Life is like a rollercoaster

“Life is like a roller coaster. It has its ups and downs…but it’s your choice to either scream or enjoy the ride.” Author unknown.

I think it might be because of my age, or the result of a life that has been at times rather accidental in its development, but recently I have been contemplating the fact that life is, by its nature, temporary. The reason for this will become obvious as I ramble on…

I have had my share of ups and downs in life and I must admit that I have rather enjoyed the ride, I have no regrets because even the bad bits have taught me something, led me in new and interesting directions and made me a bit wiser from the journey. My inclination has always been to live my life more by instinct than design. Part of this came from my Dad, who had a tendency to wander at will. After he retired, he would leave the house in the morning to buy a newspaper and arrive home 5 hours later, having gone where the mood took him. My Mum always said she thought he had a gypsy spirit and I think I do too!

There are two main reasons for my reticence towards planning.

Firstly I am a person who believes very strongly that you should always follow your instincts and mine have never led me far wrong. Even if the reason hasn’t been immediately obvious, circumstances have always shown me that I was right all along. This may be partly because I always see the ‘up’ side to everything, the silver lining – every situation has one if you look for it.  Also in part this might be due to sheer dumb luck, or it might be fate, that my instincts were making me follow my own destiny, one of which I wasn’t aware. I have often had the feeling that life has led me to people that I needed for some reason, for however brief a time. Also my journey has led me to places where I felt I was meant to be, putting me in the right place at the right time, so to speak.

Secondly, I have found that whenever I plan things, circumstances conspire to destroy my plans, set obstacles in my path and pull the rug out from under me.

So I tend to avoid planning and ‘go with the flow’, trust my inner voice and be open to whatever opportunities that life throws my way. If it feels wrong, I avoid it like the plague, but if it feels right, I go for it, all in, 100%. “No point doing anything by halves,” my dear late Mum used to say and “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well!” I suspect that I inherited that view from her.

With the sort of life I have led, nothing (apart for my love for the important people in my life) seems to have lasted all that long. When you are a creature of instinct, how can it? But in life in general when I think about it, nothing truly lasts, does it? Let’s take the weather – it is changeable. I have never seen weather as truly changeable as where I live. We might have sunshine, rain, hail, snow and rainbows all in the space of an hour or two, and that is one thing I love about living in a beautiful Welsh valley. I can spend ages just watching the clouds! Seasons will come and go with regularity. Within a year there is a myriad of changes in light and shade, trees and plants are colourful then starkly unadorned. Heat and cold; fire and ice – all within a matter of weeks. Rivers rise and fall, tides ebb and flow. The faces of the moon follow the same cycle and the sun sits there while the earth runs its daily course around the sky. We are powerless to stop any of it, or make it stay the same and we would be wrong to try, because that is how it needs to be.

People don’t stay the same either. Looking at the famous seven stages of man speech from Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’:

“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”

From cradle to grave we are constantly changing and each stage has its challenges. The child strives to do things that the bigger kids do, ignorant of the simplicity of life and sense of wonder that they have and which adults crave to have again. The teenager can’t wait to reach adulthood, with all its perceived freedoms and no clue of the inherent responsibilities. The adult is rushing from one day to another, looking for love, seeking money and fame, searching to make a better future. They might become parents and the cycle begins again. But they might easily forget to enjoy what they have now. There are good things and bad aspects to all of it, but in rushing from one stage to another, from one goal to another we may often forget to appreciate what we already have.  If it is good, hold onto it – you never know when it will be taken away. Life can literally turn on a dime and what you think is solid and secure can be swept from you. Your loved ones, your job, your home. The homeless person on the street didn’t start out like that; circumstances – maybe bad luck or bad choices – came and dragged them from their life. That could happen to anyone, through no fault of their own. But if something in your life is bad, there is always a chance, come tomorrow that “This too shall pass”. I personally try to live each day as if it was my last, cherishing what I have and those I hold dear and hoping that tomorrow they will still be there, that the bad things in my life might get better and that nothing worse will come to replace them. You need to live your life with your eyes open but also with your heart full of hope.

“Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.” Thich Nhat Hanh.

We also take our health for granted when we are young – we feel we are invincible and we will live forever. As we age we are plagued by illness, then if we’re lucky, we may get well again. The illness is a temporary condition. But then we might get worse or another sickness may befall us. It may go away for good or leave us with the remnants of weakness in some way. Some conditions may be long-lasting or chronic and our lives are changed forever. We lose control and feel powerless. But we can learn to live with it, we can adapt and progress, become someone slightly different. Maybe we feel that we are less in some ways, but better in others. But living one day at a time means that, at any one point, one day is all we have to deal with, just one day to get through. And that makes it manageable.

To me there are two choices in life. You can ride that rollercoaster and look forward to the climb to the top and enjoying the thrill of the ride, eyes wide open and aware that you may well hit rock bottom, but at the same time ready to do your best to climb up again, enjoy the view and get ready for the next time you fall. Or you can scream blue murder, get off the rollercoaster that is life and wait to die on a straight road to nowhere, surrounded by a cloud of negativity. Personally I’m stubborn; I will fight every day to overcome the obstacles I face and to help others to face theirs. I will ride that rollercoaster and enjoy every minute. Because that’s what it means to be truly alive. I will live with hope, because I know that tomorrow morning, regardless of what I do, the sun WILL come up, the weather will change, the seasons will pass. That new day might bring me something special, something magical – a new opportunity to take me wherever my instincts lead me. And if it doesn’t, there is always the day after that.

© Alyson Mountjoy