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This month Susan continues her interviews for Bounce off the Rocks, a non-fiction book about how people cope after a significant personal life crisis.

“What did you do after the crisis? What strategies did you use, both positive and negative? How did you behave when your life was suddenly a blank slate?” Thank you to everyone who agreed to answer those difficult questions. I feel honoured to have heard about some of the most difficult moments in your lives – and more importantly how you coped.

The stories I’ve heard so far are touching, funny, heartbreaking and incredibly powerful. It is my hope that this collection will prompt each of us to ask – and answer— questions about our own coping strategies after a life-altering experience. If you would like to share your story please contact me at: susan@gingerheart.com.

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Coincidently, I have been meditating more this past month.

I took a meditation course in early July and at long last received my very own mantra… approximately thirty-five years after everyone else. Among the many things I learned was that meditation is a kind of ‘witnessing’ of your own mind. That’s what Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra have been on about. There’s the ego self with all its fancy badges and labels and then there’s a kind of calm and dispassionate core self that observes the chaos.

I’ve noticed a similar process during the interviews for Bounce off the Rocks. Most people experienced their crisis – the death of a loved one, the loss of power and prestige, a sudden betrayal – many years ago. As they recount the ways they coped they are literally witnessing their own behaviour. In several interviews people suddenly stopped as a scene from their lives played itself out in their minds. A few people have told me the interview gave them insight into themselves. Of course, I’m trained as a television journalist not a psychologist.

In Bounce off the Rocks I’m not interested in prescribing a particular path nor am I trying to describe the steps to success or safety or adulation. My intention is that through this collection of stories readers will think about their own lives. I am interested in seeing the patterns in ‘recovery behaviour’. False Starts are generally self-destructive. Dazzling Diversions are behaviours that are best described as getting away from the old situation in ways ranging from minor to grand. Surprising Detours are where people try new things on for size and learn new things about themselves.

I get to be a witness to people witnessing themselves. What I have already noticed is that behaviour is somehow ‘raw’ after a life-altering experience. And the ways people cope are as unique as fingerprints.

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The words ‘coincidence, fate and randomness’ keep popping up in my life. Recently, I spent an evening with two friends, sharing stories along that theme. While they are fresh in my mind, here are three of them:

Mild Coincidence

Several years ago I went on a Baltic cruise out of Stockholm. In the first hour onboard I met a couple named Duke and Roy. We spoke briefly – they were exhausted, having just arrived from California. I was not tired, having been in Sweden for at least a week. I’d been up north to visit my Grandmother’s village. En route I’d stayed in a very small but funky port town called Örnsköldsvik.*

The next night Duke and Roy invited us to sit with them. They told us their daughter was about to getting married in a small town with a name they couldn’t pronounce. Örnsköldsvik.

* Örnsköldsvik (orn-sholds-VEEK) is home to many of the NHL’s finest: Thomas Gradin, Peter Forsberg, Markus Näslund, Niklas Sundström, Victor Hedman and Daniel and Henrik Sedin.

Moderate Coincidence

When I was in high school I was in a play called Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. The lessons I learned from that show still resonate, decades later. Whenever someone is going through a difficult time I fire off one particular passage from the play as a gesture of comfort. Spoon River was Masters’ singular work of genius. He was born in 1868.

Six months ago I was in Maui looking at real estate (as I am driven to due to pathological obsession). My realtor, Michele Muir White, showed me various properties and took me out for lunch in Lahaina afterwards. Her husband and mother-in-law joined us. Michele urged her mother-in-law, Marylou, to tell me the story of her recent 30,000 mile motor home adventure around the United States. The delightful Marylou recounted how, on the spur of the moment, she had briefly reunited with a childhood love. He was a writer and he was proud to show her that he’d included a reference to her in one of his books. “You might know of his work,” she said. “His name is Hilary Masters. His father was Edgar Lee Masters.”

This woman knew a man whose work had been profoundly influential in my life – a man born more than 140 years ago. The sense of delight in this happy accident was overwhelming. In return I quoted some of Spoon River’s George Gray passage to her. We both cried. Here is my favourite passage in its entirety:

I have studied many times
The marble which was chiselled for me—
A boat with furled sail at rest in a harbour.
In truth it pictures not my destination
But my life.
For love was offered me and I shrank from its disillusionment;
Sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid;
Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances.
Yet all the while I hungered for meaning in my life.
And now I know that we must lift the sail
And catch the winds of destiny
Wherever they drive the boat.
To put meaning into one’s life may end in madness.
But life without meaning is the torture
Of restlessness and vague desire—
It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.

-Edgar Lee Masters

Maximum Coincidence

Preamble: I’ve been married twice. My first mother-in-law was Muriel. My second mother-in-law was Katherine.

Part One: In the late 1980’s my first mother-in-law remarried. The two of them spent seven or eight months of the year in British Columbia and the rest of the time they lived in a senior’s park in Brownsville, Texas. Their next-door neighbours in Brownsville were another Canadian couple, Ruby and Vic Laban. Muriel and Ruby quickly became best friends and partners in crime. They cooked up social events, went on shopping raids to Mexico and even visited one another when they returned home to Canada.

In 1992 Muriel died. She was far too young. About a year later my first marriage ended.

Part Two: In 1999 I remarried. My new mother-in-law, Katherine, lived across the country and so we only met one another three times. The first was on a Christmas vacation to Toronto. The second was when I married her son in Vancouver. And the third time was a blur of visits as she slowly succumbed to cancer. During that time I got to know my new husband’s neighbourhood in Toronto quite well.

Part Three: A few years later I found an old personal address book. There, under the L’s, was the entry “Ruby and Vic Laban”. I recognized their street as one that was close to my new husband’s childhood home. I asked if he had ever met them.

“Of course,” he said. “Ruby and Vic were my parents’ best friends.”