We should all embrace life’s wonderment while we can...

LIKE an untethered crystal chandelier tumbling towards its doom, life – fragile, breakable, precious life – can, at any moment, shatter into a million shards, our recently glowing self re-imagined as forlorn, fragmented remnants.

The diagnosis came out of the blue, a no-warning stealth bomb from the heavens which, at its moment of devastating detonation, instantly reduced his world to rubble.

My old friend had been feeling a little tired, low on energy, running on empty; not unlike a car with the red low-fuel warning light flashing on the dashboard.

Nothing severe. Nothing threatening. Nothing that couldn’t be solved.

Advised that some class of high-octane tonic would satisfactorily replenish his tank, he was persuaded to book one of his very irregular GP appointments.

SENTENCED

He glided into the surgery as carefree as a lark. He staggered out of a hospital consultant’s clinic a week or two later as a resident of the Green Mile. The diagnosis was terminal. Illness had sentenced my friend to Death Row.

His funeral was just before Christmas, less than 100 days after he stepped on fate’s landmine.

Of course, that’s not true. The cancer had been growing clandestinely for some time, the malignancy spreading, a rapacious colonialist determined to invade and claim ownership of every acre of his being. We’ve all been there. Compelled to look on impotently as a loved one or a close pal withers before us, devoured by pain and hopelessness.

An unspoken, selfish terror often co-habits with our sense of heartbreak. What if that was me? What if I am next on the hit list? The latest recipient of the news that renders all other news irrelevant.

Among the abundance of gifts I inherited from my dear departed mother was an addiction to worry, a tendency to fret and stress and catastrophise. Doomsday lurks around every corner.

For the serially neurotic, even the most pleasant day at the races can evoke the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It is a not uncommon affliction.

Finances, family, work... the flight-path of life has only to veer slightly off course and we surrender to panic and trepidation.

It is only when a person is ambushed by serious ill-health that the penny drops. The other stuff matters, of course it does. But when the vitality is evicted from your bones, it puts everything else into pitiless context.

The great Italian filmmaker, Federico Fellini, confronted that truth before his passing in 1993.

PLEASURE

“My relationship with my body has changed. I used to consider it as a servant who should obey, function, give pleasure. In sickness you realise you are not the boss. It is the other way around.”

Even those with 20-20 vision can remain blind to an inalienable truth: Good health, a treasure so many take for granted, truly ought to be savoured in every imaginable way.

A walk on the beach or across the local park, going to a match, reading a book, putting down the phone for a little while and giving yourself entirely to a conversation. Closing your eyes and listening to the music of your breathing.

Simple things, the inestimable value of which is often only realised after they are stolen away.

During his illness, my friend would constantly remark about how he hadn’t realised through all those vigorous years just how good he once had it.

His bank balance might never have been confused with that of Elon Musk, but he held the deeds to the riches of the everyday.

The merciless abomination visited, day after desperate day, upon the children of Gaza is another tragic and jarring reminder of all that is precious.

I find myself looking for minutes on end at some of the photographs from that theatre of malevolence, hypnotised by the terror and despair that has taken ownership of so many young faces. Wondering how it can be so.

Children whose world has been reduced to the sulphur-perfumed dimensions of their rubblestrewn hell, a godforsaken dystopia stripped of humanity and hope.

Look out the window this morning. Of course we’d like less rain, but, still, we can savour the sunshine of birdsong, of spring growth, of kids gambolling on the green without a care in the world.

Nature truly is the supreme portrait artist.

The East Pier at Dún Laoghaire is among my favourite places on earth. A great curling, concrete arm reaching far out into the might of the Irish Sea. It offers the lovely illusion of walking on water.

Right at the end of the pier, with a glorious panoramic view of Dublin Bay, there are wooden benches. It is my cathedral, my shrine to the miracle of life.

On a still, sunny morning, the gulls swooping, the fisherman patiently awaiting a tug on their line, the sense is of being handed the entrance code to a paradise.

BLESSED

Sitting there, Howth Head lying across the water like a snoozing behemoth, seduced by the therapeutic lapping of surf against shore, is to feel both tiny and immense.

Blessed and free and overwhelmed by the sensation of being truly, madly, deeply sentient..

Dwarfed by the enormity of the world about us is to understand that we are each just a single grain in a vast desert, a millisecond in life’s eternal movie.

Among my friend’s dying instructions was that some of his ashes should be scattered in the vast salty expanse at the pier’s furthest extreme.

I sat on that bench last weekend, a little discombobulated by events in my own world, and I heard his voice rising up from the deep.

His words full of gentle and wise admonition, reminding me that life is not a rehearsal, that, while we can, we should lustily embrace every second we are gifted on this great spinning globe.

Savour the rare, fragile beauty of that crystal chandelier, because none of us can be certain when it might tumble and shatter.

WHY GOOD HEALTH, A TREASURE THAT SO MANY OF US TAKE FOR GRANTED, OUGHT TO BE SAVOURED IN EVERY IMAGINABLE WAY...

Illness had sentenced my friend to Death Row