is life beautiful

Any lingering idealism which those weeks of summer holiday might subtly generate doesn't last long!

It's down to earth and back to the world of reality with a bang. A funeral yesterday. And today I found myself meeting folk who haven't had their problems to seek.

One of the encounters was fortuitous. A chance and brief encounter in the car park with a lady who's for long enough had one thing piling on another in her life.

She was coming out of the surgery as she's been struggling with a long-term internal problem. And her husband's been struggling with depression for long enough. And, as if she didn;t have her troubles, she was mugged up town and suffered from concussion.

And all that's before you ever get on to her children and all they struggle with there as well.

That's the real world, I suppose. Problems of health, of finance and of crime. Worries about children, fears for the future, and pain that won't go away.

Later I called by on a woman who's battled with cancer for quite some time. She's far from well. Still really relatively young you'd say, but the cancer has blighted her life these past few years.

And now, as I put it to her, she's simply hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. It was good to be able to talk the whole thing through with her. There'll come a time, I guess, when that sort of talk will really not be possible at all.

Life's often hard. And often doesn't work out quite the way we'd hoped it would. But it's what we choose to make of it that's in the end the really crucial thing.

I watched a DVD a couple of weeks ago. An Italian film with English sub-titles. 'Life is beautiful' was the (English) name of the film (La vita e bella is the original Italian title). Something of a classic. But it makes that point pretty well. Worth a viewing if you haven't already seen it.

It's how you choose to handle all the hardships that life brings which is the crucial thing.