The past week or so has been pretty challenging. Illness, insomnia, hormones and a few major life events have collided with considerable force.
I can’t blog about the major life events so I’m going to ramble slightly incoherently instead. Here goes …
Quite belatedly, my mind has been blown by A.A. Milne. You don’t expect someone who wrote a book called “Winne the Pooh” to have that such a profound effect on you as an adult. But I look at some of the quotes from the book now and feel awed by their beauty and wisdom:
“You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”
Piglet: “How do you spell love?”
Pooh: “You don’t spell it, you feel it.”
“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
“A day spent with you is my favorite day. So today is my new favorite day.”
“As soon as I saw you, I knew an adventure was going to happen.”
“Some people care too much. I think it’s called love.”
Pretty beautiful words, don’t you think?
Love is such a mercurial emotion. It can take you so high and drag you so low … sometimes both at the same time.
That might seem like a contradiction in terms, but my life over the past four years has taught me that it’s perfectly possible to have a heart filled with love and feel totally gutted at the same time.
A.A Milne kinda sums it up in that “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard” quote.
Life has sent me a series of curve balls – it has filled my recent years with more love and heartache than I ever thought possible to co-exist in the same timeline.
And that combination has required me to be far stronger than I ever thought possible.
But I came a little bit undone yesterday. Unfortunately it was smack-bang in the middle of a meeting at work. I am not one for melodramatically running from a room, but I melodramatically ran from a room.
The reason why is a story for another time in the distant future.
For now I am focussed on being the best version of myself that I can be. Yesterday I slipped up. (OK, I often slip up.) Today I will set my shoulders and start over.
Sometimes I wail that life throws me a few too many of those curve balls, but I always feel more lucky than unlucky.
After all, just look at some of the mindblowing things I’ve done in the last few years alone:
And then there’s the stuff I don’t have photos of … like kayaking at Pittwater as dolphins circled my canoe.
And then there are the intangibles, like getting a chance to be in love again in my late 40s, and watching two creatures I grew in my belly gallop towards adulthood.
It’s been wonderful and I know there will be many, many more special moments ahead.
Just gotta get through the rest of this week first.
Song of the day: Kelly Clarkson “Stronger”
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