Tools, tips and education to help you live the life you choose

Why would you get upset with someone you love who has survived after spending some days teetering between life and death?  Sounds hard to believe that you could feel like that, what is interesting is it has happened to both my Mum and Him and I reckon they were perfectly justified in feeling that way.

As mentioned in the last post we went on a big trip to visit His mother, Nana, as she is not in the greatest of health.  A few days after we returned we got the message that Nana was in hospital.  The next day we got the message she had declined, was intubated and air lifted out to Adelaide with a very poor prognosis.  He rushed over to Adelaide to be with her.

The next eight days were a roller coaster of emotions as there seemed to be signs of hope which were often dashed.  The doctors did not seem optimistic.  He was also suffering with a bit of the flu, not sleeping well and generally feeling the strain of it all.  In the end it got to the live or die bit where they were to pull her breathing tube out and it wasn’t going to be replaced. 

She lived, in fact, she thrived.  Within 24 hours she was sitting up and talking.  So why would he feel upset with her.  It was at this point that she noticed he was a bit sick and showed a total lack of understanding or empathy for the worry and what he had been through over the last ten days.

The story is the same for my Mum and what she went through with my Aunt, her sister.  She spent several days by her bed in Intensive Care and then my Aunt made a similar recovery and seemed to be revelling in all the attention and completely oblivious to the stress that Mum had been through.

In defence of Nana and Aunt they were out to it for most of the period prior to their recoveries so they hadn’t spent time worrying about whether they were going to live.  They may have been surprised that Mum and Him did not seem so completely overjoyed.  This comes down to having a bit of empathy, putting yourself in the shoes of the other person. 

Similarly in life you can find that someone you are dealing with does not react as you would expect.  Stop for a moment and think about what is going on for them, ask them about what they are feeling.  We can often get caught up in our view of the world and events and not realise that other people may be feeling differently for a variety of reasons as it was with my Aunt and Nana and Mum and Him.

I’ve recently come back from a 2500km trip to South Australia.  This included two days where we travelled 800km in the day.  I must congratulate Son and Daughter who were surprisingly good during those travel times.  Son, in particular, is not renowned for enjoying long trips in the car so it was lovely to survive those days with few fights.

One of the places we visited was Peterborough in South Australia.  His Mum lives there and is not in the best of health and can’t travel so we took the kids to her.  Peterborough has a population of around 2000 and in years gone by was a flourishing railway town.  Nowadays it is somewhat quieter and they are trying to build up the tourists coming to town with Steamtown (big train museum) as the centrepiece.

When we arrived at the caravan park we were staying at we were given a map and on the reverse it had ‘30 things to see and do in Peterborough’.  The idea of finding so many things to see and do in town sounded amazing, expecially to Him who had spent some years living there earlier in his life.  The list made great reading, they had actually put a little description next to stuff so instead of just listing the Motorcycle Museum they put ‘Be awestruck by the Motorbike Museum and the amazing antique collection’.  Using this type of approach they have included many things that you might not think of when compiling a list like this such as a pub crawl, having a BBQ or having a coffee.

What I am getting to here is the resourcefulness of the tourist information people at Peterborough.  It could be seen as a bit of a dead town with as many pubs as churches (or that was the way it seemed to me) filled with a large proportion of welfare recipients.  By taking another perspective of the town the tourist information people have managed to compile an impressive list of activities that you can do in town and present it in a way that appeals.

This is where the title of the post comes in, it is not a case of what resources you have, it is how resourceful you are.  Peterborough doesn’t have a huge number of spectacular attractions however it has been resourceful in pulling together a list of activities that you can undertake to appreciate their town.

Similarly in life we often decide that we can’t move ahead with something because we need to have x and y to do the job properly or get the best outcome.  Sometimes just changing your thinking and becoming resourceful to see what you can do to access those resources or get round your requirement for them can get you moving ahead again.  Have a think about it, are you waiting for best resources or are you being resourceful?