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Today I did my regular trip into “town” for groceries and a few errands. It’s a 15 minute drive the local shopping centre, I know, it’s hardly remote, but it would be a good days walk for me. Sipping on a coffee at my favourite local cafe, I realised the shopping list was sitting on my desk, at home.
If asked why I forgot, I might say it is one of the drawbacks of ageing, but I’ve always been a bit forgetful with a busy brain and wandering attention span. I busied myself re-constructing the list in my head, wet dog food, roast chicken, library stop, bread, milk, vegies, and oh yes, cotton buds, we rarely get them but we needed to restock.
All items were easily found, the different shops in short walking distance of each other. I stopped at my favourite place for discount vegies, the deli for Italian pane and free range eggs, leaving just a few remaining items from the supermarket.
The cotton buds... where to find these little fellas? It had been a while.
Our local supermarket has two aisles of personal hygiene and first aid products. (Does that seem like a lot? It does to me, but there’s not great variety). The aisles include half a row of baby items – nappies, baby clothing, wipes, formula, dummies, etc, etc, etc
Baby gear, you get the picture, every involuntary childless woman does. Yep, a big fat grief trigger, right there, no cotton buds in sight.
In the past, sometimes I’d artfully avoided that end of the aisle or at other times, i’d lingered hopefully, familiarising myself with the items that would soon be needed. At the time, not being a Mum wasn’t in my range of vision, so the best i could do was to get prepared.
But today, the baby gear barely registered as wandered past, looking up and down the shelves for my quarry. The cotton bud collection wasn’t easy to find, it felt like being in the movie “Dark City” where everything seems to get regularly re-arranged .
On my second sweep past the baby items, I stopped and marvelled as I consciously noticed them for the first time. I marvelled at the capacity for human psychological healing from devastating grief.
The baby items are located right next to the incontinence and menstrual pads. Over the past 15 years, (particularly when we were still trying for children), this aisle would leave me devastated, overwhelmed by emotion.