I WAS born just off the Falls Road, at 248 Cupar Street, up a short terrace of two-up, two-down where the rain settled in before you did. The houses leaned into one another as if for support, and some mornings the street felt older than I am.

I’m seventy-odd now. I’ve stopped counting properly. After a while the numbers don’t add much, except weight – in the bones, in the memories, in the pauses between things.

Friends still call me a student. I don’t correct them. It’s the truest thing about me. I’ve spent most of my life learning the wrong lessons quickly and the right ones slowly. If there’s wisdom in age, it doesn’t arrive polished. It comes worn, chipped, but carried lightly if you’re lucky.

I didn’t imagine this life. That’s the first thing I had to face. I imagined something neater, a straighter road, fewer wrong turns, fewer apologies made silently. I imagined a version of myself who got it right more often than not. For years I carried that picture around, measuring everything against it: the work I did, the relationships I lost, the words I didn’t say in time. That’s how perfection gets you. You suffer not from what is, but from what you think should have been.

I know now how heavy that vision can be. How it sits on the chest and shortens the breath. How it tightens the jaw and hardens the heart. How it turns good enough into failure. I’ve punished myself for small things and big things alike, for deeds meant well and words said clumsily. No good deed goes unpunished, especially when you’re the one doing the punishing, replaying the moment long after everyone else has moved on.

Zen came to me late. Not in some far-off place, but here, among ordinary chairs and ordinary people trying to make sense of themselves. There were no grand promises. The instruction was simple enough to sound useless.

Notice your breath.

So I did.

In.

Out.

Nothing fancy.

At first it felt like I was wasting time. Sitting there while the world carried on without me. Then I realised how much time I’d wasted not being here at all, living ahead of myself, or behind myself, anywhere but where I was. The breath doesn’t ask about the life I imagined. It doesn’t care what I should have done or who I should have been. It just arrives, and leaves. This moment, it tells me, is complete.

I started to see what I was holding on to: old hurts polished smooth by repetition, old stories I told myself about being decent, about being right, about being someone who tried. I held on to perfection because I thought it would save me. All it did was weigh me down.

Letting go didn’t give me fireworks. It gave me space. And in that space I found what I’d been looking for all along – not answers, but ease. Not a perfect life, but a real one.

This isn’t the life I imagined.

It’s the life I have.

Some days I still forget. Some days the old habits come back, sharp as ever. But I notice the breath. I feel the chair beneath me. I remember that imperfection isn’t the problem, clinging is.

So I keep studying.

At my age, what else would I be doing?

Breathing in.

Breathing out.

Letting go, again and again, of the weight of perfection.