and staying in my first backpackers’ hostel had been the kind of city escape I had never experienced. Well, apart from that school trip to Belgium to practice the broken French I had acquired over a year, which was never much more than ‘je voudrais un orangina si vous plait’. We wandered the Las Ramblas markets and slowly meandered through the crowded street, people watching and sharing stories about our lives and our friends at home. I always found Emma so interesting as she had lived such a beautifully diverse life to me. Born and raised in London until her family moved them over to her mother’s home city of Stockhom, Sweden at 8. Trilingual speaking, she had spent the previous summer living solo in France and then moving herself back to England for university at 20, I thought she was the epitome of cool. We travelled just outside of the city to meet her younger brother for dinner. I still remember the warm pumpkin ravioli I ate in that cosy low-lit booth. I remember thinking their sibling relationship was so mature and kind. I remember reflecting on that night train back to the city that I couldn’t believe I was in Spain, navigating public transport and exposing myself to a culture so different to the kiddy pool, tapas and Spanish karaoke I had only ever known growing up. It had been Emma that showed me it was possible to travel differently. We spoke that train ride back about all the places we could go. How nothing was impossible anymore.

Happy traveller, September 2012

That weekend, that conversation, set the travel bug alight, running towards the fire of my imagination and more than 20 countries since.

It’s January 2015 and I am living back home with my dad. I have joined the local giant gym like all optimistic New Year resolutes and I am finishing a yoga class soft and lucid after a deep shavasana. I wanted to start yoga as a temporary replacement to dance classes, but I am absolutely loving these Tuesday evenings with this particular teacher. I go to express my thanks to her at the end of class. She says, ‘you move well, there is a story wanting to be told in your body’. The blue of her eyes against her pale skin and dark hair are piercing. There is a story inside me, and yoga is helping me tell it.

I have never left yoga since I made the connection of yoga as moving poetry. Which also brought me back to writing, then menstruality, then making a life out of beauty, which is a Substack for another day :).

The waning moon from my little courtyard February 2024

I know there are many more canon conversations I could write about, but I wonder if you have ever thought about your own?

Do you play them back in your mind? Or do you believe in some other worldly ways that got you to where you are today?

Let me know :)

Love always, xo