The tricky middle.
You're not stuck in the middle, you're in the now.
I am standing on the Lancashire coast just passed Lytham St Annes and I can see my past and my future at the same time. Across the river, to the south is Southport and the memory of good people in hard times. Ahead of me, to the north I can see the tip of the Rollercoaster at Blackpool.
I've stopped walking for an early lunch. I turn around slowly, South to North. I am standing in the present. Not leaving somewhere, nor arriving. Just here, in the middle, between two worlds. As Max and Paddy said “I don't know where I'm going, I've got no way of knowing…but I'm on the road to somewhere.”
Looking back:
Southport is not just a town on a map. Not for me, not now.
I won't say too much about what happened there, because some things belong to the people who lived them and changed me and not for public consumption. But I will say this: there were days in Southport that were the happiest I'd had in years. Days when I remembered what it felt like to be simply happy and seen . When the weight I'd been carrying - the separation from family, the descent of a life coming apart, lifted enough that I could breathe again for a while.
These are places that save you. Not because of what they physically contain, the seafront, the people, but because of who was there to help in tough times.
Southport saved me. I look back at it now from the middle of the Fylde and I feel gratitude so large I can never repay it. It just sits there, warm and complicated, behind me on the horizon.
Looking forward:
Blackpool is another thing entirely.
It stands on my northern horizon in the form of its now visible South pier - like with Southport’s pier, it was all ambition, built by people who believed that the working men and women of Lancashire deserved something rather lovely on their holidays. It is a monument to optimism. Something built to last.
I have complicated feelings about Blackpool and Southport. Everybody does. It is impossible to look at it neutrally. Are they in decline or is this resilience?
Is this a metaphor for my life?
I haven't arrived anywhere yet . That's the point. From here, Blackpool is still potential. It hasn't yet had the chance to be anything other than a landmark on the horizon, it's nothing but a way point for me. Right now it is simply the future and the future always looks nicer from a distance.
This is what the middle does to you. It gives you perspective that arrival never can.
We spend so much of our lives either looking back or looking forward. The past pulls at us -the things we regret, the people we miss, the versions of ourselves we outlived. The future pulls at us, it’s beckoning. It’s also uncertain. What we almost never do is stop, turn slowly in the wind on a cold Lancashire coast and look at both at the same time.
I have written in other essays about the horizons we carry within us. The weight of what's behind us and the shape of what's coming. But I hadn't understood, until this moment, that the present is not a compromise between past and future. I've spent so many years terrorised by my past and scared for my future that I forgot about the present. It is not the halfway point on a sliding scale. The present is its own place.
Standing here, I am not half-way between Southport and Blackpool. I am entirely, completely here. On this path, in this wind, with these memories behind me and this uncertain hope ahead. And for today that feels more than enough.
Middles have a bad reputation. We treat them as the difficult bit between the beginning (which is exciting) and the end, which is resolved. The middle of a film is where the pace sags. The middle of a project is where enthusiasm drains away. The middle of life, is for many of us, a crisis - as if being exactly where you are, rather than at the beginning or the end, were a condition requiring treatment.
But I think we've been reading middles wrong. Maybe it’s the best bit?
A beginning is just potential, not yet tested. An ending is just resolution, the loose ends tied. The middle is where everything actually happens. Where our character is revealed - not in the excitement of setting out or the relief of arriving but in the long, boring, middle section where you just have to keep going.
I am 48 years old and I have been living in my middle for a while now. The first half - the career, the marriage, the version of a life I cherished, that I thought I was building - has vanished behind me. What's ahead I cannot fully see, any more than I can fully see Blackpool from here. I know it's there. I can make out its outline. I know roughly the direction I need to walk. But I haven't lived it yet, which means it still belongs entirely to possibility.
This is not the worst place to be. What's there, behind me: Southport, happiness, and people who mattered enormously, and the slow beginning of a return to myself. What's there, ahead: Blackpool Tower, the unknown, and a hundred miles already walked, that prove I can do this, and whatever comes after. And me standing in it, looking both ways, grateful, frightened and yet alive.
Sometimes the middle is exactly where you need to be. The question I'm leaving with you is the one that stopped me in that field. If you turned around right now and looked at both horizons at once, what would you see? And what would it tell you about where you're standing right now ?
This essay is part of On the Trail of Happiness, a Substack exploring walking, love, loss, and the long work of building a life worth living. The walk however is being undertaken in aid of Andy's Man Club.
You can donate to the cause here. https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/adam-waldron-2