Comings and Goings

This may be the first of a number of back-entries, as I catch up from a fantastic climbing week, chilling out with great friends, old and new.

It's a relief to have today to collect myself before heading back into work tomorrow. I think that it'll make it easier to take the relaxed attitude that JoSiTo's engenders back into the office. I still feel those care-free climber vibes, but at the same time have adjusted my internal sense of location back to Scotland. Maybe there is a fighting chance of carrying them into the week.

But that's not what this Blip is about. After a wee while of having no metaphorical thoughts tripped off by photographs that I find captured in the camera, here at last is one...

I was sitting with Alex, James, Iain, Nicola, and John in Antalya airport last night, waiting for the flight. Alex looked up after a bite of his Burger King, and saw the translucent ceiling panels. It was too much to resist the photograph, despite the likelihood that airport regulations didn't permit it (although that is only conjecture on my part - I did it quite obtrusively, and the security teams didn't intervene).

Having spent a week mixing with climbers from different parts of the world, I couldn't help but watch the shadows in the ceiling of the airport.

By chance, the "people in the ceiling" would make up small groups as their paths crossed, just briefly before going their separate ways. Almost always their direction was unchanged by the encounter.

By chance, I've met various people this week at Josito's Camp. Briefly in conversation over breakfast, coffee, or a climbing rope our paths of life have crossed. And now we have gone our separate ways.

The beauty of our Humanity is that each of our directions will have been changed by each of those encounters in some small and perhaps imperceptible way. But it is the sum of those small changes that is significant and (some may say) goes to make up both who we are and who we will become.

I wonder to where the encounters that I have been part of will bend me...

~~~

Of course, some have the power such that their encounters will have more effect than others... Today (particularly considering from where I have just come) I am thinking of: This