The town I live in has an amazing park. It has a lake, a bandstand, fields and woodland, football pitches, netball and tennis courts, a skatepark, a BMX track, an athletics stadium, kid’s playgrounds, honestly, the list seems endless. I’ve spent many hours of my life strolling around its beautiful spaces, and every single time I feel blessed to have it on my doorstep.
It’s seen me through many of life’s joys and sorrows, always grounding me and helping me find perspective. It’s where I decompress. It’s where I meet up with friends. It’s where I head when I’m on a fitness mission, determinedly power-walking its paths. On occasion, I’ve even been known to break into a little jog when my mind decides to remind my body it can do a little better. The jog never lasts though as, red-faced and out of breath, I stop before anyone sees me.
Nestled amongst this greenspace oasis is a little garden, peaceful and secluded, with cottage-style flowerbeds bustling with colour, and an air filled with the hustle and bustle of nature. In a corner of this haven of calm is my dad’s memorial park bench. I don’t visit the bench every time I’m at the park, but every so often I like to say hello, to have a moment with my memories.
After my most recent visit, just as I was heading along the path that leads out of the garden, I heard music coming from a boombox somewhere close by. Not an unusual sound to hear in the park, there’s lots of groups of kids of varying ages about, keeping themselves entertained, it’s what the park’s for after all. I remember being a teen myself, meeting up with my mates here, one of us providing the tunes on a battery-powered cassette player, usually a bootleg copy of the latest hair-band rock album. And so, not an unusual sound to hear in the park at all, it was more the song being played that caught my attention.
Eye of the Tiger, by Survivor.
Now, as the 80’s were the soundtrack to my youth, this is a song I’m very familiar with. It was a colossal hit back in the day, intrinsically linked to the Rocky film franchise, and whilst the original Rocky movie is a gritty, albeit predictable, timeless classic, the same could not be said of Rocky III which featured the song. The movie is a cliché-riddled, formulaic crowd-pleaser, hugely successful yes, but not a classic, and despite Eye of the Tiger’s equally huge success, it is nothing more than pure, crowd-pleasing, 80’s cheese. And very definitely not cool.
So, who would be playing such a song out loud in the park on sunny summer’s evening? It was to my amusement I saw the culprit wasn’t the twentysomething dude carrying the offending boombox on his shoulder. I had a little chuckle to myself as he sauntered past me, trying his hardest to simultaneously stay on brand and swallow his humiliation as his mates, a few paces behind, took control of the playlist, very obviously pleased with themselves.
It was an entertaining scene to stumble across, a timely reminder that life is better when it’s filled with fun interactions and not always taken so seriously.
Given the journey I’ve been on these last few months, life has felt a little more serious than usual. Getting to grips with having a bunch of newfound letters-after-my-name has had me all contemplative and withdrawn. And, whilst I’m not Rocky Balboa, like, I’m not about to run through the streets of my hometown to the encouragement of hordes of bystanders, before triumphantly running up the seventy-two steps to the Museum of Art, victoriously punching the air at the top (because for one thing I don’t live in Philadelphia and another, my lungs could not take the exertion), I feel I am long overdue a little kickassery of my own.
And so, I’ve decided, from now on I’ll be focussing on giving less energy to the retrospective what-ifs that have been gnawing away at me, and instead giving more power to the opportunistic (not to be confused with impulsive) what-ifs that I usually silence. Maybe I’ll even pay less attention to the self-doubt I’ve been riddled with my whole life, and try a little harder to free the self-belief I know is within me somewhere.
One step at a time and all that, but who knows what I can do now I know why I’m a bit of a square peg.
What if it could even become my superpower?
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