“Now You’ve Made Two………..”
I had a tantrum last night.
Quite a big one.
I just lost it.
I have been doing a Mindvalley course on Abundance with Christie Marie Sheldon (abundance is my sixth bind).
Yesterday was lesson 10 and I obviously have been bringing up the dirt, slowly but surely over the last couple of days (Which is a good thing!). It has been simmering, just below the surface and finally it blew.
I was mildly hysterical, which doesn’t happen too often, but does happen on occasions.
I won’t go too deeply in to what was bothering me but it did have something to do with my current geographic location.
Obviously I was harbouring some ill feeling towards that and a few other things – I still had some things to heal.
I watched Midsomer Murders on the couch. Barnaby let three through to the keeper before he found the killer. It strangely calmed me down.
I said goodbye to Sydney the first time in 2000 and have extremely fond memories of working at the ABC and in particular, the beautiful people with whom I worked.
When I moved back to Sydney almost a year ago, one of the first people I thought of was a dear friend I used to work with in the News Graphics department of the ABC, in Gore Hill.
He was such a gorgeous man and really did make me smile – I loved working a shift with him. We used to laugh about “Aerial PingPong”, the term he used for Aussie Rules: he is English and a huge fan of the Tottenham HotSpurs.
Over the three years I worked at the ABC, he went from a very strong, healthy, capable man to a man confined to a wheelchair, his MS diagnosis both debilitating and aggressive.
But today would be the day.
I was going to get out of my own way, stop thinking about “my problems” and find my way to Parramatta, to see a man who may not remember me!
I grabbed some orange roses, and some shortbreads – he was older now – and made my way down the M1.
A very lovely lady showed me the way to where he was living.
As I walked down the corridor I noticed a couple of things: the vacant look on a lot of the aged care patients faces and the remarkable job our aged care carers, do. I literally felt such sadness in there, such loneliness.
I poked my head around the door and there he was.
I didn’t recognise him at first, and he didn’t recognise me – it had been twenty years – but the thing that was familiar was the sound of his voice. It was unmistakably him.
He still had that wicked sense of humour, and just as we had twenty years ago, we got along famously. The familiarity becoming more apparent as the hours ticked by.
He said lovingly, “Oh, you’re a quirky one! Will you come back and visit?”
How could I refuse?
We chatted all things ABC and talked about who I worked with during my time there and I was so pleased to hear most of them still came to visit him.
The visit humbled me, and made me realise I’m not the only important one in the world. It reminded me to expand my view and think of others and not just myself. Sometimes we just have to be reminded.
Under 24 hour supervision, bed-ridden and unable to move at all, I had to put his glasses on so he could see me. He started to fill me in on the last twenty years of his life and if I felt humbled before, I now just felt love and appreciation. Love for this beautiful man facing adversity – and appreciation for all he was teaching me.
He told me how his son was brutally murdered in 2013 by a psychopath and marvelled at the fact I hadn’t heard the story (I was in Singapore at the time). He was brutally murdered not far from where I now live. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, it certainly put things into perspective.
My worries were not worries at all. All was well with me.
And there I was: complaining about being in Australia and how hard it seemed to be to make friends. There he was: Motionless from the neck down – upbeat, smiling and full of life, even though his body wouldn’t let him experience life how he used to. There he was: without his son, the images in his mind of how he died etched in his brain for him to play again and again – over and over – as he lay immobile in his bed.
And still complaining I said to him, “I can’t believe I’ve only made one friend in a year”.
He smiled at me sweetly and said:
“Now you’ve made two”.