Dear First name / friend
Welcome to wedding season.
At the weekend, I was in Dorset for a friend's wedding. It was a beautiful and moving ceremony and my friend looked absolutely stunning: elegant, graceful, beaming. The setting was incredible and the weather couldn't have been better. Despite all this, I didn't have the best time. Actually, the best part of my weekend was spent the next morning, talking with my Airbnb host, a formidable lady in her late seventies. Weddings, she said, are hard because they bring up all sorts of emotions. We think about people we have loved and lost; we might question our current relationship or yearn for an old one; we might feel jealous, bitter or resentful; we might feel lonely, alone or a little lost. Of course, in this melting pot of emotion you are likely to also feel joy, pride and an overwhelming sense of love, happiness and hopefulness. There's a lot going on.
My point is not to be a Debbie-downer on what is undoubtedly a day dedicated to love, but to acknowledge that weddings are not always the easiest of days and to have some compassion for that.
The morning after the wedding, the Airbnb host and I talked about everything from travel, career and relationships to spirituality, childhood and grief. I realised that what I had been missing from the wedding was real depth of conversation. (I had had one interesting conversation about the nature of performance anxiety in music but the other conversational component was somewhat inebriated so I'm not sure how two-sided it really was.) It wasn't what I expected from the weekend, but perhaps it was all the more wonderful a weekend because of that.
Mindful moment: If you feel difficult emotions at a wedding, you're not alone. All “big” occasions have a tendency to bring up “big” emotions. Be compassionate about what else may be going on in your life at that time and acknowledge that everything from how much sleep you had that week and what you have or haven't eaten, through to your current relationship climate or upcoming important dates will have on these emotions. Above all, though, when things feel difficult, there are three tools you can use in the moment: take a few deep breaths; think of something to be grateful for and practise mindfulness by noticing your experience through all five senses. (Of course, I forgot all this at the time and ended up crying to my best friend on the phone in the carpark - thank you, Alice! However. I've learnt a lot from the experience and can see now that I was too much in my own head and had been swept away by thought and emotion. I know that next time I can use the tools from meditation to help practise some healthy non-attachment. We live and learn…)
