The fragility of life

On Monday, I started a new job as a care assistant at a care home for the elderly. It has been an exhausting week learning new procedures, faces and names, and realising anew the privilege of being a carer and being part of such a vulnerable and intimate time in individuals' lives.

Today, I also had my first 'episode' in what feels like a very long time. It had been such a long period of stability and contentment that I had wondered whether depression was a distant memory. During these 'episodes', all my thoughts and emotions scramble together like a sudden attack, a chaotic mess of disjointed painful noises overlapping in my mind. I am left wracked and unable to figure out what to do. Lost and alone. Then I come out of it, and have to figure out where to go from there. How to pick myself up again.

The numbness is subsiding as I write. I am now struck by the fragility of life. We go out of our way to ignore it, to pretend it's not there. To go through the motions of life, managing well, self-sufficient and successful. I think it works for the most part. And then something hits. Setbacks. Illness, death, pain. Something happens to throw everything out of kilter, and we realise again that the walls we construct around us are made less of sturdy brick but more of panes of glass, glued together to the best of our abilities, but so easily shattered and torn down by the storms of life. Human beings are so fragile. Our lives are so breakable. I am seeing this more and more every day, especially since returning to nursing and care. I am learning to accept this more and more in myself. Everything could change from one day to the next.

Life is a strange thing. We could lose everything in an instant. Yet we believe and act as though what we have and who we are stands forever. That we are infinite, invincible. An illusion easy to live by.

Many of you will know the Serenity Prayer, famously adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous. The original Serenity Prayer is attributed to theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. With no wisdom or conclusions to offer, I end this post with this prayer.

God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.
Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.
Amen.