I’M SITTING here smiling at my arms. I know, odd, hey?
Just a few weeks ago I wrote about how I felt a new me emerging. One that wanted to get fit and strong, one that had at last shrugged off the need to cocoon myself. It’s fun, this new me, and (as regular readers know) it got involved in a push up challenge.
I think I’ve been training for just over two weeks now, and my arms are beginning to show a change; some muscle. Right now, the muscles over my shoulder are under gentle burn thanks to this morning’s session. It feels good.
Misery, they say, loves company. I found it easier to write this blog when I was battling physically and emotionally, there was material with which to work. Now that I am happier, and a lot calmer, I am sometimes stumped. It’s a good place to be, but it doesn’t make much of a topic to write about. My life is very ordinary.
I get up, do yoga twice a week, swim once a week, wake my daughter, get ready for work and school, work, go home, cook supper, watch TV with my husband, read a bit, go to sleep. Repeat. There are those for whom that description of suburbian domesticity will sound like hell. It’s my heaven.
Some very admirable people, after an encounter with cancer, a transplant, multiple sclerosis, bomb blasts …the list goes on, change their lives radically. They leave jobs, march across deserts, climb mountains, raise money for various causes, dedicate their lives to helping others. I salute them all. Their stories are inspiring.
Right or wrong, when I knew that I was going to have a transplant, what I wanted from having one was normality. I wanted my life to go on as it had.
Just before, and just after the transplant, that was hard to imagine, but here it is: ordinary life.
What’s more there is something to be celebrated in the ordinary. The world needs quiet, ordinary people as much as it needs heroes.
Every now and then someone who would otherwise have lived an unremarkable life finds themselves pushed to the leap into frozen rivers to save people from a capsised boat, or clamber into a burning car to drag out the injured. Interviewed they say they simply did what the had to do, that they felt they had no choice, sometimes that they didn’t stop to think, they just did.
Before I had cancer or a transplant I looked at anyone who survived either as remarkable. I don’t feel remarkable at all. I feel ordinary, which is great because that is what I wanted to be: just an ordinary person making the world a better place by being a quiet citizen trying hard to be good and kind and honourable.
There are millions of us, all over the world. We get up every day, feed the kids and the pets, take children to school, work as best we can, pay taxes, try to always speak quietly to the irritating, smile, say thank you, drive as safely as we can.
The world absolutely needs heroes, those people who inspire us, and show us that ordinary people can extend themselves, can step up to the plate when the going gets tough. The world also needs us ordinary people. We keep it running, we keep society ticking over. So, smile, chances are you are an ordinary hero too.
Delivered. 