Be Happy with my Life: The Divine Potter

Katie and Lauren lead ordinary lives, and then one day something extraordinary happens...Katie Farrier and Lauren Penfold are two women who never meet. Then, just for a few seconds, their worlds collide, and at that moment, their lives change forever as they both begin to find what they have been searching for - they just don't know it yet. This is their story.Opening Chapter: Death! That was the first thing that popped into my head while I sat in the waiting room gazing up at the sculptured pattern of the suspended ceiling tiles. Don't get me wrong; it wasn't the tiles that made me think of death, they weren't that bad. They were inanimate objects designed not to arouse intense feelings - apart from mediocrity, and in that respect, they had succeeded admirably. I found the tiles to be curiously attractive, but that was it. Not something I would have at home, but they were strangely pleasing on the eye. I imagine the surface of the moon probably looked remarkably similar when seen through a telescope, but then most things, when viewed at a distance, take on an entirely different perspective when seen up close.I had always viewed death much the same as the moon; it was so far away it was not worth wasting too much time thinking about. Now and then we are obliged to confront the existential reality of life - we are born, we live and then... But not me, I had never actually given it any real consideration. You don't when you are young; it's something that happens to other people, mainly old people, well older than me anyway.Why precisely are we here? What does it all mean? I only ever asked myself those questions when someone I know dies, or the funeral service is dragging on a bit. The rest of the time all that nonsense stays firmly locked away in a cupboard under the stairs. Best not to dwell on it too much I thought. Nothing ever came from dwelling too much on anything, especially something I didn't understand.However, this time it was different. It was me who might die, and suddenly, for the very first time, I had to confront the stark fragility of my mortality and how precarious life really is. The harsh reality was; I just wasn't young anymore, I was nearly twenty-eight.I was probably a tiny bit melodramatic about it, getting it out of all proportion to what it really was, but that's what I do - when I don't know something.I remember seeing a play a few years ago, and for the first ten minutes one of the characters just flipped a coin in the air, and it always landed the same way up. With each flip, I could feel the tension grow more intense as I waited for the coin to fall the other way up... it never did - till it did. Maybe life is like that, just a toss of a coin. Fear and anxiety lie in the unknown; the maybe's and the what if's - not in certainty. You can prepare for that, for what you know is going to happen, but not for what you do not know.Would it be a slow, lingering, painful death I wondered - I always assumed the worse - but then I guess that's what everybody thinks when something unexpected pops up on your body. I was trying my best not to think about it - flooding my brain with The Dark Side of the Moon and wondering whatever happened to Syd Barrett after he was kicked out of the band. That took my mind off other things for a while... then I remembered he'd died only a few months ago, the final toss. Surely not me. I must be too young for breast cancer - it must be something else. I had googled the possible alternatives. Then another shot of reality bit my arse. Come on get real - twenty-eight! Of course, I wasn't too young. Anybody can get cancer at any time. It had become very cosmopolitan and not remotely ageist. A multi-faceted disease for a modern society... Could it be a boil? I wondered. Now there was a lovely thought. No! It wasn't a boil; I knew that much. Had lots of them as I wandered through puberty, they were enormous and horrible, and my mum squeezed them out ahhh.

• | Author: Summerset Downs
• | Publisher: Independently published
• | Publication Date: Aug 24, 2018
• | Number of Pages: 284 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1719872317
• | ISBN-13: 9781719872317