Where you’re standing now, I’ve stood. And where you’re standing, I can’t now stand. If I could, I’d be there too, somewhere in the hum of Sydney Street. Maybe drinking coffee outside a cafe, while all of Brighton bustles about me.
I might look in the shops, or meet up with a friend, make my way down to the palace pier to check if the sea’s still there, and dodge the dratted seagulls. Nothing very dramatic. I didn’t know it was all so precious and so fragile that all the small mundane pleasures of our silly little lives matter so much, or that they’re a privilege and not a right.
We all know we’re going to die, but when we’re young that generally feels far off and distant and white haired, almost like it’ll happen to someone else, the someone else we’ll someday be. But the stark truth is that it isn’t just full-blooded living or death, there are many states in between, and this illness is one of them.
And anyone can become ill or disabled at any time. I still love my life, and there’s still much happiness to be experienced and shared, but there’s also a lot of limitation and constriction that I’d never imagined would come to me in my 30s.
I spend a lot of my time lying flat, in the dark, unable to engage with anything or anyone. I miss vitality, spontaneity, opportunity. I’m glad you’re there, though I can’t be. I hope today is a good day for you, and if it’s not, if it’s a hard day, I hope that you can find some bright spots, some solidarity, some love, and I’m sending that. Grab all that your life offers, because it’s a time limited deal.
There’s a poem from Mary Oliver, and I just want to read the end of it. She says,
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
