Tuesday 17th February

I paddled again today – just a short 2kms – but it reminded me about doing things that take us out of real life for a while. Being out on the water is always peaceful, even if Dani and I did chat the whole way! It’s also good to be concentrating on just moving the boat along and nothing else, really.

There’s a line from a Wordsworth poem that begins: “The world is too much with us…”  The poet actually talks about materialism. That half line, though, speaks to me about how the world and everything we are involved in can just get to be a bit too much at times.

If we could find a way of stepping outside and looking at ourselves, looking at what’s going on around us and inside our heads, then maybe we would see things differently.

I suppose having had cancer has done that for me in a way. Things that I perhaps took foregranted are, at times, more significant in many ways. Other things that I may have been bogged down with are, perhaps, not quite so important. I think I understand better now how actions and words can have consequences we don’t even consider at the time. Mostly, though, it’s about understanding how things lead on to other things and that what happens to use can affect us in so many ways we don’t even begin to understand.

I am acutely aware at the moment of the role that stress plays in our lives. I am even more conscious of the thought that stress and things like cancer can be related.

If only people would just talk, slow down and allow themselves and others to see past what aren’t really such big things and aren’t really what matter. If only that could happen. People are strange beings, though. Everyone becomes so conscious about themselves and how they see the world that they lose sight of everyone else in the process. And sometimes the fallout is huge.

But so often we find ourselves trapped in a situation that there seems to be no stress-free way out of. Maybe life is supposed to be like that. Maybe it’s the price we pay for being close to others.

And the fallout just happens.

The trick, I suppose, is to find ways of dealing with the effects on ourselves, even if we cannot influence the input of others.

The trick is to get out on the dam, hit the road, sit and spend time with ourselves  and just allow life to happen around us.

Maybe…