Highs and lows of life

Beautiful Florida bougainvillea

It's Sunday morning again, and I'm back home in my normal place, before dawn with my partner sleeping beside me as I begin my Sunday task. It's good to be back home, but I miss my sister and feel a bit sad that I probably won't see her again in person for awhile.

The word happiness would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.   ~Carl Jung

I ran across this quote from Jung sometime this week, and I pondered its meaning in terms not only of happiness and sadness, but of health and sickness, gain and loss: all the highs and lows of life that we all experience. You cannot be fully alive without having a first-hand understanding of the fragility of our existence in its present state. In the twinkling of an eye, things change.

The last two days of my visit in Florida were marred by suddenly being unable to hear anything out of my left ear. It seems to be a small thing, but my head felt like it was wrapped in cotton, and it was the focus of my days, trying to find some way to remedy the situation. Nothing worked. I'm going to the doctor's office tomorrow morning to have my ears flushed of wax and I will most likely return to my normal state. I've gotten used to it now, and I'm able to think of other things, but at first it was all-encompassing.

As I read about the lives my fellow bloggers are living, and as I sympathize with their trials and tribulations, my own seem small in comparison. Having your knees give out on you, without much hope of relief; dealing with surgeries you and your loved ones must endure; meager financial means and no way to change a bad situation — the list could go on and on.

But there are also the highs: the birth of a beloved grandchild, children growing up and successfully heading out into the world, sharing the beauty of a sunrise, or finding relief from pain and suffering. It's all part of being fully alive. We rejoice together when times are good, and we grieve together when things get rough.

My own friends and family have expanded to encompass the universality of the world of the virtual acquaintance. There are dozens of people scattered throughout the world whose lives mean as much to me as my birth family, and I share their highs and lows. In the old days, before blogging, my world of people whose lives matter to me was constrained by distance or by the lack of a shared activity. That has all changed, and I am grateful for the ability to reach Down Under in an instant and send a message of love to a dear friend, someone whose real name I don't even know. But I share the vicissitudes of life with her in a very real way. We care about each other.

And things change in an instant. As I was writing the opening paragraph of this post, thinking about having left my sister's world in Florida, I realized how quickly we might end up being together again, if something were to happen to one of our family members and we needed to gather for a life event (or death). As I grow older, these things are inevitably going to occur more frequently. We weren't made to last, were we? At my time of life, a decade passes more quickly than I thought possible when I was younger.

Inevitably, major life events mark the passage of time. The death of my son Chris is one of those markers. The birth of my grandniece Lexie is another. My world is divided into the time before and after I began skydiving. Major illnesses and accidents are events that change our lives. When I met my husband, when we got married, and when we moved to the Pacific Northwest: these are all events that cleave my days and years into Before and After.

In the meantime, as my life resumes its regular trajectory for the moment, I think if I can just remember that everybody has highs and lows, that stopping to smell the roses, sending and receiving messages of encouragement and commiseration as we move through life, these are some the best things any of us can do for one another.