Living in a wrecked kind of haze this week. Yesterday a story was told and today people responded and a little six year old boy got his first ever toothbrush.
Living today in the midst of human stories that are brilliant, snotty and heart aching at the same time.
I don’t know whether there is a message in the times or if I am seeking authentic stories and they keep finding me in a puddle of tears but I snuck off to the movies by myself this morning and was completely undone.
I am lucky it was the 10.30am session, with a spattering of people who together sat in the dark envelope of the theatre and cried endlessly.
The Fault in Our Stars, is the most breathtakingly real movie I have seen in a very long time.
It will take me weeks to unpack the explosion of inspiration in my heart, but mostly I came away with a sense of urgency to live life to the fullest with every moment given.
Live now, when opportunities arise, grasp them, don’t think too much just jump.
Moments can be fleeting or they can be pools of possibility inviting us to jump into their infinity.
Time is fleeting and the life we are given speeds by, but at the same time some moments can last a lifetime and it is not the length of the moment but the opportunities grasped in the midst of it.
We can wait our whole life to truly live or we can go with the possibility and be ever changed.
Like my friend Beth this week. She was booked to fly to Berlin, but in one moment, she decided to throw that plan away and to stay and help.
To help someone in need.
To accept the possibility of one story.
To live beyond fear, what if and could this possibly be okay?
Who is waiting on the other side of our decision to have a go?
What story is waiting to be written by our courage shown to stop, listen and act?
By worrying about the what ifs, we can miss the potential in the moment.
“There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.”
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
I walk away from the last couple of days so grateful for every opportunity I have with my little family.
I feel determined to say yes, to the little stories that come my way (even when they are inconvenient) and I feel overwhelmed at the possibility to live a substantial life in the quiet of my own little place in this world.
I don’t want to live out loud.
I want to quietly live authentically to the beliefs that I hold.
Letting my yes be yes and my no be no.
Living beyond the fear that tries to contain me.
Aware of how truly blessed I am to have found love.
Grateful for every human story that I encounter and truly listen too.
To see every person not as a number but a possibility. To see every human not as their behaviour but the story behind the pain.
To see every moment with the potential of radical real life.
Authentically painful and brilliantly real at the same time.
I could keep on writing, sentences that probably don’t mean much to anyone else but me.
Go watch the movie.
Then breathe deep.
That’s the thing about pain, it demands to be felt.
