curve ball – Aspirational Adventures

So as I told you in my last post I’d been told that I’d been told not to drive. Today I got confirmation that my driving days are over. Thanking God that I had lens replacement surgery 13 years ago and so my vision forward is fine and I can still read and write. But now it is official that I can’t drive again. I’ve been thrown a curve ball

in the sport of baseball, a throw in which the ball curves as it moves towards the player with the bat:

something unexpected and difficult to deal with that changes a situation:

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/curveball

I must admit I never knew the baseball term, curve ball, but the other definition is correct. Though really it doesn’t feel difficult to deal with . It just feels something to deal with that is unexpected. Yes it does change my whole situation and make life very different. I will no longer be able to get in the car first thing in the morning and go to a deserted beach. But I do have a friend who used to be a bus driver who is going to help navigate getting to far flung places. The other day I did get the bus to the beach and realised what an advantage there is. I could get off the beach at one place. Walk for a couple of miles and then get on a different bus further a long the beach. I didn’t have to go back to where I’d started and get my car.

I love this quote from Jon Stewart ….

‘the unfortunate, yet truly exciting thing about your life,

is that there is no core curriculum.

the entire place is an elective.’

-jon stewart

Found on I don’t have my glasses on ….

I think too often we expect to be able to choose that core curriculum, make those decisions on what we want our life to be. In many self-help books we are told this is what we should do – set goals, make place, know where we want to go or we won’t get there. And ok yes there is some truth in that but I think we always need to be ready for when life takes us off that core curriculum, when an elective is chucked in front of us, when we have to dodge or catch that curve ball. But too often when those things get thrown at us we react badly because it is not what we wanted, not what we think we deserve, not what we think should happen in our lives that we are struggling to control.

So not being able to drive was not my plan for my life at this moment in time, but then, as I explore writing my memoir tales, a lot happened in my life that, even though I let happen, even orchestrated, it wasn’t really what I wanted. The awesome thing now is that I can lean into God, trust God let me know and full believe that they know their plans for me which is to give me a future and a hope – and that hope only comes, I believe, through my trust in them.

At this junction I can choose whether to have hope or whether to be in despair. I choose hope.

How to be grateful when life isn’t being fair

Photo looking across a wooden fence through trees that are just starting to turn autumnal towards a waterfall. Taken by Diane Woodrow — Swallow Falls, Conwy, taken by myself on Sunday 10th October

I’ve been having a quiet rant to God on behalf of a friend. I’m not sure if she’s ranting too but I am. Last week her youngest daughter gave birth to her first child in her early 40’s after years of trying; miscarriages, IVF, etc. But then at the start of this week my friend’s dad died suddenly. It isn’t fair, I am shouting into the heavens. Why can’t her and her family enjoy the awesomeness of this miracle baby just for a few months without having to deal with grief? Why???

The season in GodspaceLight is gratitude, and I know I’ve also written about gratitude on here in various guises, but my thought for today is “how can I/we be genuinely grateful when life is being unfair? “

But then as I walked the dog in the park this morning I experience the second awesome sunrise of this week and also had a heron fly from the pond almost directly in front of me. It got me thinking – I only get to see the sunrises on my dog walks now because the days are getting shorter, daylight hours are getting less. And I can marvel at how there are amazing colours in the sky for a good 20-30 mins before the sun rises officially. Even if I get up in the summer really early the sun doesn’t do that same thing of filling the sky with colour and light earlier than it pops its head up. If it wasn’t for that shortening of daylight hours I wouldn’t get to see this. So a place to be grateful when the dark is getting more?

Also what I felt when all this was going on around me is that yes life isn’t fair but there are good things going on in the unfairness. It reminds me of the fact that the trip to Paris to launch my daughter into university was marred because my father-in-law died that same weekend, so when I look at the picture of her grinning over a very very frothy cappuccino I think of his death too. Life throwing one of its unfair curve balls.

So all I can say about how to be grateful when life is being unfair is to accept and grieve in the unfair bits, the death bits, the darkness, but also be grateful in the sunrises, the births, the trips to Paris.

Both are allowed. Both are ok. It is not ‘either or’ but ‘both and’.

A few years ago I supported another friend though the first year after her husband’s suicide and we cried lots but we also laughed lots. We were able to be ‘both and’. Even now when we meet we do both – laughing and crying – more often than not in a public place

So I will hug my friend as she grieves and laugh with her as she delights in her new granddaughter. Together we can accept that life isn’t fair and that there are sunrises and there are sunsets. Somethings are beautiful and some things are tragic. That we do not live in a world where only good happens and somethings we have to deal with both things at once. But we can do it!

And for that whole humanness of who we are I will be grateful