As sometimes happens, I have this concept, this phrase, this thing sloshing around in me.

It is time to try and get it down.To write!

I have been tired again. Understatement of the year! We chose to spend this winter expanding one of the cottage’s at Fynbos Retreat instead of resting. What can I say? It seemed like a good idea at the time.

In my sheer exhaustion, I kept on thinking if I don’t have compassion with myself, who will? I found myself weepy and tearful about events long past and supposedly forgotten. Some of them might even have been classified as regrets. That is, if I actually believed in such things. I don’t…having decided long ago that there is no point.

It was the weirdest feeling. The events would start to come up – surface. Before I could properly recall the circumstances and even the people involved, I would hear this little voice saying: “If I don’t have compassion for the girl, the woman, the person I was then, who will?”

It was fascinating too, to wonder about this thing that happens when I am tired. How I am automatically sad. As if there is a deep well of sadness somewhere in me (dare I say in us, especially in women!). It lies hidden and calm until my defences are low and then there it is!

Interesting that I no longer feel the need to analyse the event or the feeling even, but just know with absolute soft and gentle clarity that the Perdita I was then, was doing the very best she could. At that given moment in time with the resources she had and the knowledge- with who she was then.

This phrase, this concept calls me to smile and accept the various versions of me that have existed in all the different phases and circumstances of my life to date. To forgive and tenderly embrace myself with the very same empathy and compassion I try to give others.

I have been many people along the road. All these people had their reasons and motivations for doing the things they did. In the early morning light as I write this I love them all, forgive them all and welcome them all as facets of the diamond that is me today.

I know for sure, whatever they did or said or were…it seemed like a good idea at the time.