It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at

We tell ourselves we want change.

We stare across the divide at that other life - greener, cleaner, fuller, freer -
and we feel the ground beneath us hum,
one mundane tectonic plate of existence grinding against another.

Between them, a chasm.
Treacherous.
Beautiful.

We sense that to cross it will cost us something,
But we never quite know what until we’re already falling.

They say you only have one life,
But they never tell you that every transformation is a small death.
Every new beginning is a kind of loss.
The leap is a baptism in fire.
Everything you were, burned away in the hope of becoming something else.

And for a while, it works.
The air is different.
The light feels sharper.
You breathe more deeply because you think you’ve finally escaped the dull gravity of before.

But slowly, inevitably, the new becomes ordinary.
The thrill cools.
You look around and realise you’ve traded like for like,
perhaps even worse.
The view is unfamiliar, but the ache is the same.
And now you’ve lost what you had.

That is the paradox.
Life’s riddle.

Change or die, they say.
But what if change is a kind of dying?
What if every leap just brings you closer to the same horizon,
a little wearier, a little less sure of what you were chasing?

Still, the thought of standing still is worse.
To fester in familiarity,
to rot in the comfort of knowing exactly how each day will end.
That is its own kind of death,
a slower one.

So we leap again.
Because nothing is stopping us but fear,
And fear has never been a good enough reason to stay put.
We leap, even if each landing is a little harder,
even if each world feels slightly smaller.

But what if openness becomes foolishness?
What if, older now, worn and less able?
We are only grinning fools with no regard for the good that once was -
blind to the quiet value of stability?
Others build, brick by brick,
and we, forever shedding skins,
stand stripped of shelter, destitute in the open.

Or perhaps that’s just the fear of the unknown whispering again -
And what’s really happening is that we’re learning to travel light.
To understand that ownership is a form of captivity,
Those roots can also be chains.
Maybe both paths are traps:
the stillness and the motion, the safety and the risk.

And maybe the only true freedom is not in where we stand,
But in how we stand there,
in the mind that can either incarcerate us,
or set us free.

Author’s Note

The title comes from something Ian Brown said at the iconic Stone Roses gig at Alexandra Palace in 1989: “It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at.” I was there — a night that has stayed with me long after the faces and friendships of that time have faded. I don’t miss the time or the people, but I’m glad I was there.

Perhaps that’s really what this piece is about — not freedom, but acceptance. The understanding that moments pass, that people drift, and that it’s enough simply to have stood where you did, fully alive for a time.