“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”   Khalil Gibran

“Feeling irritated, restless, afraid, and hopeless is a reminder to listen more carefully.”   Pema Chodron

“So many people come into our lives and then leave the way they came.  But there are those precious few who touch our hearts so deeply we will never be the same.”   Mary Engelbreit

“Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.”   Margaret Mead

“Destiny is not a matter of chance; but a matter of choice.  It is not a thing to be waited for.   It is a thing to be achieved.”   William Jennings Bryan

It fireworks night in the UK and over the weekend hundreds of events will have taken place celebrating a time in British history when a plot to blow up Parliament was thwarted.

Try as I might I cannot get excited about this.  Of course I love the pretty colours that appear in the sky overhead, I just do not like fireworks; the noise and smell of them.  I find myself year after year reluctantly joining in and going along to organised gatherings for fear of being called a party pooper when all I want to do is watch some rubbish TV and go to sleep early.

It’s not like any other time of the year for me.  Having prepared a few days ago for Halloween and the “Trick or Treaters”, again a custom I find very very strange but can see the fun in it for the children.  Children of all ages literally with the teenagers being the funniest as they just don’t quite understand that to get the “treat” they need to have participated by dressing up, not just turning their hoodie backwards and borrowing their younger sibling’s hat.  Yes I can see the fun in that.

But fireworks night . . . I don’t get it.  I can remember a time when I did get excited about fireworks night, when we’d huddle together waiting for our sparklers to sparkle and watch the fireworks one by one leave the safety of the tin to be taken to the end of the garden, to be lit and explode with a flurry of colour and sound, like diamonds in the sky.

And these points in the year were not focused so much on the event but on the people Aunty Betty, Uncle George, Cousin Ann, the list was a long one being part of a very large extended family.  20 people or more for any day such as fireworks night was a big deal and a chance to catch up with each other.

Perhaps it is this that I miss.  That sense of being part of something bigger than myself.  That sense of knowing that nothing would ever change, that we would always be as close as we were back then.

In reality I can’t remember the last time I saw Cousin Ann and her parents are no longer with us.  That large extended family is now huge with so many many relatives that most venues would have difficulty housing us if we should choose to get together as we did when we were younger.

How interesting!  I can now feel my excitement returning.  Fireworks night reminds me of times gone by . . . of all the times this day has happened and the family and friends I’ve had fun with.  It’s just different now and up to me to create new memories.

Happy Guy Fawkes Day!!

“The great thing in this world is not so much where you stand, as in what direction you are moving.”   Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Kind words are the music of the world.”   F. W. Faber

“Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom.  It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.”      Rollo May

“Nothing can add more power to your life than concentrating all your energies on a limited set of targets.”  Nido Qubein