Lived Experience

“You didn’t expect this?” .... I felt rather than heard her judgement. The joy and excitement I felt just a second ago at getting my old friend’s phone call, slip-slided into the pits where those reside who are found to be guilty as charged. I struggled through my speechlessness exacerbating my feeling of guilt by telling myself that this was just me being oversensitive. I took a deep breath, made it across the crevice that suddenly had appeared between us and started to assure her that “sure I knew that I was going to face some hick-ups in moving back.”.

Being cognitively aware of the implications of our choices is one thing. Living them is quite another. This reminds me of a story I heard about a daughter telling a friend that she wanted to work on being prepared for the passing of her elderly parents. Her friend replied by asking whether any of them were poorly at the moment. “No, not really”, the daughter replied,”I just don’t want to be so shattered when the day comes.”. The friend wondered how on earth the daughter was going to effectively prepare - creating more space between them, seeing them less frequently, focussing more on her own life instead of sharing the final stage of theirs?  

Being so busy preparing and fine tuning our contingency planning we seem to lose our ability to endure the inevitable. It seems to me that the art of living includes the ability to live through the good and the bad times - meeting our joys and our sadness on equal footing, rather than favouring the feel-good ones and shunning the rest. By living through all of our experiences we grow into the complete and unique person I think we are meant to be.

The friend gently advised the daughter to love her parents now in any way she can, creating the memories she will later treasure and find solace in when their time has come. 

​Have a good one!

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