Rotary Club of Plimmerton
Ann Scannell gave us the Viewpoint today.
She said:
'Today there is too much righteous indignation and need to apportion blame. This is aided and encouraged by the media with its emphasis on sob stories (or making a sob story out of an everyday occurrence, where there is not one). Yet when you read the story you think "Really, you’re complaining about that? That’s nothing much".
'But really bad things can happen in life that are nobody’s fault. There is nobody to blame to help take away the pain. As if the pain would go away anyway. Life is not always about getting justice or payback.
'In this life, really bad things can happen and we have to deal with the consequences. In order to heal we need to go all the way through the grieving process so we can get to the other side, so we can move on. We need to fully grieve for what we have lost. The old reality has gone forever. We can want it but we can no longer have it. All we have left is a new reality.
'Grieving is like having a very steep mountain with no path in front of us and the only way to get to move forward, to get to the other side is to go over it, however hard the climb may be. And while we may rest on the way up, while we may slowly drag one foot after the other with extreme reluctance, while we may take a detour, we cannot avoid the climb. We have to get to the top before it gets easier and we can start to go down again. We cannot avoid it.
'Most of us at some time in our lives will have had really bad things happen to us. We do not see them coming. They sneak up on us while we are just happily getting on with our life. We do not want them to happen. We do not want our life to change. We do not want to face the pain. But we do not have a choice. In life we mostly have only the illusion of choice. We do not have the control on the world we like to think we have. What we have control on is how we view things.
'It could be a serious illness, it could be the sudden death of a spouse, it could be a pandemic. In an instant everything we had planned stops. The future is no longer the one we were heading towards. In front of us suddenly is a brick wall forcing us to stop, to change direction in order to move forward.
'You need to feel your feelings. Pretending they don’t exist does not make them go away. Feel the anger, feel the fear, feel the overwhelming sadness.
'Happiness in life is the accumulation of a series of little pleasures. When the sun shines, feel its warmth. When a bird sings, hear its song. On a cold night snuggle under a down duvet (unless you are a vegan). Enjoy the sound of rain from safely under a tin roof. Watch a sunrise (or a sunset, if like me, you do not like waking early).
'So my viewpoint today is: Sometimes shit happens and we have no choice but to deal with it. It is nobody’s fault. Nobody is to blame. Sometimes it is just our turn for the shit'.