BLOWN THROUGH LIFE BACKWARDS

You may be a stable type, with clear-cut future goals and a history of doing the right thing.  Although you have faced adversity you will never fully relate to someone who has been blown through life backwards. These unfortunates are people who seem to do everything right, with results that simply do not correlate with their well meaning, strongly considered and ambitious plans.

Twenty years ago, a small neighbourhood restaurant was bought by a bucolic and motivated young chef.  On his opening night, a man sliced off the end of his finger with a steak knife because he did not have his glasses on. The man affectionately known as Uncle Gerry hopped about screaming while his family group just keep yelling “Oh no Uncle Gerry.”  Although the fare was sumptuous, the staff accommodating and the young chef—owner extremely ambitious, the opening night finished him. In a superstitious little town, the restaurant became known as “Uncle  Gerry’s Finger” and went out of business months later. 

A women who was a semi-celebrated stage acress in England pursued and caught the son of member of the House of Lords. He was reasonably good looking and urbane.  The woman did not know he was the”step-son” and not the son of the Lord.  After marriage the step son got sacked from his job, the Lord died and left nothing to him and the actress who thought she had married the motherlode had to sell the faddish Lordly Slimming Couch (purportedly able to rattle off pounds through a vibrating, spin cycle like action of internal springs and motors) to make ends meet. Later she became a manicurist, but this simply wasn’t where she thought she would end up.

In Pennsylvania, a young man married his dental hygienist, an attractive young woman with golden hair.  He brought his bride to live in his parents home.  The young woman developed terrible allergies, but the couple stayed on in the house. Gradually the woman’s symptoms disappeared and she was happy. Happy, until it became morbidly clear that she was now allergic to everything but the house. The only place she could survive now due to some peculiar adaptive immunity anomaly, she could not leave the house, or she would become deathly ill. The young couple grew apart because she could only wave to him out of the kitchen window as he left for work, but never able to accompany him anywhere. They lived on for years in relative sadness, because they no longer liked each other, but she could never move out.

The strangest “blown through life backwards” story concerns a man from a First Nations Community. He was a well educated leader, a Community Scion and a good  man. He was in a frightening car collision and lost a good deal of short term and some long-term memory. In that state he completely detached from his heritage and no longer self-identified as First Nations. The food in his reserve community was foreign and unpleasant to him. He could not relate to those around him and withdrew into a world of who he was not. He thrived on Chinese takeout,  took up many crafts, none of which related to his heritage and moved to the city where he runs a small souvenir store, where none of his formerly beloved symbols or images are displayed.

Time, circumstance, assumption and  irony all play a role in our lives. For some, it is an almost “twilight-zone” experience which reforms or redirects or plunges their life into a  new place with unfamiliar players and and uncertain outcomes. What is the object lesson in these stories? Enjoy each moment, savour your routines and rituals and develop a healthy empathy for those whose lives see them blown through life backwards.