To become a friend of time

Met a lovely couple today, both in for their covid vaccine. The husband was dressed up in his shirt and tie - it’s easy to forget that this has been their biggest outing in months. Yet his only concern was for his wife, with dementia. They’ve been married for over 60 years, and all he wanted was to make sure she was okay.

A couple of the other staff overheard this - one remarked to me, “It’s a shame for your generation, you must be worried that there aren’t men like that anymore, who’d be willing to care for someone with dementia!” Little does she know :-)

Made me want to re-read some of John Swinton’s book when I got home. I’d kept a record of some of my favourite bits:

“Many of us spend our lives at war with time. But to become a friend with someone with Alzheimer’s, means to become a friend of time. We forget that our most precious gift to others is presence; just being present...
To slow down and take time to notice those small things that the world sees as unimportant, but which, when we take time, are revealed to be profound.”

“She probably won’t remember you afterwards, but in that moment she will appreciate you.”

“He had learned to meet with her in the moment. It might only be a moment, but that moment mattered.
To learn to be in the present moment is to learn what it means to redeem time.”

A constant challenge in a busy world...one I’ve yet to succeed in. I often notice my thoughts wandering from the person in front of me, to the “things I need to do”.
But I guess a related challenge is to sit with things that I’m in the process of learning, to be okay with not yet having reached completion in those lessons.