from the heart

Ok. Let's write something real and from the heart. i usually try to think positive here on this blog, or at least, i try to avoid perspectives that are ugly, despairing, nihilistic. i try to see the beauty in things; or, if not beauty, then at least the interest.
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But life is no bed of roses -- whether mine, or anyone else's. i've had some tough conversations in the last few days. Conversations about broken relationships, serious illnesses. And these conversations are weighing heavy on my mind.
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Over lunch yesterday, a colleague was telling me about how she has built a community for herself among the women who frequent the same (high-end) jewellery shop she hangs out at. (Yes, this particular colleague collects jewellery -- the kind of one-off designs featuring precious metals and big expensive stones.) Apparently, many of these women go to the jewellery shop as a way of escaping their daily lives... and they tell their stories to the jeweller and to their fellow customers. My colleague clearly relishes these stories -- her voice went up a few pitches just talking about them -- but they are not nice stories. Not at all. These women may be rich, she told me, but their lives can be so broken. She didn't say much more, but what she said sounded pretty bad to me.
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Life can be so inexplicable. How is it that some people just manage to sail through life with everything going smoothly for them -- good health, good career, happy marriage to their first boyfriend / girlfriend, happy, healthy, well-adjusted children.... You name it, they've got it. And then other people just don't have the luck: they grow up in dysfunctional families, or dysfunctional countries, perhaps they contract some serious illness; their spouses betray them, or they never find a partner, or their countries go to war or get hit by a tsunami ... There are so many ways that life can go wrong. Asides from the kind of mistakes for which there is no one to blame but ourselves, there are so ways that things can collapse on you through no fault of your own. Life can be so hard.
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Not cheerful thoughts at all.
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i still can't wait for term to end. And i still wish i had a river.
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