A line from one of my all time favourite songs…
I was not sure whether this was the right place for this but I’ve decided this is where I want to put it. I’ve just written it, I’ve not even read it through as I’m about to go out. It’s been written with lots of interuptions, I’ve lost track of my thread several times so there is every chance I’ve not said everything I meant to or got the tone right. But I wanted to get it out as it’s swimming in my mind and I want to capture it now…
I’ve been reading Hannah’s Gift last night and this morning and been hugely moved and inspired by it. I’ve not finished it yet but as it is not a story and it is not going to have a happy ending as such but so many things about the message in it have resonated with me hugely.
Obviously on a personal level the fact I am a mother, and indeed have a small daughter the same age as Hannah has been particularly heart wrenching – Scarlett was snuggled, naked (split coco-pops and any excuse!) under my dressing gown with me this morning while I was reading it, stroking my face as tears rolled down my cheeks telling me how pretty and sparkly my eyes were with tears in them…
I have several friends who have first hand personal experience of sick children – some have had the happy ending, some have not. I also have several friends who have lost children before they were ever born – a different sort of pain and sorrow again. So all of these friends have been dancing about in my head as I’ve read the book but that’s not what the book is about really, at last not what I’ve got from it.
For me reading the book has come at a time when I’ve been on a slow journey to realising that in our one life we need to grab every opportunity even if some of them are very well hidden, sometimes you have to get yourself dressed up warmly, put on one of those hard hats with a miners light on the front, pack yourself some kendal mint cake and go searching for an opportunity. Sometimes you might think you’ve found your opportunity and later realise it wasn’t it after all, sometimes that opportunity is what takes you the next step of the way to the next opportunity – a bridging opportunity if you will.
So what I’ve taken from the book is a sense that length of life means very little really. I have every intention of growing old and being that old lady running my walking stick up and down the railings, living in a house with 22 cats and scaring small children at bus stops – but just as I suspected when I was a child life actually doesn’t all move at the same pace throughout your life, it actually moves very differently.
When you are a child it’s like your life is a dvd on fast speed (although it feels slow – a summer holiday feels endless, the space between two Christmasses feels way more than just one year) – in just one day you have crises and victories, you know great joy and great sorrow, everything is magnified, colours are brighter, sounds are louder, love is enormous. Great drama can be experienced in a dropped ice cream, great miracles of healing witnessed in mummy kissing it better.
When you are an adult the dvd is in real time – a year is precisely a year, you have good days and bad days, you summarise your years, you feel the changing of the seasons. Bad things take far longer to recover from and sometimes you never do. Good things are celebrated and more life changing. You think choices are your own, actually you have probably never been less free.
In your latter years it might feel like life is whizzing by, you don’t know where the years have gone, let alone the months, weeks, days and hours. But actually you are now on very s l o w s p e e d. Nothing much ever changes to you, just to what you observe and who is around you. 20 years could pass and your daily routine could remain unchanged, although the world is moving on and up around you your basic beliefs and ideas and knowledge base remains the same. You have already become you, that happened years ago and the chances are your time of self discovery is over. That makes it sound grim, infact providing you have good health and comfort I would imagine this is the most enjoyable period, time to enjoy the fruits of your labour and relax into the person you are.
Or you could split life into decades – in my first decade I was a child and life was as I described in the earlier paragraph, in my second decade I did being a teenager and all the freedom that that offered. I was able to be selfish, grow into myself and enjoy being who I decided I was going to be. In my third decade, my 20s I did a lot of foundation laying – I had a career, I married, I had babies. I’m now just a couple of years into my fourth decade – my 30s. This one is a pretty even split of being all about me and being all about my children. At the moment the two halves are very complementary – we’re very bound up by each other but as much as they need me I also equally need them, they are teaching me who I am right now at this stage and what I learn from them will help me into the next phase of my life. My aim is to leave this decade – in 8 years with a clear idea of what the next decade is to be about, who I am in what could be the midpoint of my life and what I want to gain out of whatever time I have left.
Back to the book – the message I have taken from it is that truth or life happens regardless and what you can change is the way you view it and what effect you allow it to have on you. In the same way as the worst thing that can ever happen to us can also be the very best if it is the catalyst for reaching for the moon having hit rock bottom with up as the only way to go. Even the worst comprehensible things could be made worse in some ways. I can choose to be humbled by how positive people can be in the face of having dealt with some of the worst situations I can ever comprehend dealing with, I can choose to wallow in my own misery, I can choose to feel lucky that my life is actually really rather fantastic, or I can grab it and work out how I can make it even better than that.
Guess which choice I’m making starting today, right here, right now…
Hannah’s Gift. I read it about four years ago, I think. Hannah could read the title, but not much else, and she had a pair of shoes almost identical to the cover picture. Her kidney tumour fortunately wasn’t the same. But she insisted whenever she saw it in the bookcase that it was a book about her, and eventually I got rid of it, as I had to believe that it was not going to be her story. But despite everything, it’s a book about hope, so maybe in some way it is her story. Oh god, I’ve had too much to drink…..