I think I sometimes get lucky with some very special people around me. I’ve had a few experiences recently.
July was a complicated month with various ups and downs. In fact, that’s how I’ve experienced most months this year, more difficult than the first year of the pandemic. I know it wasn’t the year different, I felt it that way.
The other day I saw a friend who had just come back from holiday. She had had a short holiday, a few days at the seaside in the Vltava and then to Greece. She greeted me with a relaxed, free air that changed my mood. She gave me a little chocolate, a little prosecco and we talked, but her ease inspired hope, a desire to leave worries behind, to escape. It reminded me of something I’ve often said to myself: we make things happen, we can move something around, we bring about change, not the other way around.
Maybe I had forgotten, maybe the weariness of the last two years and many years before, a certain feeling of being ‘alone in the world’, as Hector Malot’s book says, maybe all this and more ‘got to me’, as my granny used to say. Or maybe, as someone told me in the past, it was Mercury retrograde this year. Never mind. What does matter is that every now and then these gift people appear, people who bring rain to a thirsty land, people seemingly sent by someone who, perhaps, up there, loves us.
Then, the next day, I met someone who delighted me with an artfully delivered speech, with words that conveyed poetry, creativity, critical thinking, imagination, courage, sincerity, warmth.
Oh, and I wouldn’t want to end without saying about a very young colleague of mine who came to work from the office and brought, that day, an air so free, fresh, peppered with quality jokes, new perspectives, that it added doses of positivity to my day.
Let me not forget that I also have a few gift people on social media, among those who always know how to look on the bright side of others. I admire them for this ability to support others, for their generosity, discretion and gentleness.
All these people didn’t come by chance, they are my lately gift people. And I thank them.