As we approach the second anniversary of Carys’ death, it feels appropriate to take stock and see how things have changed.  Normally when you live your day-to-day life, one day feels much the same as another… until something seismic happens.  We don’t really recognise Change when it creeps up on us gently, one day we are full of youth and vigour and the next we are feeling our age and looking back with nostalgia.

We had our world changing event 2 years ago and suddenly nothing would be the same again.  That isn’t the same as saying nothing would be good again, but at the time it felt that way.  Two years on, my youngest is half way through the university course, that he hadn’t even started back then.  My middle child is months from leaving the university she had only just joined two years ago.  My eldest has changed job and left home.  I spend my time rather differently.  I’m more selective about the work that I do and how I find it.  I recognise I have other priorities these days and have two roles to fill for my children and a gaping hole to fill in my own life.  Much as one might wish it otherwise, these things don’t magically fix themselves, you have to get into the hole and fill it with your own labour.

I write this piece partly in the knowledge that there are others out there who are at a different and darker part of their journey and in the hope that this might help them, and also as a reflection on the different faces of Change, one passive, that sculpts, shapes and erodes without you noticing and the other active that doesn’t happen if you don’t make the effort and do the work.  We so often deceive ourselves into thinking that the former won’t happen and the latter will… Life just isn’t like that!  In both our personal lives and business ones we need to take responsibility for both faces of Change and act to make our plans, our dreams and our desires take shape.

“If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”  John Wooden

“Know how to live the time that is given you.”   Dario Fo