That Nudge

Life creeps up on us when we think we’re being smart and sophisticated by making elaborate plans to achieve things we assume is important. Then suddenly, the most subtle nudge jolts us out of that self-indulgent stupor and we realise that everything we were planning for was actually trivial and pointless.

I recently begrudgingly settled into the assumed reality that life the way I know it is the way it will be until the end. I assumed the foetal position ready to be a martyr. I was ready to sacrifice my needs and desires for the stability and security that those around me would benefit from. But from a place I least expected, I was jolted out of my staid reality and infused with fearful hope that the fat lady is not yet ready to sing.

I had planned in detail how I was going to explain to my daughter that she needed to be strong by herself without a mother. The arrangements I would need to make for my care should I reach an infirm age. My explanation to my estranged daughter that I had to simply make a very difficult choice in utilising my limited resources to help her sister recover from the trauma of a dysfunctional environment rather than continuing the ten year struggle with her mother to maintain a significant role in her life.

And then the nudge came in a most unassuming form. A nudge that has unsettled my idyllic loneliness and forced me to peer out of my shell at a world that I had long grown to despise for its hypocrisy, betrayal and double standards. Part of me is whimpering in silent protest at the changes that that nudge is prompting in me, but most of me is smiling like a newly toothed baby assuming that the whole world is ready to smile with me.

By I’m a decaying pragmatist at heart, so such euphoria will be tampered with reality no matter my romantic inclinations. My stubborn cynicism will endure a while longer until the reality of this hope is realised, because I know all too well that such hope can be fleeting, and such promise can be empty. Yet the fool in me remains hopeful nonetheless, and no matter what the outcome, I will spit in the face of futility and laugh at the fact that I hoped again, despite the gravest oaths I’d taken never to succumb to such a frivolity ever again.