Recently, on our way home, a car veered onto our lane hitting us and sending us crashing into a nearby ditch. I was driving and my mum and 8 year old daughter were my passengers.
The other driver was drunk. He admitted liability on the spot, apologised several times over and kept saying that he would pay for the damage to the car. I could hear him but I was waaaaay too furious to accept his apologies or whatever else he was saying. I believe he fell asleep at the wheel. I put this to him and he didn't deny it.
Thankfully there were no serious injuries to any of us and we know and understand it could very well have been much, much, much worse.
When we got home, that evening following the accident, I was helping my daughter get ready for bed and she kept talking about the accident going over certain details over and over again. She also kept saying how good it was that we were all wearing our seat belts (I lost my brother Davis 6 years ago in a road traffic accident and it was never established if he had his seat belt on or not and this was her reference point).
After much discussion around this topic during our teeth brushing session, she finished by saying something that we could all apply to our own lives including in divorce and separation situations and experiences.
She said, "Lives are full of accidents Mama and we need to learn from them. It would be really boring if everything was perfect and we had ice cream everyday."
Indeed, life is full of accidents and difficult experiences and we do need to learn from them if we are to heal, grow and move on.
We all face difficult events and situations in our lives, that's just how it is, and when we do, it can simply smash the world we knew into a million shards and pieces. As Prof Stephen Joseph puts it, "...trauma can transform the course of one's life. Our way of seeing the world can be so completely and radically dismantled and then rebuilt that, in a sense, we step into a new world."
Here are more great quotes to go with this post, starting with the most common ever:
"What doesn't kill him makes him stronger." Nietzche (Apparently this has been paraphrased so many times so just insert whichever personal pronoun you prefer).
"We all must face difficult events in our lives. What has happened cannot be undone. Our only choice is how to live with what has happened." Prof Stephen Joseph
"There is no better than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time." Malcolm X
"Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat." Anais Nin
"Where there's no struggle, there's no strength." Oprah
and finally,
"There's beauty in the breakdown." Not sure who said this:-)
Soila (www.soila.co.uk)