I am off to Richard’s to build today. The weather is good for Sydney – some drizzle rain. I was woken at 5AM with really heavy rain and then went right back to sleep. The forcast today is for occasional showers and 17c. Not bad.

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A couple of weeks back when I went to Albury I mentioned that I had done a lot of thinking during the drive, and that I would note down some of my thoughts here at some later point. That later point is now.

I spent about 12 hours driving to Albury and back. That is a huge amount of time to just think, and look at the beauty of nature, and listen to music and think. The countryside is so beautiful, and lets face it, empty. And then during this last week I have needed to drive into the city every second day giving more time to just think.

Some of this thinking time has been work related, and some has been personal. You see, in the last few weeks a couple of people I know have come to me wanting to talk about their relationships, wanting advice – and needing longer term support, so I have needed to think how I can best help them. [I am not going to mention who they are or what they wanted to talk about obviously]. Normally I am the one needing to talk to people – and people wanting my advice is a new experience.

This next bit is hard. I know what I want to say… I just need to work out how to put my thoughts into some semblance of order – something that makes some sense to you, the reader. Bits of this may sound like they are written in double-speak. I am trying to respect the everyone’s privacy, whilst saying what I want to say.

Since I broke up with my ex-fiancé in January, I have done a lot of thinking about many things. During this thinking time I have come to understand things more from her side as time goes on, and at the same time learn more about myself. The more I think about the situation, the more I understand things from her perspective.

On the drive to Albury I did a whole lot more thinking about it. I definitely see her point of view – and I tend to think that if I was in her shoes then I would have probably felt the same way she did. I now better understand what she was going though, and why she felt the way she did about me.

And that is an important realization. Understanding what we are going through ourselves is an important step on the road. But it is only one step. There are other important steps, like understanding what others are going though.

And by seeing ourselves through the eyes of others we can then learn more about ourselves, and what is important to us as individuals. What makes us unique and what makes us a part of a society. About how we make decisions, and why we are really making decisions, as opposed to why we think we are at the time.

I am sure that I must have appeared to be a really horrible person at times – and I did make mistakes. These mistakes hurt people, which make’s me unhappy. It also upsets me that the consequences of decisions and actions I made caused people to be unhappy.

It is a fact of life that people are hurt when hard decisions are made. I can only pray that the next time that I need to make decisions like that, it will be done with fewer mistakes and with as much compassion as possible.

Would I do things differently today? Yes. How? Honestly, I do not know exactly. But I do know that I now have some inkling on how to look at a situation from another persons perspective. Some things are a balancing act, where I need to keep in the middle, not going too far to either side.

And I am consciously putting things that I have learned into play in my everyday life…