Everything and Nothing

Liz is on her bike in the distance!

Today I went for a bike ride with my lovely friend, Liz. Interestingly, given what I’ve been talking about this week, (about how we judge so much by the past), she blew my expectations by taking me on a route I never knew existed before. I love that! As Liz said, suddenly just off a boring dual carriageway, there is a little slice of heaven – a quintessentially English pastoral scene. For every bit of ‘rough’ there is ‘smooth’ just around the corner if we look closely enough.

How apt then, that, later, our conversation in my favourite coffee shop (The Olive Tree in Nailsworth), should turn to my experience with infertility. I nearly died with I was 19 when my appendix burst. The aftermath of that left me unable to have children. After 5 years of trying to beat the odds my husband and I adopted 2 gorgeous children from Russia.  Words cannot describe how happy we are as a family. I think we all feel so blessed.

I recently watched Prof Jim Al-Khalili’s programme entitled Everything and Nothing where he talks about how, in a vacuum, matter and anti-matter exist at the same time. It’s seems little wonder then, that love and hate, despair and joy, sickness and health also co-exist in our world. We cannot fight that. It is just the nature of Everything and Nothing.

What could have turned out to be one of the most devastating periods in my life – my battle with infertility – has turned out to be the most profound, unusual, joyful and meaningful thing I’ve every done.

So this, I suppose is my happiness lesson of the week: Expect the unexpected and whether it be ‘bad’ or ‘good’ there is treasure to found if we look close enough… just off our metaphorical dual-carriageways.