I’m watching the clock. Watching and waiting. Waiting for my phone to vibrate, and my daughter’s voice to ask when I’m picking her up. She works in a pub in town – running food orders and serving at the bar when needed.
The temperature is dropping while I’m writing this – I imagine overnight it will dip below zero. At least my chest seems to be recovering from the suspected bout of Covid I’ve been dealing with for the last week and a half. I wonder what it will make of the cold air during the couple of mile walk to the pub and back?
This week has been strange. It’s Wednesday today – “hump day”. The last few days have felt like ground-hog day – filled with an endless round of work, chores, obligations and expectations. While folding clothes, doing the washing up, or trudging into town to meet your children from work it’s easy to imagine the rest of the world have much more exciting lives – but I suspect they have exactly the same thoughts.
I’m just glad that I have one or two friends that somehow manage to find me during the more bleak moments. I would like to think I might find them too – to listen, to share, and to lessen their burden from time to time. I think perhaps the universe arranges our entrances and exits – delivering us when we are needed.
I think sometimes I need to take more notice of the universe.
Is it really a coincidence when forging a friendship that we discover endless similarities in each other? Perhaps some friendships were always meant to be.
A passage from Forrest Gump comes to mind:
“I don’t know if we each have a destiny, or if we’re all just floatin’ around accidental-like on a breeze, but I, I think maybe it’s both. Maybe both is happenin’ at the same time.”
It’s always fascinated me that we pass through each other’s lives in different ways – at different times – sometimes fleetingly, sometimes keeping pace for a little while, and sometimes for the rest of our days. There’s an old saying – “when you know, you know” – I think perhaps we really do know when somebody of significance walks into our life.
In recent months I’ve been thinking quite a lot – not just about friendships – also about me. I tend to weigh everything I do in terms of the perception of others. I put myself last at every juncture. I worry about how something might look – what others might think – what the results of a given action will be. It’s easy to tie yourself in knots if you fall down any of those rabbit holes.
A rather famous fictional headmaster once said “it doesn’t do to dwell on dreams, and forget to live”. I think he was right.
Living seems to require rather a lot of bravery though.
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