This entry was originally destined for my diary but on reflection I’ve decided to post it on flatwhite in the hope that it’ll inspire a little positivity for any readers who are having a bad day – it’s not easy to count your blessings sometimes, but it really does help when you do. Having just returned from a friend’s wedding in Australia (a magnificent affair) I was feeling a bit low, in the way that you do after something you’ve looked forward to for ages comes and passes. Rather than allow the anti-climactic feelings to swallow me up for days, as is usual, I decided to try and inject some positives thoughts into the mix to crowd out the woeful ones. Here’s the list of little blessings that I came up with:
- Riding my bike home from work tonight I could, for the first time ever, have overtaken someone on The Most Evil Hill in Wellington (the city has many attractions, but the multitude of steep hills, many of which lie between my home and work, is not one of them). For someone who until recently considered bikes to be an instrument of torture, being in this situation was quite an achievement. I didn’t actually overtake, because I didn’t really need to; it was just nice to know that I could have done it.
- A little while into my flight back to New Zealand from Brisbane, I got to watch a beautiful sun set over the Tasman Sea. Golden clouds and an amber sun against a bright pink sky makes for a pretty decent view from an aircraft window.
- One for the ladies: at the end of the wedding reception, 7 Magnificent Kiwis in Kilts performed a haka. Scrumptious!!
- I was lucky enough to meet lots of lovely people for the first time at the wedding and hopefully I’ll keep in touch with some of them. One in particular had enough positivity and passion for life to light up a room, and was magical to be around. I also got to catch up with a number of old friends, some of whom I haven’t seen for a good while. Having the opportunity to renew old friendships and to make some new ones are really the biggest blessings of the last few days of my life, so I’ll finish off with a few quotes that, for me, sum up pretty well what friendship means (the second one is for my girls, OP and Dot):
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. ~Marcel Proust
Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is half a sorrow. ~Swedish Proverb
Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. "Pooh!" he whispered. "Yes, Piglet?" "Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw. "I just wanted to be sure of you." ~A.A. Milne
the person who…
"had enough positivity and passion for life to light up a room, and was magical to be around"
…did you tell them this?
That’s lovely Jo. I was feeling pretty crappy after knocking myself out last weekend, and this post brightened me a touch. It’s been a bloody horrible week recovering, but looking back on it after reading what you wrote I’m damned grateful to have had such close friends around when it happened.
It was the most disconcerting episode I’ve had in…well, perhaps ever. When I came to I didn’t know where I was, why I was there. I couldn’t even remember the bloody novel draft I’d finished only a day or so earlier when my friends tried to use it to jog my memory. It took a horribly long time for my brain to build up the layers of memory, one by one, until I settled down and slipped back into the present. Urgh…
But what I did know, hadn’t forgotten, were the people around me. My first sense was my mate crouching next to me on the floor calling my name, then another making me a cup of tea, another calling an ambulance (against what I’m sure would have been my foolish protests) and yet another later that day calling my lady to let her know what had happened.
Little things to them perhaps, but bloody big to me…
I didn’t tell the person, no, but perhaps I should?
Matt, understand very well how disconcerting that episode would have been, having found myself in the same position a few times over the last couple of years – last time being in Oamaru, Feb 2007, after a very pleasant evening with some Little Blue Penguins. Ending up at the bottom of a (mercifully short) flight of stairs unconcious was not the best way to end the night, but hey, Book #2 has been born from the incident, so it wasn’t all bad!! It seems to be extreme dehydration that causes it for me, so I watch the water intake very carefully these days! And yes, having friends around at a time like that sure is a blessing. Hope you’re all better now.