Sonja Catani Blog

After meeting up with friends at a wonderful, generous and warm dinner the other night I’ve been thinking about the implications of carrying a heavy load in life. Everything is about making choices, about choosing how to live your life and how to make the best of it. Many people blame history and past unfortunates in order to have something to blame if their lives are not up to par in the presence. But everyone’s got s choice. We can choose to see the problems or we can choose to see solutions. We can choose to be unhappy or we can choose to find happiness in life, in the small details like being able to drink coffee in the sun a beautiful September morning. We can choose to forgive and move on. We can choose to forget and only remember the good things. We can choose to turn bad events into something good. For example a friend of mine who broke her leg was so happy to have only broken one leg, and not both, because walking on crutches makes it far more easier to move around than sitting in a wheelchair would. Problems and heavy burdens, past mishaps and sad events can actually be something that gives us an opportunity to practice this positive and life embracing attitude. A curse is almost always a blessing in disguise. The only way to find out is to choose to see things in a new light. If one stands in a dark corridor and it seems that the door at the end is locked and won’t open however much one pulls and pushes and tries to force it. Well then it might be a good idea to turn around and look at the corridor from a new perspective. Oh look! Revelation! There are suddenly three doors we never saw before. They’re wide open, sunlight streaming through them from open windows inside the rooms. New opportunities, new beginnings and a chance to forget the dark hallway.

So back to the dinner. The hostess said afterwards that it was like Babette’s Feast or in modern day maybe we’d refer to the Stephen Fry movie Peter’s Friends. The gathering was a mix match of people who all carried a lot of heavy burdens with them from life. Not a very Swedish or text book A1 constellation. There were:

– 3 adopted people
– 3 who’ve lost their wives in young age to cancer
– 4 or maybe even 5 who had traumatic divorces behind them
– 2 who’ve witnessed the horrific scene after one of their parents committed suicide
– 2 families who had adopted children
– 3 who had a known or unknown diagnosis of some sort of letter-combination
– 6 who had other religious views than the dominating Swedish Christian view
– 2 who ate food not normally served in restaurants
– 2 who had survived natural disasters
– 4 who had divorced parents
– 3 unemployed
– 5 who chose to work only for the fun of it
– 8 single or part-time parents
– 8 who had ancestors from Finland, France, Germany, Russia, India, Switzerland, Sri Lanka, Denmark or Italy
– 8 who had lived in England, France, US, Germany, Norway, Finland, Spain, the Carribean, Denmark, Israel, South Africa or Estonia

And everyone got along, everyone had fun. Everyone talked about how life is at it’s best on a Tuesday. And everyone chose to see life as a gift, as something precious. Everyone chose to see past burdens and instead see a curse as a blessing and to look at life through pink glasses. This had nothing to do with all the champagne served. This was because we all chose to walk on the sunny side of life. And if we have a burden, however heavy, we chose not to carry it with us and cast a shadow over us.

I will now in my terrible school French try to explain this to an ant that for the past half an hour has been carrying out a Sisyfus task by dragging the heavy load of a grape three meters over a sunny patio. Please, sil vous plait, sit down in the sun and enjoy life, drink a glass of champagne instead of carrying your own grapes in order to make it. Life is too short. Especially if you’re an ant.