Surrounded by magic

Sometimes everywhere I look there is a miracle. A few months ago after lots of hard work and testing moments I left my flat and walked the usual route into town, it had stopped raining a couple minutes prior to this and everything felt as though it had been washed clean. The air was flavoured with diamonds, the street glistened and everyone appeared to be smiling but in reality nothing was different. I've walked that path thousands of times but that time was will stand out.

Last year I worked with a woman who was extremely forgetful and had a very slight learning difficulty. She had one son, we'll call him K, and he was the sweetest of children - very determined, diligent, polite and fun. As she doesn't work so her life is very family orientated - visiting her parents in the mornings and spending the rest of the day with K. His father had chosen to have nothing to do with him, after a messy divorce she didn't want any contact with the father either. She is, however, one of the best mothers I know, always trying to educate K in every way she possibly can yet maintaining a delicate balance of work and play.
Earlier this year she fell pregnant for the second time. It had been the first time ever in her life that she'd had a one night stand and wham, bam, big mistake! The guy turned out to be a real mess with a history of violence, addictions and so on. She found out his family are well-known in the area for their bullying tactics and it was proved to her when his sister and approached her and threatened her and her son. Not long after that she asked me to get information on abortion for her. I gave her telphone numbers of local clinics, medical write-ups and a few stories of people who'd been through this. She took her time in making this heart-wrenching decision and came close to having an abortion but in the end she decided to keep the baby - despite her doctor's predictions that the child could very likely born with brain damage. They were very somber moments. Not once did she get angry, all the time she kept saying that they were her circumstances so all she had to do now was deal with them in the best way she possible.

A new support-worker took over from me about 5 months into her pregnancy, but a couple weeks ago I received a text from my old manager saying she'd given birth to a healthy son, both mother and brother were overjoyed.

This week I'm going to meet the little boy. For some silly reason I feel he'll always have a tiny bit of me with him.

For some reason I think this is all a miracle.

Christmas treats for the soul

So Christmas is just another day. I'm guessing, thanks to China, more people in the world do not celebrate it than do.

My Christmas got off to a dodgy start with me having to work for 24hrs but luckily my colleagues pooled together and I did not have to wake up at the office. I couldn't go to England to spend it with my folks so I bought a good substitute, cheap red wine. My Christmas eve turned into quite a party due to dancing and singing along, with a Glaswegian, to John Belushi by the Broken Family Band.

This morning I went to work and had to deal with situations such as service-users in tears because they were missing their family who never contacted them anyway. Another woman tried to phone her sister only to be told she'd moved out the flat and left no details, but after handing the phone over to me the new owner told me why ... their father had been arrested for murder and the sister's partner was in prison for attempted rape. The usual stuff. My shift ended with one of the new polish colleagues getting a pretty good slap across the face and a big enough dose of shock to keep her crying for an hour. All the pretty stuff that everyone thinks of on Christmas.

After work I took up a kind invitation from a friend to join him and his family, luckily I arrived just in time for dinner and it was a superb evening with all the relatives. From there we took his grandparents to their home and his granny proudly showed me their open fire which they wouldd spend the rest of the Christmas night infront of. From there we went onto visit friends of my friend, a very close family. The father asked me what I did and I told him social work as a career and photography as a hobby .. and hoping to combine it into photojournalism at some point. He called me away to look at some autobiographies he had, then let me read a write up about a soldier who'd given up his limbs to courageously protect a town that wasn't even in his home country, and after that he told me about one of his children who'd died tragically a few years ago. He spoke about where he tried to get his inspiration from to keep believing that he should keep going. I listened. Then he asked where I, being rather young, got my inspiration for life from.
He probably won't realise it but his kind words and the time he took to talk to me is what will make me return to work tomorrow and keep going. Thanks Joe.

Where is my mind?

Up until a couple of years ago I always thought the saying 'make ends meet' was 'make hen's meat'. Well the second option makes more sense to me, do ends ever meet?

(If you're not philosophical then stop here and rather look at the pretty pictures.)

If there is a lesson I'm learning it is that I know nothing! Nothing at all. When I talk to people that are so confident about an idea or theory I wonder to myself just how much of the big picture are they seeing? Or did they see it and then decide that it's just too confusing so rather just settle for the easy way. And I also question do they realise how small a part they play in this massive scene. Knowledge is far more powerful than opinions but even facts change with time .. was the Earth always round? I know it's a silly question to ask but don't we always say honesty is the best policy? We're learning and discovering, we do not actually know.

The joys of opening up your mind are that you shoot yourself in the foot too. You deliberately challenge yourself to understand everyone's lifestyles, ideas and beliefs. And then you analyse. And you analyse. And you realise that there is no black and white whatsoever. And the world in general lacks common sense. But you accept everything for what it is and realise it should not be judged because it is 99.9% probable that you don't have all the facts. Once past that you realise the only thing you truly do have is this very moment which is filled with possibility - if you can surpass your self.

Maybe once that is done one can truly appreciate just how big life really is.