la vie passionnée

In one line, she challenged me.
With 6 words she made me stop and reconsider.

I have been challenged today. Challenged away from advocacy to participation. True participation. The embracing of life.. Beyond all the rhetoric I have been sprouting about living for the now.

I had brunch with a woman. She is an active passionate woman, with grown and flown children and a part time job. She is strong and opinionated. She also has a disability. She can not easily recall what has been, or what will be. It is an acquired and hidden impairment that she can and does choose at times not to disclose.

She heard me explaining why I had left the job. The reason normally elicits a visible response, especially from those that understood the job, like she did. It didn’t this time. I got a simple “oh”. This was fine. The strong clear brown eyes, held my gaze with both unnerving comprehension and calmness. I told her of my renewed vigor for social equity especially regarding accessibility and my renewed conviction to live authentically. I talked of my desire to choose my activities and do what was important.

We talked of books; mostly owing to the fact that I expressed my intent to get more reading done in my off time. We talked of folks we know in common. In hindsight I think we pretty much agreed on most things if in circular ways.

She asked me what I did for fun. If I’m honest I struggled to come up with two hobbies that I really enjoyed, and that I was keen to talk of: reading and travel.

In one line though, she challenged me. With 6 words she made me stop and reconsider.

“Because I’ve never seen you laugh”.

Now to be fair, she has only ever known me in a professional setting, but even so?

Over spring roles and prawn stir-fry, at a party last night, a relative recently retired, drew an image on scrap paper; a rectangle intersected by a diagonal line, roughly in the middle. The resulting triangles represented in turn one’s job and personal (the rest of life), life. He explained that a healthy and fairly equal balance was required, and to be found in retirement or in a good break. He, like me was struggling some what to maintain a tiny personal triangle in the rectangle of life.

Time to re-calibrate my triangles perhaps.

Should we not all do this? After all perhaps the best way to advocate is indeed to live.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Doing the limbo
• The email I wrote for international day last year
• Just writing
• it was a time
• Weekend and quasi-book review

Tagged as: advocacy, disability, hidden disability, muse, self, work life balance