Meeting Old School online on Answer Bag and having him move in. I would never have predicted any of that. I would not have had the courage to go through what I went through again. He had nothing to do with the bad, it was what we both had to go through to just make it through those years. I still find that one of the strangest things that have happened.
No knowledge of any public event has prevented me from enjoying an activity - so I'm guessing that being able to predict it would similarly not affect me.
Well, not quite.
I did feel intense grief and depression when I first learned how serious the threat of global warming really is, that it is now too late to prevent it, and that our best hope is to start mitigation, minimisation and adaptation as soon as possible, and that the longer we leave it the more drastic, costly and deadly the consequences will be. Life seemed pointless if it was inevitable that it all ends in such suffering on such a planetary scale and I just wanted to jump off the planet and be dead. I did not want to witness the horrors of the end. After three weeks, I began to adjust to the shock and realised that psychologically and socially, the best thing was to try as hard as possible to be part of the solution.
This wasn't necessarily about a public event. I was listening to "The Dance" which I posted above. It's about losing someone you love, but being glad you didn't know it would end. The version I was watching at the time was a live version and during the song, a woman held up a sign that said something like "Chemo this morning, The Dance tonight." The singer stopped his song, went over to the edge of the stage, and sang with her, then handed her his guitar. That was very fitting as well; life being the dance for her and not knowing cancer was coming.