GIVE ME A BREAK:I WAS writing my column yesterday with the radio on, and heard Alain de Botton talking to Pat Kenny about his new book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. What most people believe would make them happy would be serving others, he said, and as if to prove the point throughout the day, RTÉ1's radio programmes were full of listeners offering free transportation and accommodation for travellers' stranded as a result of the volcanic ash cloud.
It was synchronicity, because I was writing my column about how, in the past few weeks, I’ve been fortunate to have received generosity from strangers, including three pieces of unsolicited advice out of the blue.
Sometimes, when I’m busy and preoccupied, I forget I have a soul. So there I am, feeling hassled in the supermarket, pushing the trolley and looking for bargains. There’s a long queue at the check-out and behind me is a little woman with a basket of a few things so I tell her to go ahead of me, since I’ve got a laden trolley.
She thanks me, looks straight into my soul like some sort of white witch and says: “May I give you some advice?”
What would you do? Unsolicited advice can be dangerous, especially in families where we always seem to see other people’s problems more clearly than our own. Never offer until you’re asked, because giving advice can sometimes be perceived as judgment, rather than wisdom.
With this total stranger, though, there wasn’t this risk, so my curiosity won out.
She eyeballed me. “Things are going to get better for you. Much, much better and you haven’t long to wait,” she said.
That made me smile, then she said: “You should be dead by now. You’re still here because God needs you here.”
Disturbing, though doubtless true. At my age, most people have had a few close calls.
I thanked her for her advice, then she disappeared, leaving me to ponder her words as I went through the checkout. Her advice, though unexpected, was delivered with love and left a glow behind. I think what she was really saying was: “I recognise you as a human soul whose life is about more than doing the food shopping and getting on to the next task. You are here for a reason.”
We all need a reason, otherwise we’d feel like hamsters on wheels all the time, instead of just half the time, and maybe my reason during that exchange was to give that lady a reason.
The second piece of advice came from a lovely and wise man I happened to meet socially and we didn’t know each other from Adam. There was chit chat for the first few minutes, yet somehow we clicked, as you do when you meet someone whose quest is similar to your own.
He looked straight into my innermost self, saying: “Your soul is so, so tiny, you’re hiding it away. Look at your body language, what you did with your hand holding it against your chest, you’re protecting your soul.”
And he was right. I won’t go into the details, because that would not only bore you to tears but would be breaking healthy psychological boundaries in a national newspaper read around the world (and if you think he was chatting me up, he wasn’t, believe me).
This man had a healing energy and there was a sense of purpose in our conversation, as though it was meant to be. Synchronicity again. When I gave him an honest, brief answer to one of those open-ended questions that can be answered in five words or a million, his eyes filled with tears. “Just then, I glimpsed your soul.” While cynics may say it’s crazy, my tiny soul felt braver having met him.
The third piece of advice came from the kindly flower shop lady, who walks by my house to and from work. “I hope you don’t mind me saying this – is it ok?”
Go ahead, this unsolicited advice thing is growing on me.
“The trees you planted in your front garden last autumn need to be pruned now, while the flowers are blooming.”
The flowers take the strength from the tree, apparently, and the upward growing branches sap the energy, so you need to prune about 10 cms from the top of the tree, especially the central branch. She even lent me her little foliage clipper for the job.
I had two thoughts: maybe souls are a bit like that. If you spend all your time growing upwards in the external world without pruning back and nurturing yourself, your soul’s energy becomes depleted and you grow straggly and can’t blossom.
My other thought was, there are angels everywhere, and some of them don’t have wings.
