Thought Picnic: How normalcy helps the healing process

We need something holding up

Imagine being on a boat in a storm, the boat getting battered by waves and buffeted by the winds, as long as the boat is not disintegrating, you will probably stay on the boat with the hope that you can weather the storm.

It is the same with many other situations in life, during times of fragility and vulnerability you want to know that something is constant and sturdy. You appreciate the little joys and pleasures being thankful for the snatches of happiness that come your way.

With regards to others, the desire is that they are not also falling apart just as your world seems to be falling apart, they would sometimes create the normalcy you need in support, succour, encouragement, understanding, and comfort.

Little sacrifices go a long way

Every tendency to be impulsive is put aside so as not to cause upset, offence, or rupture. Knowing that in the earthquakes of living some things are immovable given the relationships you have gives you a sense that the turmoil is limited in its range and when put in perspective, things are not as bad as they seem.

Obviously, it is a bit much to ask that others abandon their individuality and engagements for you, though some would commit to more than that to help take your mind off things, they avoid where the many minor issues when looked at together seem like a pile on of the upsetting and the consequential.

Upset and offence is easy without care

You want to ask for a small thing and hope you have been heard. Yet, human nature, in its various inclinations of satisfying lust, want, or need can come across as uncaring, wilful, obdurate, and selfish.

That minor shift becomes a major upset, and you begin to lose essential concentration on the particular because the peripheral that you hoped was unshifting has become part of the storm indistinguishable from the rest and impactful in its effect.

Probably people do not realise how significant their role is in helping maintain some normalcy for others undergoing issues, even sometimes to their own detriment, for in keeping things as they are they become part of the healing process others need.

Volunteering my volition

By my volition

I attended a session yesterday which would form part of a 10-week programme in the hope that it would kickstart something that would help me recover much of the sense of wellness and well-being that I have been struggling to settle in.

Caught between funk and frustration, I sometimes wonder how much more is in the tank for the journey ahead. Even when I feel quite exhausted something spurs me on as doubts creep into my mind about what there is to learn about who one might become as these changes in circumstances remain unsavoury.

One is not without constant encouragement from my partner, my friend, and my mother, but the feeling of being carried in the winds of a storm is such that there is no indication of where one might land. Between the lifting and the landing, brutal encounters might ensue for which in the consciousness of the event one silently prays to survive and in landing, one hopes not to be too severely bruised.

Maybe even the storm is to shake things up a bit so that when peace comes to reign supreme in the calming and passing of the storm, a new wholeness redefines one's present continuous experience of nothing missing, nothing lacking, and nothing broken. I have to believe in something, fixing on what; seems to elude me.

Incubating blogs

This blog was written hours ago and unlike many other blogs that I publish as I finish writing, I did not feel I had finished the blog and at the same, I had no inclination to change any part of what had already been written. When I had another look, I added the last sentence in the penultimate paragraph preceding this one that explains my thinking.

Thought Picnic: Life in the times of chicken

Life creates us as we create life

There is a part of me that I probably do not acknowledge that much that some people see in me as being a survivor for which I am thankful and grateful for the gift of life and living. For a long time, what has become the story of my life, mostly unplanned but navigated in the baby steps and the giant leaps that on reflection appears accomplished; everything has just been life and I cannot live another life but my own.

That I have by the accident of events I have lived through sometimes become a shoulder to lean on is not a role I have sought, but it is one to which I hope to deploy my full humanity, consideration, and attention, because for anyone met with infirmity or adversity, things are tough, and perspective is difficult to obtain when you are in the midst of an ordeal.

In the life of chicken

The way reality and realisation begin to materialise sometimes hits us by surprise if not shock that we are probably not as young, as agile, as composed, as strong, as prepared, or as ready to perform as we once were able to. We are dogged by our history robbing us of a moderated present with a difficulty in squaring up how consequential things are that recovery will take time and pace may never return to Peak Me.

A friend opined, “I should accept the spring chicken is more of an old rooster now.” To which I responded thankful for the frame of mind that allows that kind of inspiration in the propinquity of the exchange. “One thing, it is the rooster that announces the breaking of the dawn, that the night and the nightmare is over.” When the spring chicken has matured into an old rooster, the time of spring chicken things and living in danger is over, as the rooster heralds a time of living with peace.

I pray that for everyone going through a storm in their lives, the calm would soon come to give them comfort, safety, succour, and security that they can begin to cherish the little moments, start living from good to better, day to day, and see the days tally into a story of once not being able to see beyond the night to having experienced on the whole, a wonderful life.