Resting places

Along life’s road there are bends and detours, passing places and resting places. It is one of these resting places I found myself stumbling upon this week. This was not a bench by the side of the road with a shady tree, this was a huge gaping hole that opened right in front of me making me pull up to a screeching halt. This was a hole so wide that I couldn’t see the road beyond. This was surely the end of the road how do you get past the words “I’m so sorry Nick is in hospital – there is little hope” These holes that suddenly appear in the road don’t seem to have any reason; don’t have any explanation, they are deep and dark and deadly and like a cosmic black hole, they seem to pull all the light into them, they are able to pull the light out of your very soul and they want to pull you in too. My brother had suffered a heart attack – he didn’t survive.

So you stand staring in to the abyss and for a moment the wind does not blow, the sun does not shine and the world itself stops turning. Then you take a breath and a step back from the edge. For your journey to continue you must do something to get past this, but what? It’s too wide – you can’t go round it, it’s too deep – you can’t go through it, how do you get over it? How do you walk across a void? You have to fill it. You have to take every wonderful moment, every precious memory, every smile and song and story and pour them into the hole. At first you think it is just too vast, that it will never be filled. But you keep on going until you start to see the light shining back up out of the crater and the more light that shines the more you find the strength to search for and add every single tiny second, a look, a word, a touch and suddenly the hole is filled – you did it. But when you raise your head from your task you realise that you did not complete the work alone, around the edge of the hole are many other travellers, friends, family, strangers and you realise that they were all there working along side you, you couldn’t have done it alone.

Sometimes when we least expect it, when we certainly don’t want it, life causes us to pause, to rest from our headlong rush to our destination. We are forced to stop and remember and share and notice each other. When we are rested, and we start to take the small slow steps of our journey again we realise we are not alone because we have friends and family and strangers with us every step of the way. Some are walking their own paths and some travel along with us, some are by our side some are only in our hearts and minds but we can be sure that we are never truly alone.

Not every resting place needs to be  a deep dark hole in the road, we can also choose to pause, to build a bench and plant a tree and invite other travellers to rest with us, to remember, to share and notice each other. It is never too late to rest and invite others to rest with us, just for a while. When someone dies we often say we have “lost” a loved one, I have said it myself. But sometimes we may actually find a loved one. It can happen when we realise how much someone meant to us, how much we miss them, how much we love them, and it hurts because we wonder why we didn’t rest long enough to realise this before. But – and this I really do believe, as long as we do pause to notice – everything around us, the beautiful things, the wonderful things, the magic, then although it will never make everything OK, we just might be able to realise “what our why is” (Collateral Beauty – 2016) and that all those wonderful memories and moments that get us over the void exist because we did know what people mean to us and what we meant to them but we just didn’t say it out loud often enough. So my advice it – take every chance you have to say it to them, or write it, or sing it if you need to and we will find the journey with all its bends and detours, passing places and resting places will be worth making.

Remembering my brother Nicholas, who I miss and love. He made me see the magic.