On the drive down to Bristol this morning, …

On the drive down to Bristol this morning, I was listening to a 90’s mix. Two tunes caught my attention, One Headlight by The Wallflowers and Public Enemy’s He Got Game featuring Stephen Stills. I’ll deal with He Got Game in another post. Here’s the Wallflower line that poked me in the eye:

“Man, I ain’t changed but I know I’m not the same.”

I kept turning it over in my mind as the road passed beneath me. It names a kind of change that doesn’t fit the usual before-and-after story. There’s no clean break, no discarded self standing at the side of the road. The old patterns are still recognisable. The same voice answers to the same name. Yet the person hearing it knows something has moved.

At fifty-eight, I can trace certain threads all the way back: the urge to wander, the need to write, the suspicion that the official version of reality is never the whole story. I haven’t outgrown those things. If anything, I’ve grown further into them. But I don’t inhabit them in quite the same way. What once felt like restlessness now feels more like method. What looked like drifting has begun to reveal a path.

Maybe we notice real change only when we stop looking for a replacement self. We expect transformation to arrive with new clothes and a manifesto. More often, it appears in the changed relationship we have with what has been there all along.

The thought hasn’t changed, but I have.

The car kept moving south. I carried on with the same name, listening from somewhere new.

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