Life

Life’s a funny old thing.

There are so many sides to it, so many people feeling so many different things within the space of a second on this planet that, if you really stop to think about it, it’s kinda scary!

For example, as you read these words, there will be people falling in love, people falling out of love, people being born, people dying, people laughing, people crying, people praying, people thinking about how they look, people petting their pets, people learning, people stuck on a ventilator… and the list goes on.

What made me think of this was two separate sides of life that came to me on Friday.

Don, who owns the school with Noel, came to me this afternoon quite upset. His mother, 87 and living in a home because her memory isn’t what it used to be, was taken to hospital for suspected heart failure; they didn’t believe she would live very much longer. He’d just seen her earlier in the week, and she’d been fine. And I think that struck him hard because it showed him how fragile life can be and how things can change in only a matter of a short period of time.

So Dorrie (his mother) is in hospital, in a bad way. They’re not sure if she will live, and Don reports she is seeing her husband and her daughter — both of who died years before. This, methinks, is never a good sign.

There, a life is ending. Maybe not today, maybe soon, but her life is now nearing a close.

On the other side of the world, near where I was born and raised, my sister-in-law’s twin sister, Darthy, was getting married this afternoon. She’d been searching for love in all the wrong places (to quote a song) and the tales of some of the guys she’d end up with shocked me, to be honest.

And finally, she met a man who opened his heart to her, did all he could for her and her son, and showed her the kindness and compassion she deserved to see from the start.

Together, a new chapter in their life has begun. A new start, a new beginning as a family and hopefully a successful one at that. For a man to love a woman so much that he’s willing to take her child (who’s not his) in as his own is okay in my book.

Here we are with two separate events in one day to show how multifaceted and complex life is. I often think strange thoughts like that, and sometimes my head feels like it’s going to explode because the concept is too large for one person to handle. Sometimes it feels like I am outside myself when I contemplate these things and realise that life is a lot more than just me and who I am, yet, it couldn’t exist without me or who I am. A very strange paradox indeed.

The moral of this story is love, laugh, live and enjoy life. Start every chapter fresh. As I said to one of my friends recently in response to her blog, don’t look back like Lot’s wife, for you too may never turn back. And live in each moment. For too long I was focused on the future, on the past, so much so that the present was gliding by and I was too busy somewhere else.

Big hugs to everyone!!!