The weather was rather spectacular last week in Ireland and trust me when I say that those words are rarely said in truth.
It is one of the things I love most about living in Florida … the fact that we get so much sunshine and blue skies to play with.
Inna and I took a couple of drives south of Limerick and on the first one, I got lost and we ended up in Ballybunnion of all places. I would never intentionally go to Ballybunnion but sometimes we all end up where the road takes us.
It gave me the chance for some images, I guess and the first two at the end of the blog are of the beach there.
The rest of the images are from the day after that when we drove down to Dingle and took the coast road out the pensinsula. To say it was stunning would be a real understatement and each bend on the road seemed to bring better and better views of the wild Atlantic coastline.
We had a fantastic time and on a good day like this, I honestly can’t imagine a better place to be. We drove all the way out to Slea Head and had a wonderful view of the Blasket Islands just off the coast there.
Though you could see a small few buildings on the bigger island, no one has lived there since 1953 when the Irish government relocated the final few people onto the mainland.
On a day like this I can’t imagine why anyone would want to leave such a place but apparently in winter the weather could be so bad that the islanders were cut off from the mainland for periods of three weeks at a time. Add to that the fact that there is no electricity on the island and I guess it all makes sense.
In any event, there are a number of images taken along the drive out the peninsula at the end of the blog. Hope you enjoy.
The thought for the blog today actually came from the search for isolation that many of us crave at times.
I know that I, for one, have wished many times to just be able to escape to an island and shut out the world.
This need to escape is often something that we wish for when we are feeling overwhelmed with bad shit happening.
Yet isn’t it strange that we don’t wish for help with the shit, but rather to escape away from it?
I think when people are surrounded by a good support structure, they get help offloading some of life’s upsets and challenges. It is only when we are carrying the burden on our own that we look to escape as we don’t even know who to call for help.
Therein lies a big problem. There was a time when things weren’t so crazy in our lives and we had parents or maybe an older sibling, that would shield us from much of the turbulence that existed around us.
Though we may reminisce about how things were so much simpler in those days and wish we were able to get back there, it likely wasn’t real. It was just that we were shielded from it.
If you grow old enough, you become an orphan. It is the way of life, unfortunately. And apart from now taking on issues that are causing problems for those you love, your own issues tend to fall firmly on your own shoulders.
That is where the feeling of being overwhelmed comes from along with the despairing feeling of wishing to escape to an island.
The good news is that what you are feeling is completely understandable. The bad news is, escape is a fallacy and you just have to put on your big-girl-panties and get through it.
Because at the end of the day, getting through issues of our own and helping those you love with theirs, eventually transforms you into your parents. Some of us would welcome that comparison but whether or not you had awesome parents like mine, at the very least dealing with this shit makes a better person of you.
You become the problem solver, the fixer, the person people go to when all else fails.
Don’t you wish you had someone like that in your life?
Well you do and worse case scenario it is yourself. Embrace difficulty and it becomes easier. Run away from it and it will always be the monster in your closet.
… just a thought!
