Anniversaries

Today is a sad anniversary in my life. Now, I don't much 'believe' in anniversaries. Time is, after all a continuum, lived moment to moment, hour upon hour. Sliding along the Z axis infinitely, gradually, unstoppably. We don't experience a 'crikey! A year just jumped past!' moment - even if it feels like it sometimes.
What anniversaries do I concede is concentrate the mind somewhat; that constant frame of reference against which we measure life's changes.
Fourteen years ago today my father died very suddenly and unexpectedly. Life for me was knocked violently sideways into a trajectory from which I've never really stopped reeling. One adapts, of course, that's what one does. But looking back over the hills and dales of my life, there is a great gaping rent in the landscape which can never heal. Can never feel right.
But life goes on, and it has. It is strange to compare who I was 14 years ago with life now. And uncomfortable to think of how life would have been different without that one cataclysmic event. Because of course in time there have been many good things, and wonderful things - and these would have been different - or not at all - had the world followed on moment by moment, day by day from different events.
We at some point must stop reeling and clinging on to the wreckage of what went before and build again. Though it is hard to build a life again when that fundamental trust in tomorrow has gone.
But build and look forward we must dare.
Perhaps the most important thing I have learned is to appreciate the now, not the feeling of new beginnings, or the looking forward to what should be. But what is actually important and good. Right now. And life should supply that or it must change before it is too late.
So I appreciate many things today. The company of friends, the meeting of new people with like minds. The feeling of ones own body being fit and able. My mother here, who I see far too infrequently. But most of all, my little girl in a pretty dress bought for my sister's wedding, wearing her wellingtons. Now there's a moment to hold on to.