Sunday 5th April

I’ve just come back from a run – in the rain! I actually set out during a break in the typical coastal gentle, set-in rain, hoping, I suppose, that it would hold long enough for me to follow my normal route to the beach and back round the point.

Actually, I set out going round the point, because I was also motivated by a desire to look at the sea. I had been sitting in the lounge, hearing the sea ‘bromming’ every so often and, literally, shaking the windows in the house and wanted to see what the sea was doing. It was worth the excursion. In fact, the whole run was so great and such fun – even though it involved a lot of water, both from the sea and from the heavens and I came back pretty much soaked through.

I was running along the seafront road looking out over the grey, threatening day and the angry sea and I thought, again, that everything is about how we look at it. On a day like this, it is so possible to sit at home, bemoaning the fact that there is no beach time and that the weather is miserable; or it is also possible to grab the moments of little/no rain (or not so much) and go out and see what it happening in the world. Sometimes we have to go out of our comfort zones to find things that are truly wonderful around us.

Angry sea, or not, rain or shine, I am at the seaside and that means visiting the beach at least once every day 🙂 . After all, how can we appreciate the sunny days completely if we don’t have the odd grey, angry day in between? And how can we truly understand the beauty of those wet, grey days if we don’t just look?

There is so much around us to see, we just have to look properly.

Tomorrow we will travel back to Joburg – back to work, pressure and reality. This has been a wonderful break and a chance to just take a little time out. I have been working steadily the whole week, but it is very different being away from home, not having to go into varsity and to just be able to do things in a relaxed time frame.

Leaving a holiday place is always horrible, because, I think, we all like being away from normal pressures so much. I don’t feel terribly upset, though, about leaving here. Part of this is because I know we’ll be back at some stage relatively soon and part of it is that leaving means going home, us all being together, even right at the very end of Easter, and just settling back into doing a lot of things that I enjoy.

It’s really about the way we look at things.

I don’t think that it is always possible to look at something like cancer and see it in a way that will make it seem positive. What on earth could be positive about a creepy, silent thing that does absolutely nothing except cause so many changes to happen in your life?

And yet…

Any experience enriches us in ways we may not even understand. It can also have so many positive spin-offs for others. This cancer thing has definitely made me more aware of lots of things in this world. In many ways, I think, it’s because of the cancer thing that I am so aware of the value of looking at things differently. And something that inspires that type of reaction has got to have some form of use in this busy world.