It rang – and it was my cardiologist’s rooms – and yes I have been brought forward by a fortnight to this Friday.

Nervous but pleased – let’s get this show on the road!

I just need to keep Covid free and hope that the hospital team do too as Covid has impacted the state’s public hospitals. My angiogram will be in a private hospital but nonetheless, same factors in play if the medical team catch that little dictator of a germ.

This may offend some, but too good not to share – a work colleague Jackie H posted this recently.

A few salient reminders hit home this week re regular medical checkups.

As a teenager I had a close knit group within my athletic group. We had a lot of fun as teenagers and to this day now have a regular chat group and ‘annual’ dinner when we can. One of those friends is today having bypass surgery after a medical incident (no prior warnings), and another is starting chemotherapy in a week or so (cancer can just F off!), then the third is me with unclear cardiac outcomes, and the fourth is off for a medical checkup – taking no chances!.

Time is going by slowly – I have an extra 4 hours a day to do stuff other than cycle. So what do I do? I have started work earlier, I am still working on my jigsaw puzzle, I am upcycling a set of bedside tables that I purchased for one of the spare bedrooms, I have bought heaps of books (some arrived, some still to arrive), answering personal messages received, chatting with family, working on my ancestry family tree (another hobby, over 10,000 direct relatives identified), walking twice a day with Tony and Khaleesi and yesterday we went and watched Tony’s son run in the local Ironman race (25 km?).

I love books and built a library in our home just for them – I do prefer the tactile touch of a book when reading and I’ve not got into e-books.

Suzanne P responded to my last post regarding perception. I have known Suzanne since I was a teenager, attending the same church youth group. It was a wonderful fun group and I have great memories including a play that we did around the song “My boomerang wont come back”, and another time all piled into the back of a panel van driven by our group leader (?) maybe going to a progressive dinner (?).

Suzanne reached out to me to share a beautiful article she had read recently. The following extract is all about perception.

In his book, The Vision and The Vow, Pete Greig tells of how a distinguished art critic was studying an exquisite painting by the Italian Renaissance master Filippino Lippi. He stood in London’s National Gallery gazing at the fifteenth-century depiction of Mary holding the infant Jesus on her lap, with Saints Dominic and Jerome kneeling nearby. But the painting troubled him. There could be no doubting Lippi’s skill, his use of colour or composition, But the proportions of the picture seemed slightly wrong. The hills in the background seemed exaggerated, as if they might topple out of the frame at any minute onto the gallery’s polished floor.

The two kneeling saints looked awkward and uncomfortable.

Art critic Robert Cumming was not the first to criticise Lippi’s work for its poor perspective, but he may well be the last to do so, because at that moment he had a revelation. It suddenly occurred to him that the the problem might be his. The painting had never been intended to come anywhere near a gallery. Lippi’s painting had been commissioned to hang in a place of prayer.

The dignified critic dropped to his knees in the public gallery before the painting. He suddenly saw what generations of art critics had missed.

From his new vantage point, Robert Cumming found himself gazing up at a perfectly proportioned piece. The foreground had moved naturally to the background, while the saints seemed settled – their awkwardness, like the painting itself, having turned to grace.

Mary now looked intently and kindly directly at him as he knelt at her feet between saints Dominic and Jerome.

It was not the perspective of the painting that had been wrong all these years, it was the perspective of people looking at it.

Robert Cumming, on bended knee, found a beauty that Robert Cumming the proud art critic could not. The painting only came alive to those on their knees in prayer. The right perspective was the position of worship for this particular painting.

Salient message there. Try viewing life from alternate perspectives.

Doing my jigsaw I thought about this extract more – as I turned the dark pieces around trying to find just where they fitted – and the fit was not always where you thought it might go either. I spun the jigsaw around.

As my favourite orthopedic surgeon, Dr Gary Fettke stated – he wrote a book (One Man’s Answer) about it – invert your thinking! “Inversion is turning a familiar image upside down and seeing it from a new perspective. The answer is often right in front of us.”