NUDGINGS: a journey into the unknown

This past week, I heard from another of my friends. She was empathizing with me and saying, ‘I know your life isn’t your own right now.’ And while I knew exactly where she was coming from, that she was in fact saying to me “Hang in there. Life will get better!”, it didn’t sit at all well with me. Why is that, I wondered? And so I spent the next little while mulling it over in my mind. Like most, if not all of us, I like to think I am in control of my life, at least to some extent, some of the time. […lol…] I like to think that I make the decisions as to how I respond to the things happening around me. But have I ever thought that my life is my own to do with what I wanted? As a daughter, a wife, a mother, a caregiver, as a woman, that concept seems foreign to my lived experience. So what exactly did it mean? I’m not at all sure that life is meant to be lived for oneself? That seems like something that would soon become boring and devoid of meaning.   I believe we were put on

Last year we were celebrating 100 years since the end of WW1, "the war to end all wars” with church bells ringing out across our communities, Since then has anything really changed? The Middle East, as well as many other places on this globe, still reverberate with the sounds of of gunfire and of bombs detonating, as we gather again: the young and the old. There is sitll talk of the sacrifice made by many men & women, not just in World War 1 but in the many wars and conflicts since that time: all those  who gave their lives in service to their country, whatever country that might be. And so we remembered…. Achieving a lasting peace has become more and more important as the weapons of war have gotten more deadly, until we now have the capacity to end all human life on this globe. What about the millions of people whose lives have been turned upside down by this latest violence?  Do we remember those who have been killed either by enemy or ‘friendly fire’ or have lost t