Maybe it is the shock of the delayed cognition of turning 39 – perilously close to the age of eternal foolishness – or the weariness of dealing on and off with death and grieving that births this feeling hovering over me that I can’t quite place. It is not entirely inscrutable: the little I understand of it suggests part of it is a heightened sense of my own fragility, the deaths – ranging from old classmates of mine to friends of my father’s – underscoring the fleeting nature of life and with it the sense of time speeding by. The other part that rears its head from the haze is the feeling of drifting, one day blurring into the next which is barely distinguishable from the one that follows it with the only discernible purpose being fighting whatever fire glows brightest both at work and in my personal life.

One of the most visible symptoms of this lingering disquiet has been a withdrawal from all but the most inescapable of contacts – work, family and the friends I have had the longest. I’ll be the first to admit I have never been the most outgoing of persons, but even by my standards the past year has been a new low for engagement across the board, from the spiritual to the mundane and then some more. Part of this reluctance to engage has to do, I suspect, with this feeling of drifting; the ones I might otherwise come across being reminders of the past and where I once was. There is also the small matter of the sense of feeling like I am at a crossroads of sorts, looking towards the next decade of my life and wondering if corrosion will continue to be a part of it, if tweaks are required to how I currently practice it, or if a wholesale change to something different is required to enable me reach the heights I feel like I need to. All of this makes taking time out to reflect for the next month a good place to start this rebooting from.

All told, one of the clearest lessons I have learned from the year of being 38 is that drifting is dangerous, particularly when it is a slow gradual descent in which the evolving present seems just familiar enough that no alarm bells ring, until at the end one finds oneself – to quote the lost son – in a far country. Once firmly ensconced there, returning can feel impossible, the distance between there and home feeling like a chasm so great that it cannot be bridged. More than I would like, I fear many times over the past year, I have tottered on the edge of that chasm sometimes beginning to slip and at others just managing to avoid taking the last step that would take me over the edge. It is a dark, dangerous and isolated place, one I am keen to step back from and begin the long trek home. Here’s to rebooting, and beginning again, yet again.