Some morning musings

I have two relatives overseas who have come to mind today as I write to them two very different letters.

One is in her nineties and is about to have yet another birthday bash. Keep on keeping on seems to be her outlook on life and she is making a fabulous job of it I must say.

Another of my relatives recently lost her husband and is going through a terrible time right now, still in mourning and still looking forward and not really seeing much to look forward to.

As I wrote to them both, (neither has access to the Internet) I wondered at the differences that personality and time can make.

My ninety (plus) year old relative also lost her husband a considerable number of years ago - in the 1970's to be exact, and while I am certain that she went through her period of mourning she bounced back and married again, lost her second husband, no doubt went through another period of mourning and then bounced back again and is still going strong.

My other relative is still in the stage before what I hope will be her 'bounce'.

When you get the glad tidings that you are about to die from cancer or some other dreaded disease, it is relatively easy, believe it or not, to accept your "fate", lie down and simply let life roll over you like a large truck.

It is not so easy to get yourself ready for the knife, for chemo therapy, for radio therapy and and other possible nasty illness that could strike you down while you are incapacitated. Somewhere deep inside there has to be some motivation to tell death to go an bugger off, that you are not ready to go yet. It helps if you have wonderful friends, relatives and work colleagues who can and do say a few words to whatever version of deity they worship. Their support is just the reinforcement you need at a time like that.

My poor sick computer has just had to go in for radical surgery. It not only faced going under the screwdriver, but had its memory taken out and replaced, and it's innards exposed and twiddled with. A few days and dollars later it is a changed beast. It now has four times the memory it had and seems to have an arrogant and jaunty step in its functioning.

If only it was as easy and as cheap to do that with our own lives.

Alas we all know that life is not a dress rehearsal and that you are 'on stage' all the time with almost no time off the 'set'. Still, if we do have to make a comparison, then life really is a little like a soap. It is certainly full of drama, if does come in episodes which really do seem to have their beginning, middle and end and in which the characters are both recognisable and sometime monotonously familiar.

Maybe that's what we all represent by our lives - a drama series played out on a cosmic wide screen with billions of plots and sub-plots to keep the citizens of another galaxy fascinated by our antics.

If that's the case - I want a new writer!