Making the most of life Archives

We all know that the pandemic has changed many aspects of our lives and has presented us with huge challenges. But, as with most things, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is all bad. Take my experience of yesterday, for instance.

I am a member of the committee for our local branch of the Theosophical Society. In the past, our business meetings tended to be dry, dull and uninspiring. Then along came Covid and we could no longer meet in person – a great relief where committee meetings were concerned as we could hold them via Zoom instead, and, due to the fact that there was very little happening during lockdown, we had correspondingly little to discuss.

Three years ago, at the beginning of the pandemic, we let the tenancy of our regular meeting room go. Earlier this year, with life and activities opening up again, we felt that it was time we met in person to decide the future of our group. We opted to meet over a pot of tea in the restaurant of our local garden centre. Overjoyed at being able to greet each other and hug again after so long, we had a lovely meeting and all enjoyed the experience tremendously.

Yesterday, we had our latest meeting at the garden centre which was held over lunch. First came the minutes of the previous meeting and some of the days business over cups of coffee. Then we stopped to eat – delicious plates heaped with salads and cold cuts or very tasty savoury flans – followed by more cups of coffee while we completed our meeting afterwards.

Along the way there was a great deal of laughter, teasing and fun. We have decided that we now love the new form our business meetings take so much that we shall carry on with this hugely enjoyable format in the future.

And why not? If something can be made an enjoyable treat while still getting the job done, why not do so? It is all too easy to focus on all the negative, difficult and painful aspects of life. Why not do the same with all the possibly joyful ones too? I feel that it is almost a duty for us to ring every tiny measure of happiness and pleasure out of life that we possibly can. Why leave a vacuum to be surreptitiously filled with lack, unease, discontent and irritability? Why not make up one’s mind that something is going to be a blast and stick to it?

Nor is this a selfish decision for our happiness and positivity grows and spreads like a forest wildfire. Unbeknown, our warmth touches everyone around us and they, in their turn, are affected by it and pass it on to all they meet along the way… and so it goes.

So, to anyone reading this, I call on you to begin a new movement – that of engendering goodwill, light and love through your own happiness, pleasure and contentment. It only needs you to decide that you are going to make your everyday tasks as enjoyable as possible and then do just that, enjoy them.

One of my favourite maxims is ‘Make much of little’ which is a neat way of encapsulating all I have just taken several hundred words to woffle about. Go on, give it a go – what have you to lose?

At the end of July I found a lump. As the advert says, just a very little thing. This coming Monday, I am having a cancerous tumour removed from my breast. The prognosis is excellent and full recovery expected.

Yet there are always those unpretentious yet niggling and unsettling little words, ‘what if?’

Throughout my life I have had numerous challenges provided by my health; some have been long and protracted, some agonisingly painful, but I have never had anything which was potentially life threatening before. For many years now I have learned to accept the fluctuating state of my health as opportunities in disguise, wise guides, to be given gratitude and blessed.

My current situation hasn’t affected me any differently. After a very difficult, draining and traumatising time this past year in connection with close family members, that little ‘c’ word has given me focus and permission to leave the past behind and fully enter into and relish every moment, to stop procrastinating in any way and do it now… whatever it is.

In the past few weeks there has been so much love and laughter in our home. Every moment, every breath has become a sacred joy and my gratitude and exuberance to engage with everything around me has brought intense wonder, fulfilment and enlightenment. I find myself continually cresting a wave of energy which is perfectly formed from unconditional love, and I am completely blown away by it.

However, I now find that there is even more to my current situation than I first thought. Our physical bodies and our higher selves will go to the most extraordinary lengths to bring into our circle of experience just the right situation, activity or understanding. In this case, it has been discovered that my blood pressure is far too high; so high that they may refuse to give me the operation in three days time and the procedure may have to be postponed until my B.P. is more healthy.

Now, I have to confess that I have known that my blood pressure was not as it should be for some time; that I wasn’t successfully controlling it any more as I have for the past eighteen years, but I have had other concerns to deal with and have kept ignoring it. Now, my body has taken a firm and unrelenting grip of the situation. I either address the problems with my blood pressure or I eventually die of cancer. No wiggle room. No argument.

Even more staggering is the thought that everyone is so terribly fazed by cancer, but here I have been walking around with a condition – quite easily treatable – which could severely incapacitate or even kill me in the next hour. Where is the sense in that? Therefore, I have even more reason to give deep gratitude to my little ‘blip’ – my cancer has possibly saved my life.

It is all too easy to rant and rage against what life is apparently throwing at us. Right now, I feel even luckier than I did a couple of weeks ago. Life is good and it works in mysterious but amazingly wonderful ways which so often are not at all obvious. I humbly submit to whatever life has in store for me next.

I completely agree with the closing of words in the book ‘Journey Into Spirit’, written by Kris Hughes, who is head of the Anglesey Druidic Order:

‘LIVE! Take this life and be it, run with it through pain and joy, and bring every ounce of colour and brightness you can to the song of the universe. This is your story; make it a good one.’