Once a week, my friend and I meet, have lunch together, and then go for a walk in the park. We talk about what we’ve done, what we’ve thought, what we’ve felt in the last few days when we haven’t seen each other. We don’t gossip, we don’t talk about what others do, we don’t comment on the latest news or what Jose Armando has been up to on the latest hot soap opera. Because we don’t follow the news or watch TV for a long time, none of us. Maybe we recommend a podcast or a book to each other. I trust that what she recommends is worth listening to, watching or reading, and so does she.
We enjoy each other’s company even though we are completely different. She is tall, with a curly red head of hair, full of energy, always elegant and on point. A true Libra. Not in a million years she would wear a pair of ripped jeans with a black T-shirt 😊. And like a true Libra, she takes forever to choose something: from the menu, from the shops, from a palette of activities. She talks a lot, but she doesn’t like to write. Instead of giving a text message, she prefers to give a phone call. To talk more 😊.
Me, small, I am up to her shoulder, blonde and always frizzy, with the energy of a retired snail. Sometimes I get out of my ripped jeans and get into a comfortable dress that shows off my knees. At the restaurant, I immediately choose what I want, go to the bathroom, and when I come back, my friend is still thinking about what she would like to eat. I usually talk little or keep quiet. I communicate better through writing. Ideas sit better for me on a piece of paper or a screen than they come out of my mouth, my words have more substance written than spoken. Capricorn 😊.
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The other day we met and got caught in the rain in the park. My friend had a bit of a cold and had left her umbrella at home. She had a new jacket, nice and stylish, but not as waterproof as she would have liked. It wasn’t raining very hard, but the water had begun to seep through the thin material at her shoulder, near the strap of her purse. This made her uneasy and afraid that the rain would make her cold worse. She wasn’t enjoying the walk as much as she usually did.
I was walking by her side, trying to calm her down and bring back her joy of the walk. “Look, even though it’s Saturday, and usually the park is full, now it’s just ours! It’s quiet, you can only hear the rain. Soon you’ll be home, making yourself some hot tea and snuggling under the blanket.”
Nothing seemed to settle her. Not even when an old couple admired us for our waterproof jackets and courage to walk in the rain. The old woman had a walking frame, and the old man protected her with his umbrella. My friend complained that her jacket was not waterproof and she got wet. I warned her that she walks on both feet, which, even if they are wet, can easily take her where she wants, unlike the old woman we passed by. Nothing seemed to work to bring my friend back the smile on her face and the playful twinkle in her eye that she usually has.
*
We parted at the usual place, she started home and me to the bus station. She called me after a few minutes. She had arrived home, and I was on the bus, admiring the sky that looked like a swirling sea, with clouds of different colors, laid out in layers. My friend’s voice was full of emotion when she told me on the phone: “Now I understand! Let me tell you what I saw on the way home.”
She told me that she saw two blind girls walking down the street, helped by their white canes and a phone open to an app. They seemed lost, stopped in the middle of the road, disoriented, drenched in rain, trying to figure out where they were. Two lost blind girls. They gave her tears. She instantly forgot about the wet jacket and the cold that had gripped her. Gratitude flooded her heart. She had just had a nice meal at a restaurant with her friend and had taken a walk in the park on her own two feet, admiring the vivid colors of the falling leaves with her own eyes. She had eyes, she had legs, she had a warm house where a puppy and a cat were lovingly waiting for her. And she had a healthy body and a healthy heart that contained all the gratitude in the world. She was happy!
The lessons do not always go from me to her, very often it happens the other way around. I, like most people with autoimmune diseases, have a greater rigidity in thinking than healthy people. It took me a long time to understand that I needed changes in my life, and even then, any change comes with heartache. Every lesson noisily knocks down another piece of the image I have created of myself, but it is like a step permanently placed on the ladder that leads me to myself. My friend served me many lessons of this kind herself.
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Epictetus said, almost 2000 years ago: it is not what happens to you that matters, but how you react to what happens to you. My story covers part of what “happens” to us in life: the fear of illness, the exacerbation in our heads of some small inconveniences, the fixation on things we cannot change. But also the joy you can have in your soul when you understand the essence: life is beautiful if we do it this way!
When we look for a pleasant or positive meaning to something perceived as unpleasant or negative, new neural synapses are formed and our universe of knowledge and understanding expands. We leave the familiar boulevard of the victim-aggressor-savior triad and gain another perspective, another point of view. First, we will understand it with our mind, and later the soul will take it over as well. We will “feel” knowledge, it will no longer be simple information. And then we will react with our soul, not with our deeply embedded programs in our minds.
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Epilogue: The next morning, I texted my friend to see if the rain the day before had made her cold worse. She called me right away (remember I told you she doesn’t like texting 😊). She was very energetic and happy: “Wow! What cold? I am OK. Now I’m dancing around the house!”. I had her permission to tell this story, with a note: “Don’t say I talk a lot, okay?”
