Predictability

Since writing my blogs, I am seeing the predictability of my life, in a way I had never noticed it before. Yesterday was ANZAC day and we attended the service. Last year, I wrote a blog about it, as I most likely did the year before that. I now see my life is far more ordered than I had realised.

It was Daniel’s birthday last week and we visited his grave on that day, just as we have done since he died. There is a pattern of certain events that have become habit, that I do from year to year. But even things like planting the vege garden, pruning the hibiscus, picking the olives, pruning the hedge, they are all yearly tasks. Thankfully, painting the house, garage and roof are not. They were big jobs.

One wonders where one had the time for a full-time job in the past, because those same things still needed to be accomplished. They just had to be slotted in on days off.

One thing that is not predictable though, is the loss or illness of friends or family. People can be taken from us so suddenly or can lose their quality of life in just a blink. I think the main thing is that we reach the end of our days, whenever that might be, without regrets. We want to know that we achieved the things we wanted to and had made peace with others and ourselves.

I am doing another speech at the upcoming Mind, Body, Spirit event in Whangarei in May (another pattern) and in this I talk about two of my former lives, showing how they have influenced my current life. In one of these I was a slave. I used to see images of a chain and ball around his ankle but I never had to do any work on that life in my current life, because when he died, he had reached a state of peace and acceptance and had forgiven all those who had caused him harm. He had died in peace. The other life is one where I was a young woman travelling through the American desert to start a new life. She was thrown out of the cart by her husband and left to die a horrendous death. In my current life, I had to do so much work on myself, along the lines of abandonment and betrayal in order to heal that lifetime.

I use these two examples, because in both of them, they never got to go the things they wanted to do, the slave because he couldn’t and the woman because her life was cut short. So, both of these two lives have influenced my current life, with each of them prompting me to try new things. Each time I have shifted in my life I am fulfilling the unfulfilled dream of that young woman who never actually got to start her new life and the slave who could only dream about any such thing.

How we live our lives is not just important to us, but to our former selves and to our future selves.

So maybe this predictability that is creeping into my life needs to be interspersed with some spontaneous new activity, so that I don’t place a burden on my next self.

Now what were some of those things I still wanted to do in my life?