You know what it’s like; when you are wholly at ease in the warmth of sunshine, you can’t ever imagine the chill of a grey day. So it is with the personal emotional landscape. When you are feeling out of sync and at odds with anything approaching happiness and well being, so you can’t in any way connect with any sense of a sunny disposition. Of course so it is the case once the scales have tilted to the side of self confidence and ease with yourself, so that it is a mystery to you how everything had looked so gloomy.
However once you have been a traveller on this kind of road for a certain length of time, the picture widens out. As I mentioned in my blog Fire and Ice Collide, I have been having particular experience of working with extremes of situations which of course have brought up an array of emotional responses. I was told by my husband’s Indian astrologer/guru that come the middle of this month (July) things would start to shift to the positive for the first time proper in over eight years. I am now starting to feel this shift as I inch my way through the darkness of my Platonic cave towards a dim glow of light at the cave mouth. This has been a long time in coming and I am aware of what each step involves and have learned deeply from each step taken. I am relieved to be feeling more at ease within myself, but I know what I have had to confront in order to get here.
I wonder how much people really suffer. On the face of things, most seem to be alright and smile and put on a good show. For example, in London recently, I ended up having a chat in the ladies room at Fortnum and Mason with a bubbly charming woman, who was a stranger, only to discover she had recently had several operations to stop becoming completely blind. She then told me her husband had terminal cancer and that they were making the best of things; they were about to go off to Hampton Court gardens. He was outside waiting for her and looked fine and was very pleasant as we exchanged a few words of bonhomie.
I am talking about a two edged sword here. On the one hand, it seems necessary that we suffer as part of our true learning as human beings. Many seem unable to confront this suffering and avoid it by putting on a good face and deal with the world either in an anodyne way ( see most television presenters) or by some other form of denial. Others deal with their suffering with courage, such as the Fortnum lady ( I could see the pain in her eyes ) who carried her pain as a catalyst. We are not children only seeking out the happy bits and parking the grey bits into a back room. Somehow we have to face the gloom with the hope that we can emerge back into the sun. After all we all know what it is to be happy, so it is a state that is real. Only, let’s not manufacture a second rate copy!
