Sometimes, and only sometimes, life is perfect in the moment - just as it is
Less than an hour after I’d entered their offices, I left the traffic department with a smile and a temporary driver’s licence.
Nothing felt as sweet as being legal on the road. I whistled in the car – I even looked for roadblocks.
Funny thing, how they’re nowhere to be seen, unless you really don’t have time, or the relevant documents to hand; which is when they surprise from behind bushes and at unexpected corners.
Pre-visit, I felt heavy and unpleasant; the complexity of bureaucracy is traditionally akin to paper cuts and hang nails.
None of us want to be there; and I always feel for the officials, who must deal repeatedly with simmering, confused or unprepared civilians.
But our local traffic department is rated one of the best by everyone I know, and justly so.
People in that building have heart – and the grins and banter rub off on surly drivers and would-be roadsters; everyone leaves smiling.
Driving home, I thought about two people in my own life who taught me to alter my attitude towards difficulty, inconvenience, bureaucracy or challenges.
A few years ago, I bid farewell to one of them, and a few years before that, to the first.
We often meet at least one elevated soul in our lifetimes – a person who encapsulates every quality that we wish we had. I was lucky, as life brought me both Amanda and Gail.
At first I wondered if their shared genetic condition, cystic fibrosis, (CF) was a coincidental common denominator – the issue that made me think of Amanda when I talked to Gail.
But in those sombre days following Gail’s passing, after a battle bravely fought, I realised that there really are people with purpose in the world.
The fact that they both coped with CF for as long as they did is not nearly as awe-inspiring as the simple truth of who they were.
Amanda was one of my high school pupils. She was particularly brilliant at English and wrote complex, edgy poems about love, death and adolescence.
If she hadn’t been off school frequently for treatment, or so tired and sick in class sometimes that she simply fell asleep at her desk, nobody could possibly have connected Amanda with any sort of medical condition, let alone such a serious one.
Fragile as a china doll, and built on the inside like a warrior, Amanda was focused on the most fascinating thing there is: being alive.
Several years after she died, I met Gail at the local pharmacy, where she worked. Every time I popped in, I learned something new from Gail and had a good laugh.
When she wasn’t there, she was usually in hospital. But if you asked how she was, she’d say: “I’m fine, but how are YOU?”
I had these types of conversations with Amanda and Gail many times. Exchanges that were inspiring, educational, cheerful, relaxed and stimulating. Things were never about them – always about others.
Amanda and Gail didn’t do guilt, shame, self-pity or resentment.
They knew that this, too, was as much a waste of energy as all the negative fripperies we concern ourselves with.
And that, I know, is why I’m double-blessed. The chance to meet not one, but two, of these incomparable super-humans; to be reminded, again and then again, that your life is perfect, in this moment, just as it is.