Amazing how simple it is.  How simple it is to suddenly appreciate something so much when you no longer have it.

 

My daily gratitude book is filled with how thankful I am for so much, the little things as well as the big things.  The big shake up of our life, sifting out what is important and what is less so.  And even for that, as hard, painful, devastating as it has been to uncover, I am grateful for a way to look at life with a new perspective.

 

Perhaps that is why a trip to Antarctica next year is so appealing.  To sift out more of what is just cosmetic.

 

Today as I lay crippled in pain with back muscles in hard spasm from stupid solo manoeuvres with a large oak bed to please a small boy with a ‘new’ bedroom, I am reminded to be grateful of mobility and pain free living.

 

The pain and the lack of mobility played tricks on me;  causing frustration and friction between my head and heart, my usual technique of running to clear my head or getting out to distract myself not possible and so my head took over.  My temper raging and my fuse short.

 

Just when I had re-found my energy to get up and get on and do things, continue breaking my bad habits formed from traumatic stress fatigue, the universe plays a cruel trick, causing me to slow down, take it easy.  And I don’t want to.  I want to get on with living!  I want to carry on wiping that slate clean and rebuilding a new existence in this new chapter that has presented itself to me.  But life has a different plan, throwing me back in to the previous one, stalling my progress.

 

I thought that reading my new book ‘Brave enough’ by Cheryl Strayed would help but the next quote after my book mark enraged me…

 

“It is the plight of every monogamous person at one time or another to love X but want to f*ck Z.   

We all love X but want to f*ck Z.  Z is so gleaming, so crystalline, so unlikely to bitch at you for neglecting to take out the recycling.  Nobody has to haggle with Z.  Z doesn’t even wear a watch.

Z is like a motorcycle with no one on it.  Beautiful.  Going nowhere.”

 

Perhaps if I had been in less pain, I would have interpreted that in a positive light, that ‘Z’ has been sent on her way, going nowhere, with no one, no plans, no life.  In her messages, all she wanted to do was talk about me.  Was she trying to live my life?  Have my life?  Jealous of my life?  I have always thought motorcycles were pretty insecure.

 

But in my state of pain, all I envisaged was me, alone eternally taking out the bins, taking out the washing, taking out the clean plates from the dishwasher, while the motorbike was doing donuts around me, laughing at me, invisible in the dust it threw up behind it.

 

My imagination is amazing, yet crippling.   I need to lasso my mind, harness it;  for it is currently the motorcycle, beautiful, but going nowhere and not serving any purpose at all in the healing process.  It needs to return to love and get back to being X.

 

The next quote helped.

 

“Do not reach the era of child-rearing and real jobs with a guitar case full of crushing regret for all the things you wished you’d done in your youth.  People who didn’t do those things risk becoming mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions of the people they intended to be.”

 

And I go back to being grateful, dare I say it, for the motorcycle, for Z.  Because if that hadn’t happened, I would be turning in to a shrink-wrapped version of X.

 

And I take it as a sign that all roads lead to Antarctica.