28/11/2018 This autumn has been a lot about people and activity as much as the season. I have had a strange but wonderful week of meeting people with round-about connections through friends or family, and of unexpected contact with people from more than 20 years ago. Some were initiated by me, some by others; some were pure chance, others prompted by dreams.
I have felt the last few years that my life is divided into two parts. So much so that I sometimes refer to the first part - half jokingly, half seriously - as my ‘past life’. Most of it I prefer not to think about. The second part is the life I have now, where I feel I have finally found my corner, and am in the right place doing the right things with the right people. My happier, more peaceful self.
The division was instigated by the illnesses and deaths of my parents. It is not an experience I would wish to repeat, and I would rather have my parents back. But these are not the kinds of choices life offers; and the indirect outcomes of that period of my life, after more than a few difficult years of adjustment and rediscovering my identity, are mostly good ones.
I don’t know why the connections and reconnections have coincided in this way, but they have made me think. If there was one part of my life I would be happy to completely erase from my memory, it would be my secondary school years. Yet two of the out-of-the-blue contacts this week were with people specifically from that context - one friend, one teacher - and they felt entirely positive and meaningful reconnections to make.
I am noticing a sensation of events and relationships and journeys weaving together. I feel these reconnections could be the start of a process of stitching together the two disconnected parts of my life, so that I no longer need to disown my former self, and memories of it no longer cause me pain in the same way. The process might be uncomfortable in part, but I think it is important. It is a stitching together to create a whole.