There Won’t Always Be A ‘Next Time’

‘You have everything you wanted, and you still find reasons to complain,’ my late wife Cushla said, looking over at me from behind the Italian retro sunglasses I had bought for her a few weeks before the trip.

It was after lunch on the veranda of the Royal Evian Resort in Eastern France, by the border with Switzerland. We were lying on the luxuriant sun beds looking over the resort’s parkland at the expansive Lake Geneva and the glorious Alps. All seemed to be well with the world: against the odds, at age 42 and after years of poor health, Cushla was a few weeks pregnant. My business was booming, and we lived in a beautiful home. Nonetheless, I still found something trivial to grumble about at the Belle Époque style, five-star hotel.

Cushla's remark woke me up from my maudlin, at least for the time being. I felt ashamed when I thought of how she was always grateful to God for all her blessings and how she uncomplainingly and heroically endured a mysterious debilitating illness for seventeen years, which often left her exhausted and which she had only begun to recover from before she fell pregnant.

Although remarkably positive, her work was cut out, trying to encourage me to keep my thoughts elevated and appreciate what I had. No matter what success I had, I wanted more out of life. When I  moaned about my first-world problems, she’d remind me: ‘You’re not starving in Calcutta’ or ‘You’re not in a concentration camp'. She also reminded me of the good health I had but took for granted.

‘ You don’t realise how lucky you are to have your health, ' she’d say to me more out of pity than scorn. She fully understood what it was like to be unwell but didn’t blame me for my spiritual immaturity when I focused on what I didn’t have instead of what I had.

For a while, I wondered about my lack of imagination—why do I take the miracles, blessings, and gifts in my life for granted and instead focus on the negative or mundane trivia? But not having Cushla’s spiritual discipline, my awareness of my blessings didn’t last long, and I soon reverted to chasing success.

 Taking Things For Granted

Unlike me, Cushla always had her priorities right, including on that trip to Evian. Despite being a Francophile and enjoying the banter with the French, holidays and luxury hotels didn’t mean much to her.

She had her eye on the eternal and knew these things passed. Her spiritual life and loved ones are what mattered to her.  

On the other hand, whereas I adored Cushla, I was often distracted by my worldly ambitions. And hard as it is to say it – I sometimes took her for granted and focused way too much on my business. In my defence, I had an underlying pollyannish outlook and had concocted a perfect future for us in my imagination. In the life script, I unconsciously wrote for us, I envisaged that we’d have a child, be financially successful, have perfect health, travel the world and grow old together.  

Little did I know what was ahead of us. A few months after our trip to Evian, we lost our baby girl, Meera Thérèse, through miscarriage and eight years after that, Cushla died at age 51.

  The Fallacy Of Permanence

Probably the main reason I took things for granted and didn’t fully prioritise what mattered was that I bought into the illusion of permanence. Although, at one level of consciousness, I knew that we all die, a part of me was hard-wired to think Cushla would always be there—well, at least until old age.

I suspect it’s the same for many people: always chasing the next dangling carrot. We race after so many carrots, but we forget what we have — and most will continue to forget it until we no longer have it.

 Our secular and materialistic world reinforces this fallacy of permanence by distracting us and aiding and abetting us in denying our mortality (subtly or overtly). With declining faith in the afterlife, no wonder there’s been a surge of interest in trying to live longer.

We are also conditioned to spend inordinate amounts of time acquiring unimportant things and ‘experiences’, so we have little time and energy left to see with wonder. We can then fall into the trap of thinking things are static and that familiar people will always be there. The hard concrete buildings, the sun rising every morning, and the familiar faces we see daily add to this mindset that things can seem permanent — it can lead to us developing a form of mental dullness. We succumb to it again and again unless we fight hard against it. Most importantly, we must remind ourselves that the people around us will not be there forever.

 Gratitude

‘I’ve led a charmed life’, Cushla said to me a few months before she died. She wasn’t just saying it to comfort me —it was the truth: I had known her for twenty-seven years and witnessed how, despite enduring many hardships, including her illness and losing loved ones, she was the happiest person I ever knew. The hope and sense of peace she possessed was no accident— she had placed love and faith at the centre of her life, and this, together with her remarkable spiritual discipline, helped her to keep in mind the blessings in her life.

Cusha has left me a legacy that guides and encourages me to lift up my thoughts so that I, too, now remember to focus on what I have and not on what I don’t. Consequently, instead of focusing on my loss, I can see how blessed I am to have had Cushla in my life for such a long time. Into the bargain, I am much better at not taking others in my life for granted —I have new eyes of faith and now know for sure that seemingly ordinary people can profoundly influence others — an impact that ripples out to the universe.