IN FROM THE EDGE Val Farrell

No secret this, you’ve known it for years, but it is news, I promise you that. Please be ready to hear it as if for the very first time. This my news for you, could just take your breath away, so get ready. I’m not asking you to humour me, but do please trust me that this is good news; the kind of news that can make a real difference. Ready? Here is my news for you. “You have five senses, five ways of getting to know the world about you.” Now I know just about everyone knows that much, so why am I insisting that my news for you is new? I’ll tell you why, listen.

A little while back I was ill and not just in my body. I am a lot better now, thank you, and I owe most of my recovery to real live people, people a lot like myself except that they work under the banner of the N.H.S., the National Health Service. Not everyone is aware that much of the great work the NHS does is outside of Clinics and Hospitals. In fact much of the work the NHS does to make people better is done in peoples’ own homes, as it was very recently for me.

Most of these real live people are paid for what they do. But that does not stop me from singing their praises. When it became obvious that I was ill, I was able to turn to the skills and learning of committed professional medics with their whole array of injections, pills and metered measuring machines. That part of my healing raised my awareness of life, what a gift it was and how I could all too easily miss out on it.  But once the medics had done their work for me, a team I scarcely knew of, a team embracing the very heart and spirit of the NHS, came to my help. These people made sure that the work of the medics was not wasted but rather that I was able to use that work to re-build the person I know as me, myself.

I remember how silly I felt when I first them. Among the exercises they recommended for me was breathing, breathing for heavens’ sake! I thought I knew all about breathing since I’ve lived a long time and have drawn an awful lot of breaths in that time. But I soon found that there was more to breathing than just breathing. With their help I began to appreciate the simple act of taking a breath and anchoring my very daily living on the rhythms of my breathing. And that’s not all. In learning to appreciate and learn from breathing I very soon came to appreciate a lot of other fairly basic things in my life, like the five senses for instance.

Just imagine living on planet earth, a world packed with beauty and riches and being unable to get in touch with any of it. What misery! A bit like the joke about the Golfer who thought that being sent to hell was not that bad when he was told it had a 36 hole well-kept Golf Course until that is he discovered that there were no golf balls there. And that of course is why I’ve been banging on about our five senses being good news. Living without them would turn our lovely planet earth into Hell on earth, literally.

And there’s more. Besides our five senses we have been given other gifts to help us appreciate things. The first of these”extras”, the one I’d like you to think about until next we meet, is the sheer gift of having to wait. I don’t mean the boring kind of waiting we sometimes do on wet days, although that too has its merits. No, I especially mean the waiting we do that is packed with hope and purpose. It’s easy to forget this gift of waiting, but it too, like our five senses, can teach us to appreciate the very gift of the life we have been given. So until next time, just wait.