This year, for the first time, I'm starting to see the sense of living in the present moment. It follows on from the death of an old friend at Christmas. I attended her funeral on my birthday 22nd of December.
Trish was diagnosed with cancer around 10 years ago, but had appeared to be over it and was one of those people I often thought about as 'conquering the disease'.
Around April of last year, I bumped into her in the supermarket. She looked fantastic, though uncharacteristically for her, her normal sleek dark-haired bob, was now curly. Her hair looked nice, so I commented on it.
"I haven't had my hair done," she replied, "it's the chemo. The cancer has come back."
By the end of the year she was dead at just forty two years old.
I'll never be able to hear the songs: "Time to Say Goodbye" or "Silent Night" again without thinking of her funeral.
And then, a couple of weeks later, I happened to ask Sian, someone I worked with as a nurse more than twenty years ago, how Huw, a male nurse was getting on. "Didn't you know? He died a couple of years ago," she said.
I didn't even know. He was only about forty years of age.
The coincidental thing about this is the last time I spoke to him was when I was out at a local nightclub for Trish's hen night about 20 years ago. He happened to be out with his friends that night.
Trish and Huw were two people who I felt a bond with many years ago.
It's made me realise that I need to seize the day. Putting things off is no good. I need to do what I want right now, reaching for the stars and grabbing hold of them. Tomorrow might not come. All I have is the here and now.
