I love it when people tell me their stories. I never cease to be amazed at the things that ‘ordinary’ people live through, cope with, or indeed manage to transform into a totally different story.
I was gifted two such stories last week. I got talking to a businesswoman and we drifted onto the subject of her family. She told me a heart stopping story about the illness her young daughter was living with and the impact this had on their lives. But it was a story told without self-pity, designed not to shock but simply to explain. A tale not of sorrow but of courage and patience and love. Laced with comic episodes and told with smiles, not tears. I could only step back with wonder at the ability of this family, this woman, to transform a terrible experience into something positive, and good.
Later the same day I was chatting to a Big Issue vendor. Just up from London he was keen to talk, trying to work out how best to engage with the Edinburgh shoppers. His story was also a roller coaster affair, a reminder of how quickly life can unravel once one part of the marriage-work-home equation starts to unravel. But this man was an optimist. It was good to be in the fresh air of Edinburgh, selling in front of the Castle, looking across to the crags on Arthur’s Seat. It would soon be Festival time. He was a busker, a unicyclist, a juggler. If he could just find the money to get his unicycle up here there was money to be made in the summer. Always new balls to be thrown, a different tightrope to ride.
Two different faces of Edinburgh, two completely different stories. What linked them together was the attitude of the story-tellers. They had reframed what to most of us would be end of the world circumstances. Chaos and catastrophe. Things falling apart. The end of life as we know it. Taken that old story and transformed it into something new: a story of courage, and optimism, of persistence and love. A belief in possibility. Not looking back, never looking down: riding the tightrope of life.
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