Insights. The Healthy And The Wise. Random.

You may have figured this out by now: I'm not the world's best blogger. I'm not even in the top fifty percent.
Blogging is awkward.
There is this deep anxiety of having to write something profound, something that will mean something to others, instead of blabbering about myself or my writing or whatever else I'm doing, or what I had for breakfast. Blogging, for me, means someone else should profit from it. 
And that's something I rarely can provide, because my life is so boring and slow, there's just nothing anyone else could learn from me.


Take the writing. 
What do you want to learn from my path to being published? Nothing.
One morning three years ago I woke up, and while I was lying there in bed, staring at the early spring sky and the geese passing by outside my window on their way back home, way up in the North, I decided I'd get up, make coffee, and start writing a book.
Just like that. And that's what I did. I got up, made coffee, opened my new laptop, and began writing, and I didn't finish until the book was finished.
Then, when that was done, on another random morning, I posted a page of it on this blog. Hours later, I was talking to my publisher, and weeks later I had a book deal.
End of story. Boring. 
By now, I have two more books written, signed, and on the way to being published, and a new project is looming on the horizon.
It's a job. I work for Buddhapuss Ink. 
I get up in the morning (as before) make coffee (also, as before), start writing, and stop when it's time to stop. It's a fun job, and I do it with a passion, but it's a job and pays my bills.


So if this counts as an insight, I'm fine with it.


My husband is sick.
Not mortally sick, not invalid sick, he just has what many men of his age have who like their food and drink too much and don't go for regular checkups: the famous "metabolic syndrome". In normal speak: high blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol. 
Last Sunday, he had to be taken to the ER in an ambulance because we thought he had a stroke, but no, it's only a paralysis in an eye muscle, thank you, diabetes. It was a huge, loud, cannon ball shot of a warning, and I'm quite certain he'll take all those pills and stick to a sensible diet and all those things.
But.
For a while there, while I was waiting for the first results at the ER, all by myself, I was wondering how our life was about to change.
It COULD have been a stroke. An aneurism. A tumor. All those were real possibilities. 
This Sunday could have changed our lives forever. 
He'll have to change his diet and lose some weight. He'll have to learn that a meal without meat is still a meal, and that a bowl of fruit for dinner is enough, you don't need a pastrami sammie to feel full.


The insights I've won from this week for myself, though, are wonderful. 
I've learned that whatever happens, I'll never be alone.
Even while I was waiting at the ER until my kids arrived, my publisher messaged me and asked if there was anything I needed.
The darling woman, I wonder what she'd have done if I'd replied, "Come here! Come here NOW! I need you here!!!"
But anyway, that would have been mean, and I know what she meant  - she was there for me. 
As were all the others. My Facebook friends, my Twitter friends, those I've met in person, those I'm going to meet this year, even those in places I'll never go to, people I'll always only know through the internet, they were ALL there, virtually holding my and my husband's hands, praying, sending good thoughts, asking how it was going, offering support. Quite a lot of them messaged me their phone numbers, asked me to call them if I needed someone to talk to, a couple of doctors offered medical advice.


Just so you know: the first thing I did when my hubby had his diagnosis and I saw him there in his hospital bed was to slap his arm, and hard.
He smiled at me and called me "darling". He knew I did it because I was so relieved to see him well.
He's home now.
After the Easter holidays, on Tuesday, he'll have to go and see our own doctor for his medication, and from now on,  go for regular visits to the lab. It's a small price to pay for a big, big scare.
We are still a family.
I am grateful today.
And that is the most important insight of all: don't take your loved ones for granted. 
Never, for a moment, believe you'll have them forever. Tell them that you love them, every day, all the time. Show them you love them, by caring about them.
Because, you see, there may come one Sunday when you look into their eyes and see something is wrong, just like I did.
Only maybe you'll not be as lucky as I was.
It may just be too late then.










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