(Moments)
I was at a BBQ very recently (multiple birthdays within a few days), then sat down (a separate day!) for Sunday roast with friends. These were two marvelous shared experiences. “Moments” if you will, snatched out of the universe.
And events this week, have brought the need to seize moments into a clearer prespective.
A good friend has been admitted to hospital after (quite a severe) stroke, an event seemingly out of the proverbial blue. Now while the news from hospital is tentatively good (through a combination of factors-time, location- diagnoses and treatment were astonishingly swift), it is still early days, and there remains a prospect of lengthy rehabilitation to fully recover.
As “second hand” recipients of the news, it was shocking and disturbing, how much more so for Val herself and her husband and boys. Although I have some inkling from my own experience, that now seems a distant memory of another person. I recall the sudden fear (and believe no-one who says they were not very scared), and how in a few heart beats, all the detrius of day to day was washed away to crystalise on the few key things; family – health, life – death…
In my own story that chapter closed well (thus far), and I wish Val as full and complete a recovery as my own, but I believe I started the next chapter as a different person, and I do not mean just the changes in alcohol consumption and diet. I think , despite my supposed hang-dog pessimism -(realism I say!), that I still carry a fragment of that brief blinding clarity, and I also hope that Val can find that to carry forwards.
A “piece of clarity” can be a valuable tool against the vicitudes of life and work, although you do have to remember to polish it and actually look through it (“does this thing really matter? is this really worth stressing about?””), not just leave it in your pocket, and one of it’s special qualities is can reflect as well (“am I still doing the things I said I would?”).
Brother Bert observed – when we received the news -, that with tragedy “one never knows the moment”, and thus, we cannot avoid it. But we can prepare for that unknown , building our resistance by forging as many important moments as we can from fate and time, so that when we must look with that awful clarity, what we can see is that our lives are not swept away with the mundane, but filled with the things that truly matter.
Next week on IaDL: Probably some complaint about nightshift.
Dalmallyfest the Asylum 